Setting up a loyalty programme for your shop in Morocco
A loyalty programme does not bring in new customers. That is the first thing to understand, and the thing most often forgotten. It acts on those who have already been in once: it gives them a reason to come back rather than go next door. If your problem is that nobody pushes your door open, a loyalty programme will change nothing.
If, on the other hand, people come and do not return, or return less often than they could, then it is exactly the tool you need. Here is how to build one without getting the three decisions that matter wrong: the mechanic, the threshold, and the channel.
1. Choosing the mechanic
Three families exist, and for a neighbourhood shop, two of them are traps.
| Mechanic | The principle | Who for |
|---|---|---|
| Stamps | One visit = one stamp. After N, a reward. | Steady basket: coffee, sandwich, haircut, session. |
| Points | The amount spent converts into points. | Highly variable basket: restaurant, grocer, boutique. |
| Tiers | The customer climbs in status and unlocks benefits. | Large customer base and high spending. |
For a café, a bakery, a barber or a gym, stamps almost always win. Not because they are more sophisticated — they are less — but because they are understood in one second at the counter. «Three more and the next one is free» needs no explanation. A points system forces a mental division to work out where you stand, and nobody does it.
Points have a real merit when baskets vary a great deal: in a restaurant, rewarding a 15-dirham coffee and a 120-dirham lunch identically is unfair, and your best customers will feel it. If your tickets range tenfold, move to points. Otherwise, stay with stamps.
2. Setting the threshold: the real question
This is the decision that makes or breaks a programme, and the one given the least thought. How many visits before the reward?
The reasoning fits in one sentence: the threshold must be reachable within a time frame in which the customer still remembers you.
Take a customer who comes once a week. At ten stamps, they get their reward after two and a half months: that is long, but they come often enough for the card to stay present. The same threshold of ten, at a hair salon visited every six weeks, takes more than a year. Nobody holds on for a year.
- Daily or near-daily (morning coffee, snack): 8 to 12 stamps.
- Weekly (lunch, gym session): 6 to 10.
- Monthly (haircut, treatment, servicing): 4 to 6.
- Less frequent than that: stamps are not the right tool — look at a birthday offer or a reminder instead.
Do the sum the other way round before deciding: multiply your threshold by the usual gap between two visits. If you go past three or four months, lower the threshold. A reward that is never reached does not motivate, it irritates.
3. Choosing the reward
The rule is simple: give away what has a high perceived value and a low sacrificed margin. A free coffee costs a few dirhams of ingredients and is worth the shelf price in the customer's mind. A 10% discount on the bill costs exactly 10% and impresses nobody.
Avoid percentage discounts. They get compared, they get negotiated, and they train the customer never to pay full price again. A free product stays a gift; a discount becomes an entitlement.
4. The channel: this is where it is decided in Morocco
A loyalty card is no use if the customer forgets it. The whole job is putting it back in front of them at the right moment — and that is where the choice of channel decides the outcome.
Cardboard
It has one real advantage: it costs almost nothing to print and everyone understands it. Its faults are known to anyone who has handed them out: cards get lost, go through the washing machine, get duplicated on a photocopier. And above all, cardboard never lets you get back in touch. A customer who stops coming disappears, and there is nothing you can do about it.
The phone wallet
Apple Wallet and Google Wallet are already installed on your customers' phones — they are the apps holding their boarding passes and tickets. A loyalty card can sit there, update itself, and show a notification on the lock screen when a stamp is added.
The decisive advantage is not that it feels modern: it is that those notifications cost nothing. Apple and Google do not charge for updating a pass. So you can notify every customer on every visit without ever looking at an invoice.
This is the channel your customers actually open, and in Morocco it is hard to do without. But you need to know what you are buying: Meta charges for every message sent through the official API, and the rate depends on the nature of the message.
- A follow-up message — stamp confirmation, reward earned — costs on the order of a few centimes of a dirham.
- A promotional message — an offer, a reminder — costs several times more, the order of magnitude being six to eight times the former.
These amounts look trivial taken one at a time. Do the multiplication: four hundred customers reminded twice a month, at a few tens of centimes per message, and the monthly bill exceeds what many shops are willing to put into loyalty. The trap is not the unit price, it is the volume.
5. The mistakes that kill a programme
- A threshold set too high. The most common mistake. You want it to pay for itself, you set fifteen stamps, and nobody reaches the end.
- A lukewarm reward. «5% off» has never brought anyone back. Give away a whole product.
- Never mentioning it. A programme the team does not talk about does not exist. The right moment is at the till, not at the door.
- Too many messages. A customer getting three reminders a month unsubscribes — and you paid to lose them.
- Looking at nothing. If you do not know how many customers come back, you will never know whether the programme works.
6. Where to start, concretely
- Write your rule in one sentence: «N visits, and the next one is free».
- Check the timing: multiply N by the usual gap between two visits. Under three months is fine.
- Choose a reward that costs you little and is worth a lot.
- Decide how the customer keeps their card, and how you will be able to reach them again.
- Brief the team on a single sentence to say at the till.
- After a month, look at how many customers came back. Adjust the threshold, not the reward.
A loyalty programme is not a marketing stunt, it is a setting you tune. Start simple, measure, correct. The threshold is almost always the first thing that needs adjusting.
