Loyalty and Referral
Most local businesses spend everything on the first visit and nothing on the second. Not because the second is less valuable — because there was never a mechanism for it. This is that mechanism: a stamp card that gives someone a reason to come back, and a referral link that turns the ones who do into the people who bring you strangers.
Bức tranh tổng thể
These are not two products that happen to sit in the same menu. One loop makes a person return and the other makes them recruit, and both write to the same place — so the second loop can be aimed using what the first one learned.
Neither loop asks the customer to create an account, remember a password, or install anything.
Which one you need
A stamp card fails at a business people visit twice a year, and a referral campaign is wasted on a business people visit twice a week. Most run both eventually. Almost nobody should start with both.
Stamp card
Fits — Anything bought often and cheaply — coffee, lunch, a wash, a class, a trim. Frequency is the product.
Cách thức hoạt động — One QR on the counter. Every visit is a stamp. The reward repeats forever: finishing a card sets it back to empty and counts the completion.
Referral campaign
Fits — Anything bought rarely and considered — a treatment, a repair, a consultation, a membership. Trust is the product.
Cách thức hoạt động — Each customer generates their own link. When friends convert through it, the referrer earns a code — at whatever cadence you set.
The card
One page, your branding, and a grid that fills up. It is the paper card everyone already understands, minus the part where it lives in a wallet until it is lost.
The number of visits between joining and getting something. Ten is the habit, but a high-ticket service might reward on three.
A free item, a discount, a coupon, or something you write yourself. It prints as a unique code, not a vague promise.
Phone, email, or either one. This is the key that ties every future visit back to the same person in your customer list.
The minutes that must pass before the same person can stamp again. This is what stops one visit becoming four stamps.
A hard ceiling on top of the cooldown. Two independent dials, because a busy counter is exactly where a card gets gamed.
An expiry date stamped onto the code when it is issued, so a reward earned in March is not redeemed in December.
Colours, background, corners, type and your logo — picked from templates built for cafes, salons, gyms, spas and restaurants.
Generated for you as PNG or SVG. Print it at any size — SVG will not blur on a window decal or an A3 poster.
One scan, step by step
There is no sign-up, no confirmation email and no waiting. The first stamp is also the enrolment — the same submission that adds a stamp is what creates the customer in your list.
The reward is a real code
Not a message saying they earned something. A unique code like COFFEE-X7K2QP that they can copy, download or print, and that you can find and mark used later.
Finishing a card is not the end
Completing resets the grid to empty and adds one to their completion count. The same customer can run the same card as many times as they keep coming back.
You never re-key anything
If the phone number already exists in your customer list, the stamp attaches to that person. If it does not, they are created. Either way there is no duplicate to clean up.
The part that makes it mean something
A QR code taped to a counter is, by default, a button anyone can press repeatedly. Both limits are checked server-side before a stamp is written, so neither depends on staff noticing.
The minimum time between two stamps for the same person. Set it near the natural gap between real visits — a day for a coffee shop, a week for a salon.
Blocked attempts are told exactly when they can try again, so an honest customer is never left guessing whether it worked.
A separate ceiling on how many times one person can be stamped in a single day. Usually one. It catches the case the cooldown does not.
The two are independent on purpose. A short cooldown with a cap of one still means one visit, one stamp.
On the referral side, self-referral is blocked
Somebody converting their own link with their own phone number is rejected outright. Referral rewards are worth more than stamps, so it is worth watching the first campaign closely and keeping the required number sensible.
Giới thiệu
You publish one campaign. Each customer who opens it generates their own short link — the same one every time they come back for it — and every friend who converts through that link is attributed to them.
You decide what counts
A referral can be counted on an enquiry, a booking, or a claimed coupon. Choose the one that reflects a real customer rather than a curious click.
The link is stable
One link per person per campaign, permanently. Somebody who shared it in a group chat in March still gets credit for a conversion in June.
Both people land in your list
The friend becomes a customer record tagged with where they came from, and the referrer gets a referral counted against their name.
Why this is not a toy
A stamp is not just a stamp. Each one is an event on the customer profile carrying a weight, and the weights are deliberately lopsided — because the actions are not equally hard to earn.
The smallest possible signal, and the most frequent one. It says this person walked back through your door.
They completed a whole card. Whatever number you set, they hit it — this is a regular, not a passer-by.
They put their own name behind you in front of someone they know. Nothing else in the platform scores this high.
That is the real argument for running this at all. A quiet regular and a first-time walk-in look identical in most systems. After a month of stamps, they do not look identical here.
Where the data goes
There is no separate loyalty database to check. Stamps, completions and referrals attach to the ordinary customer record, which means every tool that reads that record can already see them.
Open anyone in your customer list and see their stamp history, the cards they are partway through, and the codes they have been issued.
MởTotal stamps and total referrals are filterable fields. Build a segment for people with more than five stamps, or for everyone who has referred at least once.
MởA collected stamp is an automation trigger like any other, so a follow-up can leave without anybody remembering to send it.
MởRepeat visits stop being a feeling about how the week went and start being a number you can compare month to month.
MởMerging two records keeps the history
If the same person turns up twice — once by phone, once by email — merging them carries their stamps, their progress and their reward codes across. Loyalty history is not the thing you lose for tidying up your list.
Bắt đầu
The build is the quick part. The order below matters more than the speed — particularly setting the limits before the QR goes on the counter rather than after somebody has already found the hole.
First 20 minutes
Do the scan yourself before anyone else does. You will see exactly what a customer sees, and you will find out in thirty seconds whether the reward you wrote sounds worth walking back for.
Before it goes on the counter
A card with no limits gets stamped four times by one person in one queue, and then the reward means nothing. These two settings are the difference between a loyalty programme and a giveaway.
Tuần đầu tiên
The QR does not work as decoration. It works when somebody points at it while the customer is already standing still and already happy. That one sentence at the counter is most of the adoption.
Once people are enrolled
Do not ask a stranger for a referral. Ask the people the stamp card has already identified as regulars — you now have a list of exactly who they are, which you did not have before.
Running it
Once it is live, this is not a system that needs managing. It needs checking.
| Khi | Việc bạn làm |
|---|---|
| When someone claims a reward | Find the code in the Rewards tab and mark it used. If it was marked by mistake, it can be restored — nothing here is one-way. |
| Hàng tuần | Glance at how many cards are partway through. People stuck at one stamp mean the QR is in the wrong place or nobody is mentioning it. |
| Hàng tháng | Count completions rather than enrolments. Enrolments measure your signage; completions measure whether the reward was worth the walk. |
| When a campaign stalls | Compare clicks against conversions on each link. Plenty of clicks and no conversions is a landing-page problem, not a referral problem. |
| Before a slow season | Segment the people with unfinished cards and give them a reason to close one. They are the warmest list you own. |
How many cards, campaigns and enrolled customers you can run at once is set by your plan and your administrator.
Không bất ngờ
This is a deliberately small system that a customer can use without being taught. That comes with real trade-offs, and they are better known before you print anything.
| Không bao gồm | What that means in practice |
|---|---|
| There is no app to install | The card is a web page behind a QR code. That is deliberate — an app download is where most local loyalty programmes lose the customer — but it does mean the card lives in their browser, not their home screen. |
| There is no wallet pass | Nothing is added to Apple or Google Wallet. When a reward is unlocked, the code can be copied, downloaded as a file, or printed straight from the page. |
| The card page does not recognise a returning visitor | Progress is shown right after a stamp is submitted, not on a cold visit. Someone reopening the link the next morning sees the form again, not their running total — so treat the QR as the way in, not as a wallet they check. |
| No points balance and no tiers | Stamps count toward one reward and then reset. There is no spendable balance and no bronze-silver-gold ladder. If you need that model, this is not it. |
| Expiry dates are printed, not policed | An expiry date is stamped onto every code and shown wherever the code appears, but nothing voids it automatically. Whoever redeems it should read the date. |
| Redemption is a human step | Staff hand over the reward and you mark the code used from the Rewards tab. There is no scanner on the merchant side, so the code is checked by eye. |
Build a card, scan it yourself, put it on the counter. Within a fortnight you will know something you almost certainly do not know today: how many of your customers actually come back.
