Is your program working?

Your program is working if the people who joined come back more often than they otherwise would. You cannot measure the version of the world where you never launched it, so you use proxies. Four of them, all worked out from tiles already on your Overview.

There is no report that prints these. You read the tiles and do the arithmetic yourself. It takes two minutes, once a month, and it is the difference between running a program and hoping.

We will use one worked example throughout: a café six months in, one program, a free coffee at 100 points. Members 240, Active (30d) 96, Points issued 52,000, Points redeemed 21,000, Outstanding liability 31,000, Redemptions 210, Programs 1.

The four ratios

Redemption rate — Points redeemed ÷ Points issued

Our café: 21,000 ÷ 52,000 = 40%.

This is the most informative number you have, and the one owners most often congratulate themselves for getting wrong. A very low rate feels like good news: you issued a lot and paid out very little.

It is the opposite. An unredeemed point cost you nothing today and also did nothing. Loyalty works in two halves — a customer builds towards something, and then they get it. The second half is what turns a nice idea into a habit. If almost nobody reaches the payoff, nobody's behaviour is changing, and you are still carrying the liability for the day they all cash in at once.

A low rate has two causes and they need opposite fixes:

• Nobody wants the reward. Check Top rewards on your Overview. If that chart is nearly empty across the board, the problem is what is on the menu, not the maths.
• The reward is too far away. Compare typical balances on your customer list to what your cheapest reward costs. If the average member is holding 40 points and the cheapest thing costs 500, you have asked them for twelve times the spend they have ever done with you. Add a small, reachable reward and watch the rate move.

Above 70% is a different problem: you may be discounting people who were coming anyway. That is a question about your earn rate, covered in setting earn and redeem rates.

Active share — Active (30d) ÷ Members

Our café: 96 ÷ 240 = 40%.

There is no universal target, because Active (30d) is a fixed window and your customers have their own rhythm. Rough anchors: for a trade people visit weekly — café, lunch spot, gym — 30–50% is healthy. For a four-to-eight-week cycle like a salon or a groomer, 15–25% is normal and a 30-day window structurally cannot do better.

Direction matters far more than level. Rising over three months means the program is pulling people back. Falling while Members climbs means you are signing up people who never return — usually because sign-ups are pushed at first-time walk-ins rather than regulars, or the first reward is too far away to hold anyone.

Liability trend — Outstanding liability, month over month

Not a ratio, a shape. It should climb while you are recruiting, then flatten as redemptions catch up with issuance.

The shape to worry about is liability rising steadily while Redemptions stays flat. That is points piling up unclaimed, and it gets more expensive the longer it runs, because eventually people do collect. It is the same diagnosis as a low redemption rate, seen from the money side.

Because every point issued, spent or corrected is a permanent line in a ledger, this number can be trusted. Nothing is quietly written off to make the trend look better than it is.

Members per program — Members ÷ Programs

Our café: 240 ÷ 1 = 240, which is fine.

If you run three programs and two of them hold fewer than twenty members each, you have split your attention for nothing. Balances do not pool across programs, so a customer in two of yours holds two half-full cards instead of one nearly-full one — and a half-full card is a much weaker reason to come back. Consolidating is usually the best change available.

How long to wait before judging

Judge in visit cycles, not in weeks. The rule of thumb: wait for three full purchase cycles, and make sure an average member has had time to reach your cheapest reward at least once.

• Café, lunch spot or gym, weekly visits: 6–8 weeks.
• Salon, barber or groomer, roughly six- to eight-weekly: 4–6 months.

Before that you are reading noise. Two weeks after launch every business on earth has a redemption rate near zero, because nobody has earned enough to redeem yet. Panicking and doubling the earn rate is how programs end up unaffordable.

What your plan lets you see

How many months of points history you can see is a plan capability, and so is analytics depth. The tiles are all-time totals, so the four ratios always work; what varies is how far back you can look when you want a trend rather than a total. If you need more history, ask us — what your plan includes covers the dimensions.

Next

If the ratios say your rewards are mispriced, setting earn and redeem rates is where to fix it.