How many stamps?
Count back from how often your clients come. Someone who books every four weeks fills ten fields in under a year and sees the reward coming, which is what brings her back. Barbers and nail studios, who see clients every two to four weeks, do well with ten or twelve fields; for colour or facials every six to eight weeks, six or eight keep the reward within reach. A card that takes much longer than a year to fill tends to be forgotten before it is full.
Which reward?
The classic is a free visit, and it is also the dearest reward: ten stamps with the tenth visit free give away one visit in ten. A treatment that takes a few minutes, a product or an amount off costs you less and is still felt. Work the figure out before you print it, because a promise on a card in a hundred wallets is hard to take back. Ready-made reward ladders for seven trades are in our loyalty programme examples. The loyalty cost calculator shows what a reward costs you as a share of revenue.
What a paper card cannot do
A paper card lives in a wallet: it is left at home, lost, or stamped twice on a busy afternoon. You cannot see how many cards are out there, who is one visit from a reward, or which reward clients actually choose. And when you change the reward, every card already handed out still promises the old one. When paper is still enough, and what a digital card does differently, is compared in our article on the digital stamp card.
Content last reviewed on 2026-11-08