Engagement is the key driver of measurable growth in retail. Loyalty programs are no longer punch cards and stamps and have become an integral part of everyday life on customers’ personal devices.
64% of consumers are more likely to spend with a brand if they are part of a loyalty program or have a subscription (SAP Emarsys, 2025) and today, brands understand the importance of having a loyalty program and mobile app to keep their customers connected. However, the challenge lies beyond simply having a passive digital loyalty program in place. Many brands struggle to create meaningful engagement loops or real brand value.
Delivered through apps, or more traditional physical cards, these programs rely on the consumer to act, without encouragement or immediate reward. These apps fail to maintain long-term user interest, which can mean low engagement and underwhelming returns. Most retail apps become ghost towns because they lack ongoing incentives and engaging content that motivate users to proactively return regularly and build habit loops, based on immediate reward which could be emotional, rather than financial.
The Pitfall of One-Off Perks
Retailers rely too often on leading with single-use perks delivered as QR codes or single-use discount codes to drive adoption. Without establishing ongoing engagement loops, these one-off incentives feel transactional. Although it’s a great way to get customers in the door, it fails to make them feel valued over time.
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When loyalty amounts to just presenting a code for a discount, it doesn’t influence decision-making or build lasting relationships. The real challenge lies in moving beyond single-use incentives and building reward systems that create ongoing reasons for your customers to return, build loyalty and a reason to engage with the brand outside the times they want to make a purchase.
Designing Habit and Social Engagement
To promote effective repeat engagement with customers, it’s essential to combine habit loops with social cues, competition and recognition. Boost your app’s activity by going beyond simple transactional loyalty and create an interactive, socially reinforced system.
One way to achieve this is by making your users’ behaviour visible to others, with built-in socialisation elements. Whether this is achieved by customer leaderboards, social proof or notifications that show your friends’ actions, these act as triggers for engagement, motivating regular, repeated actions and a strong sense of belonging.
Something as mundane as scanning receipts or completing everyday tasks can become exciting. Monthly leaderboards can drive spikes in activity as users see their friends ‘earning’ rewards. Not only does this kickstart engagement in the short term, but it also builds long-term loyalty and brand awareness.
Building an Incentive Ladder and Referral Engines
86% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family much more than ads, which make up only 2% (Impact, 2024), making social proof and referral programs powerful engagement drivers.
This is where referrals come in. Not only do they fill the customer funnel, but they also strengthen brand advocacy when both the referrer and referred can earn rewards. This tactic has been used by many successful retailers, from Uniqlo to All Saints.
Referrals are powerful because when customers refer someone, they are actively advocating for the brand. This not only strengthens their own understanding of its value but prepares them to explain why the brand matters.
However, it is crucial that this referral step is bringing the new user into an engagement loop. Winning the customer is only the first step; you want them to engage, build a relationship, and stay!
Rewarded Gaming as an Engagement Driver
Retail apps often face usage dips linked to shopping cycles, paydays and holidays. Rewarded gaming can act as an engagement bridge, keeping customers returning to your app with fun, low-effort activities prompting users to open the app – even when they’re not shopping. With the number of global gaming users expected to reach 3.04 billion by 2030 (Statista, 2025), there’s clear potential to tap into familiar gaming mechanics that drive retention and repeat engagement.
Modern loyalty is built on a value exchange as shoppers expect rewards beyond discounts. Gaming can offer enjoyable, transparent ways to earn perks. In-app games can transform retail apps from transactional tools into entertaining companions, rewarding users for small actions like daily logins or milestones to boost engagement and spending. These engagement loops bring customers to the app proactively for entertainment, outside the times they want to shop, bringing them pleasure that they associate with your brand — even more so if they are being rewarded for their play.
Rewarded gaming also is a great mechanism with younger shoppers, who are less responsive to cashback and enjoy gaming and social features like top player recognition increasing stickiness. Flexible rewards, from gift cards to PayPal payouts, build trust and sustain long-term engagement, with retailers from Sephora to Nike successfully incorporating gamification to drive activity and loyalty.
However, not all users engage equally; a gradual introduction and education to gaming mitigates backlash and maintains positive user experiences. Rewarded gaming is a powerful ongoing tool for deeper, continuous retail app engagement and can help your app ward off automatic app offloads, but a measured, mostly organic approach is recommended to sustain healthy growth.
Choreographing Lifecycle Touch Points
Regular, varied touch points are crucial for sustaining engagement. Relying on a single message or offer won’t sustain interest; the key is novelty and freshness. Even positioning an offer as “buy one, get one” versus “50% off” taps into different customer mindsets and can influence behavior significantly.
Without regular content drops — such as discounts, reminders or partner offers — users are likely to lose interest and stop using the app. Over time, inactive users may have the app automatically offloaded by their device operating system, leaving you with no way to re-engage them until they choose to reinstall. Well-timed push notifications for new member offers, promotions or gamified content keep the app relevant and encourage habitual use.
Classic examples like McDonald’s Free Fries Friday create habitual return visits through predictable incentives.
Successful lifecycle management blends convenience, novelty, personalization and timing to make the app a consistent part of the customer’s routine and drive usage.
Metrics that Matter for Retail
Understanding what increases loyalty is crucial. Retail brands must measure what creates habits, from frequency to referral rate, lifetime value and time-to-first reward, and validate that their users are interested. Using these dashboard stats helps to iterate and improve onboarding and retention cycles. The more customers engage with your app, the richer your first-party data, which helps you to inform personalized offers and future campaigns.
Durable Loyalty Starts with Habit
Loyalty is a system, built carefully on meaningful, ongoing engagement loops that deliver real value from day one. 65% of a company’s revenue comes from the repeat business of existing customers, and it’s 5X-25X more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one (Sellers Commerce, 2025).
While it might appear daunting, with the right approach creating integrated digital loyalty programs is completely achievable. Take a moment to review your current loyalty programs: Are you rewarding isolated actions or have you designed clear, recurring loops? Brands that embed habitual engagement before launch see stronger retention, deeper customer relationships and richer first-party data — setting the foundation for sustainable growth.
Marc Bearman is a longtime ad tech leader with a track record of scaling high-impact businesses — from building Unity Ads in EMEA to leading X’s MoPub through its $1B acquisition by AppLovin. He most recently served as GM of Gaming at Fetch Play, where he drove significant growth across the portfolio. Now at Mistplay as GM, Loyalty Solutions, Bearman is steering the next wave of product innovation, empowering publishers with new play-and-earn tools that elevate loyalty and LTV.
