A qualifying loyalty visit includes: A customer’s enrollment in your Square Loyalty program. A customer’s repeat visit where a loyalty point is accrued or a reward is earned or redeemed. Square automatically keeps track of each location’s loyalty visits in the Loyalty section of your online Square Dashboard. View your customers’ monthly.
- End-to-end loyalty, offer, payment, and data solutions Velocity Logic’s rewards platform for convenience store operators, major oils, general retailers, and restaurants provides complete flexibility to attract new customers, increase their visits, and grow profitable revenues.
- What Is a Customer Loyalty Program? A customer loyalty program or rewards program is a marketing strategy that rewards loyal customers that frequently engage with a brand. By rewarding recurring engagement, you can increase customer loyalty and ensure continuous growth for your business.
- Robust loyalty program software also allows businesses to customize their rewards based on the context of the interaction as well as the type of loyalty behavior the business wants to promote. The best customer loyalty programs should make distributing rewards intuitive for business users, making oversight of the rewards program straightforward.
Not having loyal customers is costly, but using software to manage customer loyalty doesn’t have to be.
Customer loyalty programs are important for businesses to win repeat customers and new sales. Market findings show that surprise offers or gifts to reward existing customers and welcome new ones are two of the best ways to engage with customers.
But businesses—especially small and midsize ones—don’t need to drain their budget investing in expensive customer loyalty software to grow and maintain their customer base.
There is free customer loyalty software out there that your business can explore, and we curated a list of three top-rated free solutions from Capterra’s directory. Each of these software solutions has an overall user rating of four or higher (out of five), 10+ user reviews, and offers the core features essential to manage customer loyalty programs. You can read about our selection methodology here.
Let’s take a look (software listed alphabetically):
3 best free and open-source customer-loyalty software
1. Tango Card: E-Gift Card Rewards and Incentives
Tango Card is a cloud-based incentive-delivery technology provider that helps businesses order, automate, and integrate rewards programs as per their requirements. It offers four business solutions: Rewards Genius (self-serve ordering), Rewards as a Service API (integrate rewards catalog and automate reward delivery), Blast Rewards (bulk sending), and SaaS Integrations (integrate Rewards Genius with systems already in use).
None of these solutions requires a subscription fee.
Users can avail expert program support in the form of onboarding, customer success managers, technical support contacts, and reward recipient support.
Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Capterra reviewers like that the platform offers a lot of flexibility to their customers in the form of options and grace periods to avail rewards and gift cards. | Some reviewers feel that end users should be able to withdraw or transfer cash on PayPal using physical gift cards. |
| Users mention that their customers like the virtual prepaid card that functions like a credit card, which can be used by simply adding the CVV/CVC number. | Users said that sending out payments to end customers is not easy. When they upload a spreadsheet with customer details to send out payments, they aren’t sure when the customer will receive the payment. |
More product information | |
| Cost to upgrade: N/A Highly rated by: During 2018 and 2019, 90% of user reviews came from small businesses (fewer than 200 employees), 7% from midsize businesses (201 to 1,000 employees), and 7% from large businesses (more than 1,000 employees). Most reviewers worked in/at IT services, education management, and arts and crafts businesses. | |
Signing up for Rewards Genius (Source)
2. Loyverse
Loyverse is cloud-based point-of-sale and inventory management software that allows users to run loyalty programs and reward customers. Users can analyze the number of customer visits, track their purchases, and make notes about their preferences to identify loyal customers and reward them with bonus points.
The software is available free of cost; users pay for add-on services only.
Loyverse offers 24/7 live chat support, a user community (discussion forums), and a knowledge base of 100 articles, tutorials, and video guides. The software offers native mobile Android and iOS apps.
Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Capterra reviewers like that the whole suite offers them the ability to manage inventory and create a customer base by sending messages and emails. | Users feel that the software is not very easy to use on smartphones. They would like a category drop box on mobile apps and competent reporting functionality. |
| Users in the retail industry specifically called out the tool’s consolidation of sales processes. They like that they can manage sales while tracking money flow and inventory with ease in one place. | Users want to see local payment integration. |
More product information | |
| Cost to upgrade: Employee management add-on is priced at $5 per month, per employee and advanced inventory add-on is priced at $25 per month. Highly rated by: During 2018 and 2019, all user reviews came from small businesses (fewer than 200 employees). The top industries were food and beverage, internet, and hospitality. | |
Creating and editing customer profiles in Loyverse (Source)
3. VYPER
VYPER is cloud-based viral marketing software that offers features to enhance customer engagement and loyalty. Businesses can add referral campaigns, gamification, rewards, and loyalty programs on their websites. Customers can use the software to keep track of leaderboards and accrue bonus points through incentives by inviting their friends. They can utilize their rewards by using embedded coupon codes. Businesses can send automatic follow-up and reminder emails to customers with embedded contest links.
VYPER offers a free plan under which businesses can set up campaigns, grow their social media, send confirmation emails, and embed contests for an unlimited number of campaigns. This free plan supports up to 250 users.
Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Capterra reviewers like that the application allows them to set up viral giveaways, and especially like the gamification option for giveaways. | Users feel that the support articles should be more comprehensive to help beginners with their queries. |
| Users like how easy it is to set up campaigns and bonus entries; they also like the content upgrades. | Users feel that the software needs to support more integrations with email platforms such as SendGrid and Mailgun. |
More product information | |
| Cost to upgrade: The pro package is priced at $49 per month. Highly rated by: During 2018 and 2019, 90% of user reviews came from small businesses (fewer than 200 employees), 5% from midsize businesses (201 to 1,000 employees), and 5% from large businesses (more than 1,000 employees). The top industries were marketing and advertising, internet, entertainment, and automotive. | |
Leaderboard in Vyper (Source)
Which free customer loyalty software should you invest in?
Now that you know about the top free customer loyalty software options, start working on selecting the one that best suits your business needs. Your next steps should include:
- Analyzing your business needs. Speak to your team to understand what features they are looking for in a customer loyalty software solution.
- Shortlisting a few products using user reviews on Capterra.
- Comparing free offerings and noting the cost of upgrading various software products.
- Speaking to vendors about any hidden costs involved with the software.
You can check out our entire customer loyalty software directory for more information on these and other products.
Methodology
Products considered for this article must be free. We classified a product as free if:
- It offers a free, standalone version of the software.
- It is not a trial version of the software where you must purchase a product version after a limited amount of time.
Loyalty Rewards Program Software
Selection criteria
Loyalty Reward Program Software
The products that met the above criteria were then evaluated against our customer loyalty software definition: Customer loyalty software helps users customize different aspects of a loyalty program, from creating rules around how customers earn and spend points and how many points they earn per purchase to which customers are VIPs. The software lets you offer reward points for different actions, such as in-store purchases, online purchases, events, social media promotion, etc.
This check verified the basic customer loyalty capabilities and appropriateness for the category. A product was classified as customer loyalty software if it contained these core features—loyalty program administration and rewards management.
Software that met this market definition also needed a minimum of 10 reviews published on the customer loyalty software category page between Sept. 19, 2018, and Sept. 19, 2019. During the same period, the product’s rating also had to be higher than four out of five.
*Note: Listed pros and cons are derived from features listed on the product website and product user reviews on Gartner Digital Markets domains (Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice). They do not represent the views of, nor constitute an endorsement by, Capterra or its affiliates. Reviews data was used to determine the target business size of the product.
Looking for customer loyalty software? Check out Capterra’s list of the best customer loyalty software solutions.
Looking for Customer Loyalty software? Check out Capterra's list of the best Customer Loyalty software solutions.