Loyalty programme examples that work, and what you can copy from them

A loyalty scale is quick to copy and quick to go out of date. Starbucks publishes its UK rule in one line: collect 10 Stars for every £1, however you pay. In France the same brand ties those Stars to paying with a Starbucks card. That condition is exactly the sort of thing that falls off when a figure is lifted from one country to the next, along with the date it last changed.

So there is one source per example here: the brand's own page. Every figure below comes from a public page of the chain, checked in September 2026. If you want to borrow an idea, open the page again before you copy it, because these rules move.

And that is already the first lesson. These chains write their rule down, in black and white, online and in the shop. A customer who cannot say how far they still have to go stops thinking about the card.

The earning rule fits in one line: 10 Stars for every £1 spent, however you pay. What changes everything is what comes next. There is not one reward but a ladder. 150 Stars for a filter coffee, a hot tea or a signature americano. Then 350, 600 and 1,150 Stars as the choices get bigger. At 2,500 Stars a member reaches Gold level, which adds free extra espresso shots, selected syrups and whipped cream, plus a free drink on their birthday.

What transposes: the ladder. The customer reaches something early, and can see what carrying on would be worth. A neighbourhood coffee shop does the same thing without a catalogue: the pastry on the fifth visit, the drink on the tenth, the lunch on the fifteenth. Three rungs are enough.

What does not transpose: the distance to the top. Gold at 2,500 Stars means £250 spent before the birthday drink arrives. A chain can ask a customer to wait that long because it has hundreds of thousands of them. You have a few hundred people you know by sight, and the ones you most want to thank would reach a rung like that some time next year.

The rules sit on the Greggs app page. Download the app and a free regular hot drink or iced drink lands in your wallet straight away. After that it is a stamp card: nine stamps in a category and the tenth item is free. On your birthday a free sweet treat is added. Some products do not earn stamps, and the terms say which.

Look at the order of events. The shop gives before it asks. A blank card gets put away and forgotten; a card that already holds something gets opened again. That is exactly what a welcome bonus does, and it is the mechanic Digikart adds from the Plus plan. An independent bakery can do the same: the first coffee on the house the day someone signs up.

What does not transpose: six stamp cards running at once, one each for breakfast rolls, savouries and bakes, drinks and snacks, sandwiches and salads, sweet treats and hot food. A chain with an app can track six counters. At your counter you have one sentence and the length of a card payment. The moment the team has to explain two systems, they stop offering the card at all, and a programme nobody offers recruits nobody.

Pret publishes the terms of Club Pret plainly: £5 a month for up to five barista-made drinks at half price every day, with a thirty minute gap between them, blended drinks excluded, pause or cancel whenever you like. It is not really a loyalty card. It is a season ticket, and it is honest about being one.

What transposes: the clarity, and the sum the customer can do in their head. Anyone who buys two coffees a week works out in seconds whether £5 is worth it. If your own offer cannot be worked out that fast, it will not be taken up, however generous it looks on paper.

What does not transpose: charging for the relationship, and discounting every single cup. Pret can live on half price drinks because volume pays for them. Halve your coffee every day and you have not built a habit, you have cut your price, and one day you will have to put it back up in front of the same people.

Membership is free, and the published benefits have little to do with percentages. A free tea or filter coffee in the restaurant. Member prices on food and on a selection of products. Reduced delivery and click and collect. Free workshops and events. Points that unlock a few more treats.

The free hot drink costs very little and gets talked about at the table. That is the real lesson: a reward in product or in service lands harder than a discount, and it protects your margin instead of nibbling at it. The florist who gift wraps for free, the hair salon that throws in the treatment, the wine shop that opens a bottle to taste all do better than 10 % off the bill.

What does not transpose: member prices across the range. IKEA can run a members' price on thousands of lines and make it back on volume. Discount your whole shop every day and you have simply lowered your prices, and you have taught your customers to wait for the card rather than to come back.

The Nando's rules are public and worth reading. You get one chilli on any day you spend £7 or more, eating in, collecting or ordering delivery. Three chillies unlock a Green reward, six an Orange one, ten a Red one. Rewards expire after a year.

The first rung is deliberately close: three qualifying days and something is already waiting. That part is worth taking, because the hardest step in any programme is not the tenth visit, it is the second. But look at what the customer has to hold in their head to get there: a spend floor, one chilli a day at most, and a clock running on the reward once they have it.

The lesson for a local shop is the one in the negative. Every rule you add is paid for in comprehension, and comprehension is what turns into sign ups. If your programme needs a paragraph of exceptions, it is too complicated. Expiry dates in particular are worth leaving alone: they land on the regulars you were trying to keep, and they land at the counter, in front of everyone.

Put the five programmes side by side and what a local shop can take from them comes to six things: a published rule the customer can repeat word for word, a reward in your own product rather than a percentage, a first tier reachable in a few weeks, a card that is not empty on day one, something given early rather than only at the end, and a word on their birthday.

What is better left to the chains comes to six things as well: reward catalogues, stacked status levels, expiry dates, daily caps and spend floors, paid memberships, and rules that need a list of exceptions.

The difference is not a question of budget, it is a question of role. A chain steers a margin across millions of transactions, and its rules exist first of all to cap a cost. You are building a habit among a few hundred people you recognise on sight. You can say “two more and the next one is on us” while you hand over the change, and that sentence does work no software will do for you.

The test before you launch: explain your programme in one sentence to someone in a hurry, at half past twelve on a Friday. If you cannot, take a rule out and start again. Our article on the 10 mistakes of loyalty programmes goes through the traps that come up most often.

None of the above needs a budget. On the free Digikart plan you create a digital loyalty card in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, with no app for your customers to install, stamps or points based on spend, one reward, and the poster and QR code for the counter. Unlimited customers, no card details.

The two mechanics spotted above come with the Plus plan: up to three tiers in one cycle, for the ladder seen at Starbucks, and the welcome bonus, for the card that starts with something in it. The Pro plan adds what runs on its own: the birthday reward, the nudge to customers who have drifted, and notifications with no billed SMS. Plus is 17 € a month and Pro is 49 € a month including VAT, billed in euros, so roughly £15 and £43 depending on the rate of the day. The pricing is public, like the rules we have just been reading.

What is left is the part you cannot buy: writing your rule in one sentence, putting it up at the counter, and giving the team the words to say. “Have you got our card? It is free, it lives in your phone, and the tenth coffee is on us.” The FAQ covers the rest, from the customer without a smartphone to how long a scan takes.