# How many stamps should a reward take

> Ten, by default. But the right number is a calculation: the one that drops the cost of your reward below what an extra visit brings in. Here is the sum, and the 40% rule.

- Source: https://usekanz.com/en/blog/how-many-stamps-per-reward
- Language: en
- Other languages: [fr](https://usekanz.com/blog/combien-de-tampons-pour-une-recompense), [ar](https://usekanz.com/ar/blog/kam-khatm-lilmukafaa)
- Format: Markdown, generated from the same source as the page.

- Published: 2026-08-07
- Author: Kanz
- Topics: Loyalty, Rewards, Product
- Reading time: 5 min

Ten. That is the Kanz default, and it is a sound starting point for most businesses. But it
is not a convention: the number of stamps is a **discount in disguise**, and it can be
worked out.

Here is the sum, in one line. If your reward costs you `C` and you hand it over every `N`
visits, you are granting a discount of `C / N` per visit. A reward at 6 that goes out every
10 visits is 0.60 of discount per visit. Compare that figure with your margin on a visit,
not with the price of the reward: that is where the decision gets made.

The amounts in this article are in your own currency, whatever it happens to be. Only the
ratios matter.

## What the number of stamps really tells your customer

Too low, and you pay for visits that would have happened anyway. Three stamps for a reward,
in a business where people already come twice a week, is a permanent discount for regulars
with no change in behaviour bought in exchange.

Too high, and the card turns invisible. A reward at thirty visits, on a monthly rhythm, is
two and a half years. Nobody builds a habit on a horizon they cannot see. Kanz caps the
setting at 30, as it happens, and floors it at 1.

The right number is the one that puts the reward **in sight without being within reach**.
Two constraints, and both have to hold.

In visits: between six and twelve. Below six, the reward lands before the habit does. Above
twelve, the counter reads as a distant target rather than as progress.

In time: the whole cycle should stay under roughly six months at the normal rhythm of your
customers. It is this second constraint that bites when they come in rarely. A weekly
customer at ten stamps has their reward in ten weeks, which is perfectly fine. A monthly
customer at ten stamps waits ten months and gives up long before that: for them, six is
already a ceiling, not a floor.

Which means that if your customers keep two very different rhythms, one number cannot be
right for both. Choose for the ones you want to keep, not for the average.

## The 40% rule, and why it lives in the code

There is a second kind of reward, and it is not on the card: the gift you offer to bring
back somebody who has stopped coming. There the question is not "how many stamps" but "how
much am I willing to spend to buy a visit back".

Kanz answers with a hard limit: **never more than 40% of the value of a visit**. If a
customer typically spends 20 with you, the gift meant to bring them back cannot exceed 8,
however generous you feel at the time.

The reason is arithmetic. Above that threshold the visit you bought back costs more than it
brings in, and the follow-up becomes a machine for losing money, all the faster the better
it works. A ceiling expressed as a percentage of the visit, rather than as a fixed amount,
adjusts itself between a customer at 5 and a customer at 80.

A second rule in the same spirit: among the eligible rewards, Kanz picks **the cheapest one
that stays credible**, never the most generous one available. Software that always reaches
for the biggest gift within its grasp is not optimising your return, it is optimising its
own success rate with your money.

## A reward that has been earned is never given away

That is the third rule, and it is the one protecting the card itself.

The rewards on your card, the ones that ask for a number of stamps, are **excluded** from
follow-up gifts. Technically, a reward that declares a required number of stamps can never
be selected by a follow-up, and there is no setting to lift that.

Without the rule, a customer who has patiently collected seven stamps receives a message
offering them the reward they were halfway through earning. The gift pleases them for five
minutes and destroys seven visits of effort, along with the credibility of the counter for
every cycle that follows. A stamp card is only worth something if nobody can jump the
queue, software included.

## The stamp is not the reward

One last thing, often misread, and it counts for more than the exact number.

What brings a customer back is not the reward on the tenth visit. It is the counter on the
third. A card sitting at three stamps out of ten creates a small debt to yourself that
you do not like walking away from, and it is that debt that produces the extra visit, not
the reward at the end.

That has two practical consequences. The first is that the counter has to be **visible
without effort**: on a card in the phone wallet it is seen in passing, which a piece of card
at the bottom of a bag is not. The second is that a first stamp given at sign-up is worth
more than one extra stamp at the end: starting at 1 out of 10 is a start, starting at 0 out
of 10 is a queue.

## The sensible starting point

If you have no data, take ten, a reward costing less than half an average basket, and let
it run for two months. You will then know two things nobody could have told you in advance:
how many customers actually reach the reward, and at which stamp they drop out.

[How the card works](/en/blog/wallet-loyalty-card) is described in another article, and
[what all of it costs](/en/blog/digital-loyalty-card-cost) in a third.

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