Loyalty Cards Examples

Loyalty cards are usually barcode- or QR-coded for scanning at the till, letting a retailer or hospitality business track visits or spend without a phone app. Many businesses print a reward tier or stamp grid directly on the card so the incentive is visible at a glance, and order cards in the same design as any matching gift card range.

Nearly every design decision on a loyalty card follows from one choice, and it is worth making it before anyone opens a design program.

A stamp or visit scheme — buy nine coffees, get the tenth free — needs somewhere physical to record progress. That means a printed grid of boxes and a write-on panel, or a set of spaces a stamp can land in, and it means designing around an area that will be marked up rather than left clean. The advantage is that it needs no technology at all, the customer can see how close they are, and it works the moment the cards arrive.

A points or spend scheme needs none of that. Progress lives in your EPOS against an account, and the card’s only job is to identify the customer — a barcode, a QR code or a magnetic stripe, and a number. The card can then stay clean and brand-led, and the reward can be changed whenever you like without reprinting.

Both are represented in the examples above, and neither is better. What goes wrong is choosing a design first and then discovering there is nowhere to put ten stamps.

A loyalty card is competing for a slot in a wallet that already contains bank cards, a driving licence and somebody else’s loyalty card. Unlike a membership card, nobody has paid for it, and there is no obligation to keep it. It has to earn the space.

Three things decide whether it does. First, whether it is instantly obvious what the reward is — a card that says what the customer gets outperforms one that just carries a logo. Second, whether using it is frictionless, which usually means the barcode is somewhere a till operator can reach without asking the customer to turn it round. Third, whether it looks like something worth carrying, which is mostly a question of not looking disposable.

That last point is why these are printed on 760-micron solid PVC with the design sealed beneath the surface. A card that is still crisp after a year in a wallet keeps working; one that has gone furry gets thrown away, and with it the scheme.

For anything other than a stamp card, the card has to be readable by whatever you already run. Barcodes are the usual route — Code39, also called 3 of 9, is the most widely supported, with Code128 and EAN5 also available. One question to your EPOS or loyalty provider about which format they expect will save a reprint.

QR codes work too and hold considerably more data, which is useful if you want the code to carry a web address as well as an identifier. They need to be square and at least 15mm to scan reliably from a phone camera, and each one can be different if you supply the details in an Excel file.

Magnetic stripes suit businesses that already have swipe readers; we can encode them for you or supply them blank. And sequential numbering, in any CMYK colour you like, keeps the physical cards in step with your customer list.

For businesses where a wallet card is impractical — anywhere a customer arrives with keys in hand rather than a wallet out — look at our key fob cards or a combo card, which gives the customer both from a single item.