How to launch a café customer capture system in seven days.

Most loyalty apps don't fail because the app is ugly. They fail in week two, because no one decided what happens on the counter, in the staff brief, or in the first push notification. This playbook is the seven-day sequence we use to get every founding café capturing customers, rewarding visits, and sending pushes by day seven.

Seven days is short enough that you can hold the whole thing in your head, and long enough that nothing in it is rushed. The phrase you want to keep returning to is "real before complicated." A working customer loop at the counter — staff knowing what to say, customers able to join, the first push scheduled — beats a perfectly-configured platform that no one in the café knows how to use.

Before day one — what you actually need ready.

The single biggest cause of a slow launch is showing up to day one without the four things you need to start. They're not big:

1. The café's logo — as an SVG or a high-resolution PNG with transparent background. If you only have a JPG with a white square around it, that's day-one work that delays everything.
2. Your colour palette — at minimum: one dark, one accent. Hex codes if you have them, photos of the menu and shopfront if you don't.
3. Your reward structure — usually "buy nine coffees, get the tenth free" or a points-based equivalent. The rule should be repeatable by staff without a calculator.
4. One launch offer — what new sign-ups receive. The clean default is: free coffee for joining, redeemable on the next visit. The reward is the hook; the owned customer relationship is the asset.

You don't need a budget, a launch date, a marketing plan, or staff training materials. We build those with you.

Day 1 — retention plan.

Day one is a single conversation, usually 45 minutes. We capture the café's brand assets, lock the reward structure, agree the launch offer, define the quiet-period or win-back goal, and decide what customer fields you actually want to collect. The default fields are: first name, email, birthday, postcode. Phone number optional. Anything beyond that hurts conversion at the counter; resist the temptation to add "favourite drink" or "how did you hear about us" to the sign-up.

By the end of day one, you've signed off on: brand assets, reward rule, launch offer copy, customer fields, first campaign goals, and the customer-facing app name (almost always your café name with "Rewards" — "Roast & Co. Rewards," "Hoxton Espresso Rewards").

Days 2–4 — the app build.

The middle of the week is the build. You don't have to do anything during these three days. What's being built:

• The branded PWA — your customer-facing app, on your domain (e.g. rewards.dailygrind.co.uk), with your logo and colour system.
• The owned customer list — where every sign-up, visit, and redemption lives. Exportable at any time.
• The owner dashboard — your view of the customer loop. Members, repeat-visit rate, lapsed customers, upcoming birthdays.
• The QR + NFC sign-up flow — what happens when a customer taps the counter tag. Sign-up takes under 30 seconds.
• Four return-visit campaign rules — birthday push, one-stamp-away nudge, 30-day win-back, and quiet-period offer. All written, all scheduled.

By the end of day four, the app exists, the customer list is provisioned, and the four campaigns are configured but not yet running.

Day 5 — the counter launch kit.

Day five is the physical kit. You receive:

• One A6 counter QR card with your branded sign-up CTA, designed to sit beside the till. The QR opens straight to the sign-up screen.
• An NFC tag for customers with phones that support tap-to-open — under a sticker, on a small display piece, or on the till itself. We encourage both QR and NFC so staff have a simple prompt for every customer.
• The staff launch script — exactly what to say at the counter, in 12 words. ("Want a free coffee? Scan to join the rewards app.") Variations for upgrades, refusals, and busy queues.
• A printable A5 menu insert mentioning the loyalty programme, ready to slot into your existing menus.

You decide where you want the QR and NFC tags physically positioned in the café and stick them down. This is the easiest day of the week.

Day 6 — staff brief.

Day six is a 20-minute briefing for your team. We send a printable one-pager and a 4-minute video, or we get on a call with whoever's working the bar. What every staff member needs to know:

1. The launch sentence — verbatim, the same words every time.
2. How to mark a stamp — either by entering a customer's phone number, or by having them scan a counter QR. Pick one method and stick with it.
3. How to redeem a reward — what the screen looks like when a customer hits the threshold, what the staff member confirms.
4. What to do when someone says no — "no worries," not a sales pitch.

This is the step most cafés skip when they self-launch — and it's the step that determines whether you get 5 sign-ups a day or 50.

Day 7 — go-live.

Day seven is the simplest day of the week. The four campaigns flip from "configured" to "active." The QR and NFC tags work for any customer who walks in. New sign-ups start landing in the customer list. The owner dashboard starts populating.

We don't recommend a big launch event. Word of a free coffee at sign-up travels via the line on its own, and a launch event creates expectations that aren't operationally repeatable. The good launches are the ones where the staff brief happens, the prompt is simple, and the sign-up flow becomes a normal part of service.

Week two — the campaign cadence.

By week two, three things start happening automatically:

1. Birthday pushes fire to anyone whose birthday falls in the next 7 days, offering a free drink redeemable on the day.
2. One-stamp-away nudges go to customers who have nine stamps and haven't visited in the last 5 days. ("One stamp away from a free coffee — see you tomorrow?")
3. Win-back pushes trigger 30 days after a customer's last visit, with a soft offer that gives them a reason to come back.

You don't write any of these. You don't schedule them. You watch the dashboard and decide what you want the monthly tune-up to focus on.

What actually kills loyalty launches.

Three things, in order of how often they show up:

• Asking for too much at sign-up. Every extra field cuts conversion by ~15%. Four fields is the right number for a coffee shop. Six is the maximum tolerable. Anything past that and the queue behind the customer wins.
• Staff who weren't briefed. The launch sentence has to be the same words from every barista. If it changes shift to shift, customers can't tell what's being offered.
• No campaigns in week two. A loyalty app that captures customers but doesn't send anything is a digital filing cabinet. The dropoff between sign-up and second visit is the entire game.

Frequently asked questions.