Loyalty members keep their habit all year. What changes is how many come in
Data from 200,000+ member visits: members visit about as often all year, only how many come in changes. May is busiest, December quietest.
Is December a lost month? Do people forget their loyalty card over the summer? We looked at more than 200,000 member visits from over 24,000 loyalty members at businesses on Rewardly with a full year of data, most of them cafés, from October 2025 to September 2026. For every business we compared each month with its own yearly average.
Why it matters for your revenue: every repeat visit is a sale. Rewardly's clients see 30% more repeat visits and 2.5 times higher customer value on average, and café Ráno in Bratislava reports 32% more revenue six months after moving to Rewardly.
The short answer
- Members keep their rhythm all year. The members who came in visited about as often in every month, always within 4% of their yearly average. Even in December it was 96%.
- What changes is how many members come in. Member visits were highest in May (18% above average) and March (15% above).
- December was the quietest month, 17% below average, followed by January (11% below).
Example in euros: if your members make 1,000 visits in an average month and the average purchase is €5, December's 17% dip is about 170 visits or €850, and May's 18% lift about 180 visits or €900. Winning back part of the winter gap is real money.
Winter is not lost
Members who did come in during December and January visited about as often as in spring. What changed was how many came in, probably because of holidays, travel and shorter days. Winter can be a good time to remind members you are there, and spring a time to welcome them back in large numbers.
How the year looks, month by month
- January and February: 6% to 11% below average. A good time to bring quiet members back.
- March to July: the strong season, with May the busiest month of the year.
- August: slightly below average (4%), the summer holiday month.
- September to November: back around the yearly average.
- December: the quietest month, 17% below average.
What to do with this
- Plan your reminders for the quiet months. A message in early January or before the summer holidays reaches members while they still have the habit.
- Give winter a reason. A seasonal reward or a new winter drink gives members a reason to come in during the quieter weeks.
- Use the busy months to grow. In March and May more members are coming through your door, so make sure every new face is offered the card.
How Rewardly helps
- Send a message when it matters. Rewardly can send a push notification to the card in your members' phones, including automatically to members who have not visited for a while.
- See your own year. Rewardly analytics shows how often your customers return and their recent visits.
- The card stays with them. It lives in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet, through every season.
About the data
- Anonymised scans in the Rewardly scanner, October 2025 to September 2026, at businesses with member visits in all twelve months. Most of them are cafés; there were too few restaurants with a full year to show them separately. No business is named or identifiable.
- Each month is compared with the same business's own monthly average, then we took the typical (median) business. "Visits per active member" is member visits divided by the number of members who came in that month. A visit is a card scanned on a given day.
- October to December fall in 2025 and January to September in 2026. Member bases grow during the year, which can lift later months slightly; the December dip is unlikely to be explained by this, because October and November of the same year were higher. Businesses that collect stamps through a connected POS are not included.
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