#Tip 2: Increase customer lifetime value with the Punch card campaign

Punch Card is a purchase-based earning rule (previously known as a campaign) that lets you reward customers for a number of succeeding, qualified purchases.

This earning rule allows you to set a target number of purchases with a target spend amount for each transaction. You can also choose to make the earning rule active for a limited time, so your customers will need to complete the required number of purchases within a set time frame in order to earn a reward.

This will enhance your customers' shopping experience by adding more value to their purchases, which helps to encourage them to shop again from your store.

Setting up your Punch Card Earning Rule

You can decide on the total number of purchases, set an amount of purchase and other qualifiers in your Punch card setup page. 

As punch cards move online, how are D2C brands in the space rising to the occasion?

We asked Cure’s Senior Marketing Manager Hannah Bender and Art of Tea’s Channel Marketing Manager Devika Kelly about how their brands are navigating loyalty today.

Q: Physical punch card campaigns have been a longstanding reward method for Food  & Beverage brands selling in stores. As brands with D2C channels, when did you decide it was the right time to implement a loyalty program?

Devika: Before the pandemic, wholesale was the biggest chunk of our business. And then when COVID hit, almost all of our wholesale clients were forced to temporarily or permanently shut down. All of a sudden, our business was completely transformed, and it was scary.

We really had to pivot and start focusing on our eCommerce business. It was all so unprecedented and no one knew if things would ever really go back to their pre-pandemic states, so we knew we had to make some fundamental changes to how we operated as a company. We actually ended up seeing that our D2C business boomed. I think it might have been something that was providing comfort.

We know that people were shopping online a little bit more during the pandemic, people were trying to prioritize health and wellness. And in spite of all the uncertainty, our D2C customers allowed us to get through the pandemic and really uncover all of these new possibilities for ways to grow the business. Since then, we have had a bigger focus on D2C, and we really just wanted to reward those customers that gave us that life to get through.
 

Hannah: It’s interesting to hear how Art of Tea thinks about loyalty as a business that has been around longer than Cure. Lauren Picasso founded the business in 2019, but ultimately our business grew up in the pandemic, where we saw consumers prioritizing their health more than ever. Cure started thinking about a loyalty program last summer as we grew our community of loyal customers.

I actually was brought into the company to help figure out how a loyalty program could work for us, having seen how amazing brands like Sephora and Bloomingdale’s do it. We started researching and asking questions: Let’s see how they’re structured. Let’s see how effective they’ve been for other brands, especially early-stage startups. Let’s learn about how best-in-class companies are doing them.

A big part of the process was doing interviews with technology partners and trying to find the right one. Interviewing with Yotpo was a big step. With everything we learned, loyalty was a no-brainer for us as a D2C business. Like Art of Tea, currently half our business is direct-to-consumer and half is retail distribution. And with that split, it made sense for us to launch a loyalty program.

Ready to create your Punch card campaign? Share with us your thoughts and questions!