Setting up your first program

Open Programs in the left navigation and click New program. The builder is a single page with a short list of fields, and a working program takes about ten minutes. Below is every field in the order the builder asks for it, with one café example carried the whole way through.

The three fields that decide everything

Program name — the placeholder reads "Coffee Rewards". This name shows up on the join page and on your customers' cards, so write it for them rather than for your own filing system. Our example café calls its program "Bean & Bell Rewards".

What is one unit called? — two boxes, one singular and one plural, with "point" and "points" as the placeholders. Whatever you type is the word your customers will see on their card for as long as the program runs. Bean & Bell keeps it plain: "point" and "points". Naming your points covers when it is worth being more inventive, and why changing this later is painful.

Earn rate — how many units a customer gets for 1 unit of currency spent. Bean & Bell sets it to 10, so a 4.00 flat white earns 40 points and a 12.00 lunch earns 120. There is no clever answer here; the number only means something once you set it against the cost of a reward, which is the next decision.

Leave both layers switched off

Under Layers you get two toggles. Status tiers adds "Silver / Gold levels earned by activity". Referrals will "Reward customers for inviting friends". Below them the builder has a Tiers section where each tier takes a name and a threshold, with an Add tier button for the next one.

Both layers are genuinely good and neither belongs in your first program. You cannot pick a sensible Gold threshold before you know what a heavy customer actually spends, and a referral bonus set on a hunch is a bill you have written yourself. Run plain points for a couple of months, look at your real numbers, then come back and turn a layer on.

Add one reward, and check the visit count

The Rewards section takes a title and a cost, and Add reward gives you another row. Start with exactly one.

Now do the arithmetic your customers will do. At 10 points per 1 spent, 400 points means 40.00 of spending — ten flat whites for the eleventh free. That is a normal, recognisable loyalty deal. Had you set the cost to 2,000, the same customer would need fifty visits, and nobody sticks around for that. Customers do not think in points; they think in visits.

When the reward looks right, click Create program.

What you land on

The program page is the summary you will come back to. It shows the earn rate, whether earning also builds tier progress, the expiry policy that applies to points, the tier list, every reward with its cost, how many members have joined, and the public join link for this program.

That last item is the one to copy. The join link is how customers get in — on a printed sign by the till, in your bio, at the bottom of a receipt. How customers join explains what they see when they tap it.

Next, tighten up the rewards you offer and understand what happens when someone claims one: rewards, redemption and expiry.