Starting a loyalty program for your café or restaurant comes down to three practical choices: what type of program fits your business, what rewards will actually motivate your customers, and how you make sure people sign up from the first day.
What type of loyalty program fits your business?
There are three main models to choose from.
Stamp card programs are the simplest option. A customer earns a stamp at each visit and gets a reward when the card is full. It is predictable for the customer, fast for staff to operate, and requires minimal administration. For most independent cafés, restaurants, and salons, this is the right starting point.
Points programs tie rewards to spending rather than visit count. Customers earn points per amount spent and redeem them for discounts or specific rewards. They are harder to explain to customers and require more active management, but they suit businesses where order size varies significantly and you want to reward accordingly.
Tier programs give customers status levels (bronze, silver, gold) based on how frequently they visit. Each tier unlocks better rewards. They are motivating for your most active customers, but they require a platform that tracks visit history per member automatically.
For most independent businesses starting out, the stamp card model wins on simplicity. Customers understand it immediately, and it takes fewer decisions to set up well. If you are deciding between a stamp card and a full loyalty club structure, the membership rewards program guide covers when each format works better for your business type.
Three decisions to make before you launch
Even the simplest stamp card model requires three choices before you open to customers.
How many stamps? Enough that the reward feels earned, but not so many that customers give up before they get there. For a café with drinks priced around a few pounds or euros, eight to twelve stamps tends to work well. For a restaurant with a higher average spend, five to seven stamps may be a better fit. Think about your typical customer: how often do they visit, and how long is it reasonable to make them wait for their first reward?
What is the reward? The best rewards feel valuable to the customer without being expensive for you. A free coffee, a free side dish, or a discount on the next visit are all solid choices. Avoid anything too complex to redeem or too costly relative to what a loyal customer actually brings you in repeat revenue.
What triggers a stamp? One visit? A minimum spend? One stamp per item ordered? Pick the rule that is easiest for your team to apply consistently every day. Complicated stamp conditions lead to errors and inconsistency at the counter, and inconsistency erodes customer trust in the program.
Digital or physical: the decision that changes everything
A paper card is free to produce, but it has two fundamental weaknesses: it gets lost, and it tells you nothing about who your loyal customers actually are.
A digital loyalty program solves both problems. Customers sign up by scanning a QR code at your counter. You immediately see who is active, when they last visited, and whether anyone is starting to drop off.
The practical difference for your business: instead of knowing "we have regulars," you know which specific customers have not been in for three weeks, giving you something concrete to act on before they are gone.
For a full picture of what the digital loyalty experience looks like from the customer's side, see the stamp card app page, the free loyalty program page, and the live demo at https://loyalty.maiya.dk/
Setting up your loyalty program: what you actually do
With a web-based loyalty platform, setup takes under an hour.
- Register your business and upload your logo and brand colours.
- Set your stamp count and describe your reward.
- Print your QR poster for the counter (the platform generates this automatically).
- Give your team a three-minute demonstration: open the scan screen, scan a customer code, confirm the stamp registers.
Day one, you are ready to go.
The single most important thing in your first week is not having everything perfect. It is making sure your team actually uses the program at the counter from the moment you open. A QR code nobody shows and a program nobody mentions generates zero sign-ups.
The full launch process, including exactly what your team should say and do from day one, is covered in Loyalty program launch checklist: getting it right from the start.
Getting your first members signed up
Sign-up rate is the single number that determines whether your loyalty program delivers. If nine out of ten customers never join, the program cannot produce results regardless of how good the technology is.
Three things consistently make the biggest difference:
A visible QR code. Place it at the counter, next to the card payment terminal, and optionally on the table. The customer should not need to ask.
A verbal invitation. Your team mentions the program at payment: "We have a digital stamp card, would you like to join?" A direct offer produces a meaningfully higher sign-up rate than leaving a passive poster at the counter.
A fast sign-up. If joining takes more than two steps, the sign-up rate drops sharply. The customer should be able to scan and confirm while still standing at the counter.
For a full breakdown of the tactics that drive sign-ups in the first weeks, see Loyalty program sign-ups: 6 tactics at the counter.
What to look for in a loyalty program platform
Pricing models vary considerably across platforms. Three questions to ask before committing.
Is the pricing fixed or usage-based? Per-scan or per-active-member pricing can spike during a busy period. A flat monthly subscription keeps costs predictable regardless of how busy you get.
Is there a setup fee? There should not be. A setup fee means you are paying before you know whether the program works for your customers.
Is there a minimum contract? You should be able to cancel without notice if the program is not delivering for you.
MightyLoyalty costs 99 DKK/month (Standard) or 249 DKK/month (Pro), both excluding VAT, with unlimited members and unlimited stamping. No setup fee, no contract, cancel from the portal at any time.
If you are running a small business and want a focused comparison of loyalty platforms by what matters most day to day, loyalty app for small business: what to look for covers the key criteria in detail. A broader look at what loyalty programs actually cost across different pricing models is in how much does a loyalty program cost?. For a comparison of all five categories of loyalty solution used by Danish cafés and restaurants, from paper cards to wallet-based programs, loyalty solutions in Denmark: overview and pricing gives the full breakdown.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to set up a loyalty program?
With a web-based platform, under an hour. You register your business, set your stamp count and reward, and the platform generates a QR code you print for your counter. Day one, you can start accepting sign-ups.
Do my customers need to download an app to join?
Not with a web-based loyalty solution. Customers scan your QR code and join through their phone's browser, with no app store download and no account creation required. This removes the biggest friction point in loyalty sign-ups: the moment a customer decides to join while standing at the counter, they need to be able to complete it in under a minute or they will not do it at all.
How quickly will I see results from my loyalty program?
It depends on your daily footfall and your sign-up rate. Imagine a café with 60 daily visitors and a 20 percent sign-up rate. That is 12 new loyalty members per day. After a month you have a couple of hundred active profiles and can start seeing patterns: who your regulars are, how frequently they come back, and who has gone quiet recently. That is when the data becomes useful for keeping customers before they are lost.