Keep hold of your appy customers

Despite an increasingly paper-free world, London homes overflow with the stuff. Perhaps you use a bowl in your living room or a shoebox under your bed; communal residents share with housemates and upgrade to a space to match — a full drawer in the kitchen. Occasionally you’ll open it absent-mindedly looking for scissors, and unleash a torrent: takeaway menus, forgotten bills, crumpled receipts, perhaps an unexpected treat (a tax rebate! From 2008!). Amid the torrent floats the flotsam of café culture: tens of half-completed, tatty loyalty cards.

Despite the incentive, few but the very committed remember to carry loyalty cards. In a digital society, they’re relics of an old system, and a new generation of specialised apps is putting the nail in the paper coffin.

Launched in August, Loyalzoo is a loyalty app that allows customers to bank rewards based on purchases. Customers check in with a tap; they then pop up on the merchant’s list. Merchants tap again to grant a point or stamp when the customer purchases.

“We were really conscious while developing it that we wanted to keep it simple,” explains Mark Ryan, co-founder of Loyalzoo. “People thought it would be really high-tech, but it’s just one tap on each side.”

The app is tailored to small independent businesses. “The problem for independents is they crowd each other out with these individual pieces of cardboard,” Ryan observes. “The more shops you have on the app, the more they all benefit. It’s very much about making stronger the bond between the merchant and the customer.”

The app, available for both iPhone and Android, actively pursues savings for you, displaying a list of shops and businesses in the area that are using it. There are two models: a stamp system for cafés and coffee shops (eg where 10 stamps equal one free coffee).

There is also a points system for retailers with a more varied product selection, such as clothes shops. Currently, 20 independent businesses in Chiswick and Richmond are using the app. Ryan hopes it will expand into other areas in the capital.

“Repeat customers are the bread and butter of the small business,” confirms Cathy Sue Hope, owner of The Alberts Deli in Richmond, which uses Loyalzoo. And it’s popular: “We can see who’s checked in — it means we know our regulars and learn what they like to drink. It goes down really well.”

Arguably, it’s more immediate than social networking: push notifications alerting customers to money-saving opportunities could replace tweets about Friday happy hours.

Others have developed hyper-specialised loyalty systems of their own. Wenlock & Essex, a bar on Essex Road in Islington, launched its own loyalty app in November 2012. You can earn rewards to redeem on food and drink, book tables, use GPS to find the venue, and receive exclusive updates.