The cost of paper loyalty cards is not in the printing, it is in the loss. Every card that leaves and never returns is a customer who quietly dropped out of your programme. Multiply your monthly card volume by the loss rate to see how many customers you lose in a year, and the figure will dwarf the printer’s invoice.
The two costs that never appear on the printer’s invoice
- The lost customer. A card that went missing took its owner out of the programme. They did not decide to leave; they left the card in a trouser pocket, and the result is the same.
- The message never sent. Paper cannot say "one stamp to go". Every reminder that never arrived is a visit that never happened, and that is the largest cost of all and appears on no invoice.
How to estimate your own loss rate
If you do not know it, work it out this way: how many completed cards were redeemed last month, divided by how many cards you handed out long enough ago to have completed. The gap between the two figures is loss plus the not-yet-finished. Half that gap is a conservative estimate of loss alone.
And if you keep neither of those figures, that is itself an answer: a paper programme gives you nothing to measure yourself against, and that is the first thing a digital card fixes, before it fixes anything else.