Most loyalty dashboards get checked twice: once the week after launch, and once when somebody asks whether the programme is worth keeping. In between, the number people quote is total members, which is the least useful figure available - it only ever goes up, and it says nothing about whether anyone is buying. This is a monthly half-hour routine built around five numbers that can actually go down, and what each one means when it does.
The Only Metric That Answers the Question
Start with the club's share of total store revenue, because it is the number your finance conversation is really about. MYLO records every order the store takes, member or not, so this is a true percentage rather than an extrapolation from a sample. Read it with Compare switched on against the previous period - and note that MYLO only compares like with like, thirty days against the previous thirty, and will not show a percentage for a month that has not finished, so you do not get a misleading red number on the nineteenth.
What you want from this number is direction, not a target. There is no correct value: a store where half of revenue comes from members might be brilliantly retained or might simply have signed everyone up at the till. It is the trend that carries the information, and the trend is only meaningful over several months, because a single month can be moved entirely by one campaign or one seasonal week. If it is flat while member count climbs, you are signing up people who already shop with you and the programme is not changing behaviour yet.
Total members is a vanity number - it cannot go down. Track the numbers that can, because those are the ones that tell you something you did not already know.
Redemption Rate: Points Issued Against Points Spent
This is the second number, and it is the diagnostic one. The dashboard shows points issued, points actually spent and rewards redeemed side by side. A wide gap between issued and spent looks like thrift and is actually a warning: members are collecting and never converting, which means the reward has not become real to them, and an unredeemed balance is an accounting liability sitting on your books rather than a sign of engagement. Usually the cause is mechanical - the redemption minimum is too far from a typical order, the minimum cart spend to redeem excludes most baskets, or nothing reminds anyone the balance exists. If the gap is closing month over month, the programme is working. If it keeps widening, something is blocking the first redemption.
Revenue contribution by loyalty mechanic, compounding over 12 months.
Three More Worth Half an Hour
- Sales by loyalty level - revenue broken down by tier. If your top tier is not producing meaningfully more per member than the tier below it, the benefits at the top are a margin cut rather than an incentive, and the thresholds need revisiting.
- Active members this month - sitting on the dashboard next to total members and new signups this month. Read as a ratio against the total, this is your engagement rate, and unlike total members it can fall, which makes it the early warning that a cohort is going quiet.
- Referral funnel completion - the referral analytics show performance, funnel and top referrers for any period. The number to watch is the share of referrals that reach a purchase rather than stopping at signup, because that is the one that separates a channel from a coupon giveaway.
Two more views are worth opening when one of the five moves and you do not know why. Campaign analytics gives any SMS campaign its own report - revenue attributed, orders, click timeline, the sent-to-delivered-to-clicked-to-ordered funnel, and the top customers it brought in - which usually explains a spike. And the which-days-members-are-active view, split by weekday and weekend, tends to explain a dip that turns out to be a calendar artefact rather than a problem.
The Routine, and What to Ignore
Half an hour, same day each month. Set the reporting period to the last thirty days, switch Compare on, and write down the five numbers in the same order every time - club share of revenue, points issued against spent, sales by loyalty level, active members, referral funnel completion. The writing down matters more than it sounds: a number you only ever read on screen is a number you cannot spot a trend in, and three months of a handwritten row is a better instrument than any single dashboard view.
Then ignore almost everything else for a month. The temptation with a live programme is to react to the daily view - a slow Tuesday, one member with an enormous balance, a campaign that underperformed - and to keep changing the settings underneath the very data you are trying to read. Earn rates, thresholds and reward values need a full quarter before a change in them means anything. Make one adjustment at a time, note it next to the month it landed in, and let the next reading tell you whether it worked.