Definition
Repeat rate
Repeat rate is the proportion of customers who return at least once after their first visit. It is the most useful single number for judging a loyalty programme, because it measures the behaviour the programme is meant to change.
Also called return rate, repeat purchase rate.
Measure it against your own baseline
Industry benchmarks are close to useless here — a station kiosk and a neighbourhood café have entirely different repeat rates for reasons neither can control. The comparison that means something is your own figure before the programme against your own figure after, which is why it is worth recording it now even if you launch nothing for months.
Why it beats counting stamps
Total stamps issued rises whenever you are busy, which makes it a measure of trade rather than of loyalty. Cards created rises when staff push signups. Rewards redeemed rises when you are generous. None of them says whether customers changed what they do. A dashboard that leads with those and buries repeat rate is built to reassure rather than inform.
The number underneath it
Once repeat rate has moved, the more interesting figure is frequency — how many days sit between visits, before and after. A shift from ten days to eight across a few hundred customers is a large amount of extra trade and almost invisible in daily takings, and it is where loyalty schemes actually earn their cost.
Questions
- How long before repeat rate shows anything?
- Long enough for a customer to complete a card twice — typically two to three months in a café. Judging at two weeks measures novelty.
- Is a high repeat rate always good?
- It is good, but check what it is costing. If your most frequent customers were already loyal, the programme may be discounting people who needed no encouragement.
Related terms
Churn
Churn is the loss of customers over time. In hospitality it is rarely announced — nobody cancels a café — so it shows up as a regular whose visits stretch further and further apart until they stop.
Loyalty program
A loyalty program is an arrangement that rewards customers for coming back. In hospitality it usually takes one of two forms: stamps counted per visit toward a free item, or points accrued against how much is spent.
Customer lifetime value
Customer lifetime value is the total profit a customer generates across the entire period they remain a customer. It reframes a loyalty reward as an investment against future visits rather than a discount on today’s.
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