Loyalty & LTV
Build loyalty that actually retains.
A points programme is not a retention strategy. If your scheme is discounting customers who would have come back anyway, it is spending margin, not protecting it. I rebuild the loyalty and LTV logic underneath - tiers, earn and burn, the commercial model - so it rewards the behaviour that compounds revenue.
A focused 30 minutes on building a loyalty programme that pays its way, or fixing the one you've got.
Most loyalty schemes pay customers to do what they would have done anyway.
- Margin handed to the already-loyal. Your best customers were coming back regardless. A blanket points discount just lowers the price they were happy to pay.
- Points as a liability, not a lever. Unredeemed points sit on the balance sheet; redeemed ones often land on full-price orders that needed no nudge.
- No line to lifetime value. Rewards tied to spend, not to the behaviour that predicts repeat purchase, so the programme cannot tell a future high-value customer from a one-time discount hunter.
- A scheme nobody acts on. Members and non-members behave the same, because the mechanics never change what people actually do.
Loyalty should buy behaviour you were not already getting.
Built right, the programme pulls the second and third orders forward, concentrates spend in your strongest cohorts, and protects margin instead of leaking it - and you can see, in the numbers, exactly what it is changing.
- The commercial model first. Before any mechanic, the economics: what a reward costs, what behaviour it has to buy back, and the margin maths that keeps the programme accretive rather than dilutive.
- Tier structure. Thresholds set against your real cohort distribution, so status means something and the next tier is genuinely worth reaching.
- Earn and burn mechanics. What earns, what it unlocks, and redemption framed to pull the next order forward rather than discount the current one.
- LTV and segmentation logic. Rewards aligned to the behaviour that predicts lifetime value, with the data in place to tell cohorts apart.
- The lifecycle around it. Enrolment, status and redemption sequenced into the email and post-purchase programme, so the scheme is lived rather than buried on an account page.
A one-off redesign
The loyalty and LTV strategy designed and specified end to end, ready for your team to build. Scoped per project.
An embedded retainer
Ongoing ownership of loyalty and retention, month to month. For brands that want it run, not just designed.
I run loyalty and LTV in-house, not just on paper.
I run retention for a premium fashion brand turning over £30M+ across four storefronts, where loyalty and LTV sit inside what I own day to day. Recent work includes a loyalty programme redesigned from points to cashback to protect margin and reward genuine repeat behaviour. See that engagement in Projects →
I run retention for a premium fashion brand turning over £30M+ across four storefronts, where loyalty and LTV are part of what I own. I have rebuilt loyalty programmes and retention engines for DTC brands across the UK, Europe and the US, including a programme moved from points to cashback. You get the same thinking I apply in-house, scoped for your brand - once, or owned.
“Replace with a real, signed-off client quote about the loyalty work.”
Rarely. The platform is almost never the problem. I work with what you have - Smile, LoyaltyLion, Yotpo or a custom build - and fix the logic running on top of it. If the tool genuinely cannot support the model, I will tell you.
If it is discounting customers who would have returned anyway, yes. The redesign is about what the programme rewards and what that costs you, not change for its own sake.
It depends on your margins, your repeat cycle and your customers. The mechanic follows the commercial model, not the other way round. Working that out is the first thing we do.
Yes. Take the design in-house, or I stay on as an embedded retainer and own loyalty and retention alongside it.
Directly. Loyalty only works wired into the lifecycle and the post-purchase journey. Start with the Retention Audit for the full picture, or Klaviyo and email for the lifecycle layer it plugs into.
See what your loyalty programme is really costing you.
A focused 30 minutes on building a loyalty programme that pays its way, or fixing the one you've got.
or email hello@callumrichardson.com