A loyalty scheme with high scan rates can still be losing members, and the 2026 Retail Loyalty Index Pulse gives marketers a better first question to put to their platform vendors.
Opinion column by Abhijeet Jadhav. The views are the author’s.
The number most dashboards lead with
Ask a loyalty team how the scheme is doing and the first answer is usually sign-ups and scans. Both are easy to count. I think both flatter the programme, and a UK survey published on October 20 shows how far apart counting and loyalty can sit.
HyperFinity, Eagle Eye and Bloomreach surveyed 2,000 UK shoppers for the Retail Loyalty Index Pulse 2026. HyperFinity’s write-up reports that nine in 10 shoppers use their scheme on most visits by scanning a card or app at the till, “almost without thinking.” Only a third say the scheme makes them genuinely more loyal. HyperFinity puts the gap in one line: “popularity and loyalty are two very different things.”
The same write-up says more than half of shoppers feel less loyal to retailers than they did three years ago, and more than one in five have stopped shopping somewhere because of its loyalty programme. A scan-rate chart would show none of that.
What members say drives them away
The survey points at one cause more than any other. Irrelevant offers were named as a top-three red flag by 54.5% of shoppers, and HyperFinity says they were also the reason most often given by people who walked away from a retailer. Six in 10 members said they had felt no different from a regular customer, and those members were almost twice as likely to have left a retailer because of its programme.
Expectations are high in the same data. Almost eight in 10 shoppers expect their offers to be tailored, yet shoppers rarely list personalisation as a reward they want. Relevance works as a baseline. Nobody credits a retailer for getting it right, and a miss gets noticed. On rewards, HyperFinity reports that instant discounts (67%) and money-off vouchers (66%) are valued most, ahead of exclusive member prices at 31%.
The counter-argument
Scan rate does carry information, and the survey says so. Shoppers who use their scheme on every or most visits are nearly twice as likely to say a good programme decides where they shop. A team that dismisses scans entirely would be discarding the one engagement signal it can collect on every transaction.
I accept that, and it does not change my recommendation. A scan tells you a member showed up. It does not tell you whether the member felt recognised, which is the variable the survey links to leaving. Nine in 10 scanning and one in three feeling more loyal sit side by side in the same survey.
There are limits to what this survey can settle. It covers UK shoppers only, its figures are survey answers, and HyperFinity sells software to retailers and invites readers to see how their own programme measures up. Treat the numbers as a prompt for your own data, and not as a benchmark.
What to ask for
When your loyalty platform vendor reviews the programme with you, ask for three figures next to the scan rate.
The first is the share of members who received an offer in the past quarter that matched something they had actually bought. The survey ties irrelevance to churn, and purchase history is data most retailers already hold. HyperFinity makes the same observation: the fix rarely needs new data, because shoppers are generally comfortable sharing it and want to see it used.
The second is the share of long-standing members who receive the same communications as a customer who signed up yesterday. Six in 10 members in the survey described feeling no different from a regular customer, so a team can check its own version of that number.
The third is lapse rate among frequent scanners. If frequent scanners are leaving at a visible rate, the scan metric has stopped predicting retention, and the programme needs a different measure.
None of these requires a new platform. They require a query against data the scheme already has, and a vendor who will run it. This is the same discipline as the decision-first approach in IAB’s measurement decision guide: pick the decision, then the evidence. Teams automating more of this work, as in Marketing Campaigns Are Starting to Run Themselves, will find that the metric an agent is given decides what it optimises.
Source: HyperFinity
