How to Start a Loyalty Program in a Jewelry Store: Guide

A woman bought her engagement ring from you two years ago. Last month she bought her mother's anniversary gift from the store at the mall. You did nothing wrong at the counter. You simply never spoke to her again, and the other store sent her a birthday reward with her name on it.

So how do you start a loyalty program in a jewelry store? Pick one simple reward, write the rules down, choose one place to track every visit, enroll the customers who already come back, and reach them with one useful message between visits. Do that and the program runs. The reward is the small part. Remembering the customer and reaching her for a reason is the whole point.

What is a loyalty program in a jewelry store?

A loyalty program is a written promise that rewards a customer for coming back, and a record that lets you keep that promise. The reward can be points, tiers, a store savings plan, or an app that holds all of it. The reward gets the attention. The record is what actually makes it work.

Jewelry is different from coffee or groceries. A customer may buy from you once in two years. Between those two visits she walks past your store many times and hears from you not once. A cafe earns loyalty by being there every morning. A jeweler has to earn it in the long gap, and a loyalty program is simply a plan for that gap. If you want the relationship side of this in full, our guide on how to make jewelry customers come back between visits sits right beside this one.

How do you start a loyalty program?

Start a loyalty program in five steps: pick one reward, set the rules in writing, choose how you will track visits, enroll customers who already return, and keep in touch for a reason. Keep the first version small. A program you can run this week beats a perfect one you never launch.

The figure below shows the five steps in order.

Step 1: Pick the reward

Choose one reward type to begin. A points or punch card is the easiest. A tiered program gives your best customers a higher level. A store savings plan lets the customer set money aside toward a future piece. Do not try to run all three at once. Pick the one that fits how your customers already buy.

Step 2: Set the rules

This is the step most stores skip, and it is where the arguments start. Write down how a reward is earned, what it is worth, when it can be used, and when it expires. A rule that lives only in your head becomes a dispute at the counter the day a customer expects more than you meant to give.

Step 3: Choose how to track

Every visit and every reward has to be recorded in one place. That can be a card in the customer file, a spreadsheet, or an app. The trap is keeping points in one place, a savings plan in another, and payments in a third. One record, used by everyone, so any customer question is answered in a minute. Our guide on the best way to track customer payments goes through the options for a store.

Step 4: Enroll customers

Start with the customers who already come back. They will join happily, and they teach you where the rules are unclear before you offer the program to everyone. Write down a name, a phone number, an email, and the occasion each customer is shopping for. That last detail is the one most stores forget, and it is the reason to reach out later.

Step 5: Keep in touch

The loop breaks when the store goes quiet. Staying in touch does not mean sending offers. It means the customer hears from you at moments she recognizes: a reward that is ready, a reminder before a due date, a short note before a birthday or anniversary she told you about. A push notification or a text message does this quietly. Our plain guide to what a push notification is and when to send one covers the how.

Which type of loyalty program fits your store?

There is no single best program. There is the one that fits your store today. A points card suits any store from day one. Tiers suit a store with steady repeat buyers. A store savings plan suits customers saving for a wedding or a big anniversary piece, and it brings the most contact of any option, because the customer pays a little each month and hears from you each time.

A store savings plan deserves a word of care. It is a plan where the customer sets money aside toward a future purchase over several months. Savings plans and installment offers are regulated, and the rules differ by state and province, so confirm the terms with your own adviser before you launch. The software should be set up to match whatever your market allows. If a savings plan is the direction you want, our guide on how to start a gold savings plan for customers in the US and Canada walks through it, and if you are weighing a formal installment offer, see how to set up payment plans in your store.

How the loyalty loop works

A working program turns in a loop: the customer earns on a purchase, you record it the same day, the reward reaches her phone, she redeems it on the next visit, and she returns and refers her family. Each step feeds the next. When the family walks in, the loop starts again with a new customer, and now you have two.

The figure below shows the loop as it runs around your store.

Two things are worth knowing about this loop. First, a reward the customer forgets does no work. If she cannot see her points or her balance without asking a staff member, the loop stalls. Second, the loop can run backward. A reward you promised and then could not find in your records turns a happy customer into a doubter, and in a jewelry store that doubt is discussed at the family dinner that night.

This is the part I learned building software beside a working jewelry store. The customers a store loses are rarely angry. They simply forget the store, because someone else, often a competitor with an app, remembered them first.

A worked example: one customer, two years

The names, dates and dollar amounts here are examples, not a record of any store.

1. Month 1, first purchase. Customer A buys earrings for her sister's wedding. Her sister, Customer B, is with her. Staff write down both names, a phone number, an email, the item, and the note "sister, wedding in month 3".
2. Month 1, the record. Customer A joins the program and gets a card. She also opens a small store savings plan, setting aside an example amount she chooses each month toward a piece for herself.
3. Month 2, a reason to return. The store sends one short message: the wedding is next month, and if Customer B would like to see bridal pieces, the store can keep an afternoon free. Customer B visits with her mother.
4. Month 3, second purchase. Customer B buys her bridal set and joins the program. Customer A keeps paying into her savings plan and gets a receipt each time.
5. Months 4 to 12, staying in touch. Customer A gets a reminder before each due date and a receipt after each payment. She never has to call to ask what she has paid. When she misses a month, a polite reminder goes out and she pays the next week.
6. Month 13, the reward. Customer A finishes her plan, buys her piece, and the store adds a small thank you reward for completing it. Her mother, who watched the whole thing, opens a plan of her own.

Count the contacts. In two years this family heard from the store many times, and every contact was about their own money or their own occasion. No deep discount was needed. The store at the mall never had a chance.

Which reward is worth the effort?

The rewards that cost the least effort are the ones to start with: a points card, a written record, and one message before an occasion. A store savings plan takes more setup and brings the most contact. A referral reward costs little and works well for families that shop together. An app is the biggest setup and the smallest running effort, once customers already come back often.

This table lists each reward idea, the effort to set it up, who in the store runs it, and when it works best.

Read the table from the top down. An app on top of untidy records is an expensive way to send wrong reminders. A discount on top of no record is a gift to a stranger. The order is the point. Get the record and the simple reward right first, then add the parts that need more setup.

When your own app changes the game

An app puts your store's name on the customer's phone and lets the loop run without a person doing it by hand. Rewards and balances are visible any hour. Reminders go out before a due date. Receipts arrive the moment a payment lands. And a competitor who offers an app while you offer a paper card is a real reason customers drift away. If you are weighing whether an app is worth it, our guide on why a jewelry store benefits from its own app works through that decision honestly.

We built GoldKitty, the white label app we built for jewelers, hand in hand with a working jewelry store, and white label simply means the app carries your store's name, colors and logo, not ours. It runs a store savings plan, sends numbered receipts, and reaches the customer with reminders and updates. GoldKitty is modular. It is set up for each store by country and by offer, and payments run through local payment gateways integrated to that market's banking rules. Customers without the app still get receipts and reminders by message, so nobody is left out. You can also look at the other products we build at appico if a savings plan is only one part of what you need.

Mistakes that kill a loyalty program

• Rewarding only the big spenders. The customer who bought a small pendant today may be saving for a wedding set next year. Record every sale.
• Messaging too often. A weekly promotion teaches the customer to ignore your name. Send fewer messages that she is glad to get. Our guide on how to structure a payment plan offer shows the same restraint applied to money.
• Rules that live in your head. Write down how rewards are earned, what they are worth, and when they expire, before the first customer joins.
• Points in one place, payments in another. Keep one record. A reward you cannot find is a promise you cannot keep.
• Buying an app before the record. Software sends the reminder you tell it to send. If the phone number was never written down, no app can help.

The limits, and when you do not need a program

A loyalty program has honest limits. It cannot fix a product problem. If your prices are far above the market, or a piece did not match what the customer expected, no reward will bring her back a second time. Fix the store first.

It cannot be rushed either. A family customer is made over years, not over one holiday season. A store that wants results in a month will send too many messages and lose the customer it was trying to keep.

And it is not always worth buying software for. If your store has a small number of customers and you know each family by name, a card and a notebook with a few columns will do everything a system does. Do not buy an app to remember twenty people. Software earns its place when more customers come back monthly than one person can follow, when more than one staff member records rewards, or when you run a savings plan alongside the program. There is also a kind of store for which loyalty is simply not the game, a counter in a tourist spot where every buyer is passing through once. For them, the effort is better spent elsewhere.

Our take

Software does not make customers loyal. Trust does. Every idea here, from the punch card to the app, exists to turn a promise into a record the customer can check on her own, and to make sure your store is the one she hears from before an occasion. The reward gets the customer's attention. The record and the honest contact keep her.

Start with the card and the customer book this week. Add a savings plan once you have written rules. Add an app once you have more members than you can follow by hand. If you would like to see how your own store and your own customers would look inside it, you can book a private demo of GoldKitty on your own store's numbers, set up for your market and your offer.

Frequently asked questions