Loyalty programs don't create loyalty.
They create work.
More emails. More dashboards. More points to manage.
Meanwhile, customers just want a good reason to come back.
Most loyalty programs are maintenance machines. You feed them campaigns. They give you activity.
Open rates aren't loyalty. Redemptions aren't loyalty. Points balances aren't loyalty.
Repeat purchases are.
If you can't measure incremental repurchase, you're not running a growth engine. You're running a marketing ritual.
Discounting everyone the same way is lazy. Hardcoding rules into templates is fragile. Waiting on IT to launch an offer is expensive.
Commerce moves daily. Your incentive system should too.
Test small incentives. See what actually changes behavior. Keep the ones that work. Delete the rest.
No grand relaunch. Just small experiments that add up.
Loyalty isn't a program.
It's the result.