Scan updates keep a customer moving towards their reward without you writing anything. They go out at the counter, the moment a card moves: a stamp lands and leaves the card nearly full, a card fills up, or you scan a card that already has a reward on it. You switch them on per Loyalty Program, under Scan updates on that Program’s Notifications tab.
The four messages
There are four, they are the same for every business, and this is exactly what they say:
- Two stamps to go: "Two more stamps and your next reward is ready."
- One stamp to go: "One more stamp and your next reward is ready."
- The reward is ready: "Congratulations! You've earnt a reward!"
- A reward is ready to use: "Your reward is ready to use on this visit." This one is sent when you scan a card that already has a reward sitting unused.
You cannot edit the wording in this version, and there is nothing to write. If you want to say something in your own words, use the message form at the top of the same page.
An ordinary stamp sends nothing
This is deliberate. A customer collecting their third stamp of nine gets their card updated and their phone left alone. A message for every single stamp is the quickest way to have somebody remove your card from their wallet, and the stamp is already on the card the moment they look at it.
The first three go out at the moment you stamp the card. The fourth goes out when you scan a card that already has a reward waiting.
These are sent by events, never by the clock
Every one of the four is caused by something that just happened to the card, so all four reach a customer who is standing in front of you. Nothing here is ever sent because time has passed, and nothing is sent to somebody who has not been in.
Reaching the customers who have stopped coming in is the other half, and it is a separate switch on the same page: Reminders. If you want "we have not seen you for a while" or a reminder about a reward nobody has spent, that is where it lives.
How often one customer hears from them
The same notification can be sent to a customer at most once every 24 hours. So a regular whose reward has been waiting a fortnight is not reminded every time you scan their card, and somebody who buys three times on a Saturday is not told twice how close they are.
The two reward messages share that window, so a customer whose card fills up in the morning is not told again in the afternoon that a reward is waiting. It is the same news.
These do not use up your own one-message-a-day limit, in either direction: a message you send never holds one of these back, and one of these never stops you reaching that customer. They are about the customer’s own card rather than something you chose to say.
What it needs, and what to expect
- Switch it on per Loyalty Program, under Scan updates on that Program’s Notifications tab. It is off until you do.
- Nothing has to be set up on the customer’s side, and they do not need an app.
As with every message, the wallet decides whether anything appears on the phone, and neither Apple nor Google tells anybody what happened. A customer reading their loyalty card later sees the most recent message whatever their phone did at the time.
A card shows one message at a time, so an automatic update replaces whatever the card was carrying, including a message you sent earlier. Your own message is still in your Audit Log, under Reports, with Messages chosen in the Event box. That is a limit of what Apple Wallet and Google Wallet give a loyalty card, not a choice we made.
Where to see what happened
Each one appears in your Audit Log, under Reports, marked "Reward message" or "Progress message". Choose Messages in the Event box and you get one row per customer card, saying who it went to and what that card actually got.