Scan updates say something at the moment you stamp a card, so they only ever reach a customer standing in front of you. Reminders are the other half, and they work the opposite way round: they are sent because time has passed and nothing has happened. Each morning we look for cards that have gone quiet and ask the customer’s wallet to show one short reminder. You switch them on per Loyalty Program, under Reminders on that Program’s Notifications tab.
This is the part a paper stamp card could never do. The customer who reached seven of nine in the spring and has not been back since is exactly who a loyalty scheme is for, and nothing that fires at the counter can reach them.
The two reminders, and what sets them off
There are two types of reminder notification, they are the same for every business, and both are set off by a waiting time rather than by what the card holds:
- A reward has not been spent. If a reward has remained on their card for 7 days, we will send a notification stating: "You earned a reward a week ago. Pop in and spend your reward!"
- Not been in for a while. When there have been no scans for the configured number of days, we will send a notification stating: "It has been a while since your last stamp. We miss you!"
If the card happens to be one or two stamps short, the message will mention that: "It has been a while since your last stamp, and you are one stamp away from your reward!" That is only ever extra detail on a reminder the waiting time had already earned.
Being one or two stamps away is not on its own a reason for a reminder. That is something that just happened, so it is said at the counter by Scan updates instead. A customer who was stamped last week hears nothing from this feature, however close their card is.
A customer gets at most one reminder, and the reward reminder wins. Somebody who drifted away with a reward they never spent hears about the reward rather than about having been away: they already have a reason to come back and may simply have forgotten it.
You cannot edit the wording, and there is nothing to write. If you want to say something in your own words to customers who have not been in, Send Message has a choice for exactly that: "Cards not used in X days".
How often, and why it will not nag
One quiet spell earns one reminder. If a customer does not come back, that is the end of it: there is no second reminder, no weekly series and nothing that builds up. They have to come in, be stamped, and go quiet again before there is another.
- Nothing is sent until a card has had no stamp and no reward spent for at least seven days, so a reminder never repeats what you already said at the counter.
- A customer stamped this week is never included.
- A "not been in" message reaches one customer at most once a month, whatever threshold you set.
- Cards that were never added to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet are skipped, because there is nothing to show them.
These do not use up your own one-message-a-day limit, in either direction: a message you send never holds a reminder back, and a reminder never stops you reaching that customer.
Setting "Customer inactive after" for your business
Customer inactive after is how many days without a visit counts as not been in, from 14 to 365. It starts at 30, which suits most businesses. The field appears once Reminders are switched on, with DAYS marked on the right of the box. The figure to pick is comfortably longer than a normal gap between visits: if your regulars come in weekly, a month means somebody has genuinely drifted, and if people fill a card over a season you want longer than that.
Set it too short and you are messaging people who were always coming back anyway, which is the quickest way to have your card removed from a wallet. You can change it whenever you like, and switching Reminders off keeps the figure you chose.
When they go out
Once each morning, at about 8am UK time, in the same run that sends birthday messages. There is nothing to trigger and nothing to remember. If a lot of customers qualify at once, which usually happens the morning after you first switch it on, they go out over a few days rather than all at once.
What it needs, and what to expect
- Switch it on per Loyalty Program, under Reminders on that Program’s Notifications tab. It is off until you do.
- Reminders are separate from Scan updates: one is set off by time, the other by events, and you can have either, both or neither.
- A Loyalty Program you have switched off is never swept.
- 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 a reminder 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 "Scheduled reminder". 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. That label belongs to this feature alone: a row marked "Reward message" or "Progress message" was sent at the counter by Scan updates, so you can always tell which of the two spoke, and the message itself says which reminder it was.