Rewards schemes
Overview
Dojo launched a rewards product in October 2024. This product allows consumers to collect stamps each time they make a transaction through a Dojo payment a rail (face-to-face or online) and earn a reward after collecting a certain number of stamps.
For Dojo, the aim of this product was to drive consumers in to Dojo customers to spend more money and for the customer the aim was to help deepen their understanding of their customers through data and and incentivise them to visit more often and spend more.
This case study shows the discovery and design exploration phase of a what a points based scheme could look like. I partnered with the product lead to develop the initial concept which was then handed over to one of our product squads for further development.
My contribution
Discovery Product design Brand design
The team
1 × Product Designer 1 × Product Lead
Year
2023 - 2024
Process
Our north-star
Our north star as a tribe is CAT's (and no, I don’t mean the furry kind we all love). CAT's stand for "Consumer Arrived Transactions."
A CAT occurs when a consumer makes a transaction through Dojo at a location influenced by one of our products. For example, a cafe uses our rewards scheme, prompting a consumer to earn a stamp. By designing and building this product, we’ve influenced the consumer’s behaviour, encouraging them to spend money at a cafe that processes payments through Dojo.
or
The consumer has arrived at a Dojo location and made a transaction.
Context
There are two key sides to rewards: getting merchants to adopt the rewards product and encouraging consumers to sign up and transact. Our 2025 goal is to scale the rewards product to as many Dojo merchants as possible while also increasing consumer sign-ups and transactions. While both are critical, we’ve chosen to focus first on scaling the product to more Dojo merchants, as we’ve already proven its effectiveness but faced challenges in onboarding merchants at scale.
There were clear initiatives that we needed to tackle such as self-serve onboarding and creating and managing their own schemes, however, it was not clear why we were struggling to sign customers up.
The product lead and I spent time on Sales calls listening to why customers were not interested and we learned that some businesses believed points based rewards schemes were more “attractive to consumers” and wouldn’t sign-up without this type of scheme.
Stamps vs Points
We started with stamp-based rewards, where consumers need to spend a minimum amount to earn a stamp. I knew from looking at the data that the threshold typically matches the average spend for a type of business:
- Cafes: The price of a coffee.
- Bars: The cost of a drink or pint.
- Venues offering food: The price of a drink and an item.
This model works well for encouraging frequent visits and small, consistent purchases. For example, in a coffee shop, it makes sense to reward per visit since spend per visit is relatively the same (a coffee).
However, stamp-based schemes can feel restrictive—customers must hit a set spend to earn rewards. A points-based approach (e.g., £1 = 1 point) offers more flexibility. Customers earn rewards regardless of spend size, encouraging them to visit more and spend more, especially on additional items like food. High spenders also see more value, making the program more appealing.
We believed that by rewarding every spend, points-based schemes foster loyalty, may increase overall spend, and appeal to a broader audience both customers and consumers.
Discovery
I conducted competitor research to understand how other popular rewards schemes worked, to learn about the market landscape, identify any industry trends, uncover gaps in offerings, and highlight what works (and doesn’t) in similar businesses. The product lead and I also spent time looking into existing research and found that:
Points-based programs are the UK’s favourite. A March 2023 Statista survey found 65% of respondents prefer points-based schemes, compared to just 33% for stamp cards.
Software Advice reports 90% of UK loyalty users engage with points-based programs, while only 30% use stamp cards.
We also spoke with customers using similar rewards products to understand their views and appetite between points-based and stamp-based schemes. Through this, we learnt that staff engagement and in-store prompts were key factors in driving success. More importantly, we validated that points-based schemes offer greater flexibility, enabling businesses to tailor rewards to both low- and high-spending customers, ultimately delivering a more personalised and appealing experience for consumers.
The design phase
This project is still ongoing but I have included the designs that I made for the first iteration of how a points based-scheme could work and look - this demonstrates the customer journey from web to a mobile application and the application of a new Dojo brand being rolled out across all products.
