Loyalty Programs
Updated 30 May 2026 · 12 min read
Ireland's loyalty market is growing faster than most marketing directors realize. A ResearchAndMarkets report published in February 2026 put the market's 2025 value at US$199.5 million, with a forecast of US$355 million by 2030. That is nearly doubling in five years. The programs that will capture the majority of that growth are not the ones coasting on a points-and-vouchers structure built in 2019.
At Brandfire, we work with brands across energy, insurance, grocery, FMCG, and financial services in Ireland. We see what is working, what is being cut, and what clients are being asked to justify to their boards. The 10 trends below are the ones shaping program decisions right now.
Not every trend applies to every brand. But understanding all of them is the right starting point for any program review in 2026. The first is the one most brands are already discussing, but fewer are actually acting on.
Most Irish loyalty programs that call themselves personalized are, in practice, segmented. Members are grouped into behavioral buckets and each bucket receives a different email. That is segmentation. Personalization operates at the individual level: a different offer, channel, and timing for each member, generated automatically from actual purchase history.
The business case for getting this right is well-documented. Analysis cited consistently across multiple 2025 global loyalty reports shows that brands leading on personalization significantly outperform generic programs on conversion rates, basket size, and member retention. The loyalty member database, in this model, is not a marketing list. It is the primary strategic asset of the program.
For Irish brands, the practical barrier has been integration. Loyalty platforms have often sat at arm's length from CRM and billing systems, making real-time individual-level decisions slow or expensive. Cloud-based loyalty technology is reducing that gap. The brands investing in the data infrastructure layer now, before enrollment plateaus, will have a structural advantage in 2027.
Personalization grows considerably more powerful when the data pool extends beyond a single brand's customer base.
A single-brand loyalty program can only influence customer behavior within that brand's footprint. Members earn points with one brand, redeem with the same brand, and the program touches nothing outside that relationship. Coalition loyalty, where members earn and redeem across a network of complementary, non-competing brands, removes that ceiling.
In Ireland, the model is well-established in travel. A 2025 ResearchAndMarkets report on the Irish loyalty market named Aer Lingus AerClub as one of the country's innovation leaders, citing its cross-network partnerships with carriers including American Airlines and British Airways as a central part of its value proposition for members.
The logic for non-travel brands is equally strong. Partners share infrastructure costs and member acquisition investment, and each brand gains behavioral data about its customers across the full network. A utility brand that understands what its most loyal members spend at grocery or forecourt has richer personalization material than one operating in isolation.
Governance is the non-negotiable requirement. Data sharing agreements between partners must be in place, and GDPR-compliant, before any coalition program launches. Coalition programs that get governance right are also well-placed to respond to the next major shift in Irish consumer expectations.
Sustainability-linked loyalty is gaining real traction in Ireland. Consumer data cited in a 2025 GlobeNewswire Irish loyalty market intelligence report found that 60% of consumers consider sustainable features in loyalty programs important, and 31% specifically want eco-focused rewards from the brands they buy from.
Irish grocery is already responding. SuperValu's Bring Your Own Bag initiative rewards members for reducing plastic use at checkout, connecting reward value directly to environmental behavior rather than purchase volume alone.
For FMCG and retail brands, this is a genuine differentiation opportunity. Standard cashback and points programs are becoming commoditized. A program that ties earning to environmentally positive actions gives members a reason to feel something beyond the purely transactional.
The risk is greenwashing. A sustainability reward that is difficult to earn, thinly promoted, or disconnected from a genuine environmental commitment will attract criticism rather than loyalty. The mechanic needs to reflect an honest brand position.
Receipt-based mechanics offer a technically practical route to making eco-linked promotions work at scale across multiple retailers.
The unique on-pack code has been the default FMCG promotion mechanic for decades. Print a code on the packaging, consumers enter it online, a reward is issued. It works. But it carries three structural constraints: the campaign is locked to a single pack production run, codes cannot be applied retroactively across existing stock, and running the same promotion across multiple retailers requires separate pack variants.
Receipt-based mechanics resolve all three. A consumer photographs their grocery receipt, submits it through a campaign microsite, and an AI validation engine reads the product, retailer, price, and date in seconds. The same promotion runs across Tesco, Dunnes, and SuperValu simultaneously with no packaging changes, a faster setup, and a lower production cost per campaign.
The data advantage matters equally. A receipt shows the full basket: what else the consumer bought, which competitor products appeared alongside yours, which store was visited, and at what time. An on-pack code gives you none of that purchase context.
At Brandfire, we have run receipt-based campaigns for brands including Aldi, where AI validation automated the accuracy and throughput that manual review cannot match. Our sales promotions services include receipt mechanics for campaigns at every scale.
As receipt mechanics mature on the consumer promotion side, business-to-business loyalty is going through its own overdue evolution.
Structured loyalty for business customers has been an afterthought in most sectors. Volume rebates, occasional gifting, and trade account discounts were the standard toolkit. They are not programs. They are pricing tools with a loyalty label attached.
That is changing, particularly in sectors where supplier-switching is straightforward and price alone is a weak retention mechanism. In Ireland, agri, fuel, and trade merchant channels are the early movers. Programs that reward trade customers on factors beyond purchase volume, including order frequency, product range breadth, and training completion, are gaining traction.
Tirlan's agri loyalty model and Texaco's trade-facing reward structures are examples of B2B loyalty built with real program architecture rather than ad hoc incentives. The mechanic difference from consumer programs is reward type. Trade customers respond to functional rewards: account credit, priority service, faster ordering, supplier training. Aspirational consumer rewards rarely land in a B2B context where the buyer wants to reduce costs, not earn a weekend break.
The commercial logic for getting B2B loyalty right is being sharpened by a more pressing compliance reality that affects every program running in Ireland.
Ireland's Data Protection Commission published its 2024 Annual Report in June 2025. The figures deserve careful reading by anyone running a loyalty program.
The DPC received 198 complaints specifically about electronic direct marketing in 2024. Of those, 70% related to unsolicited email communications and 24% related to unsolicited SMS messages. The DPC issued 49 warning letters to companies on foot of unsolicited marketing communications, and prosecuted 8 companies for sending marketing without consent. The year's inquiry decisions resulted in administrative fines totalling €652 million across all enforcement categories.
For loyalty operators, the practical implication is direct: collecting an email address at enrollment is not consent to send marketing emails. The DPC's position requires a separate, explicit consent for each marketing channel and purpose. Pre-ticked boxes do not qualify.
The programs most exposed are those built before 2018, where consent flows were designed around opt-out rather than opt-in and have not been reviewed since. If your loyalty sign-up flow has not had a compliance review in the past two years, it almost certainly needs one. The DPC's 2024 Annual Report sets out the enforcement trends in full.
Compliance scrutiny is also accelerating a broader rationalisation of how many programs brands run at any one time.
The practice of running multiple overlapping loyalty schemes across product lines or channels is being unwound. Finance teams and boards are applying the same scrutiny to loyalty that they apply to any significant budget line: show us the incremental impact, not just the enrollment numbers.
The Global Customer Loyalty Report 2025, cited across multiple industry analyses, found that loyalty programs generate an average of 5.2 times more revenue than they cost. That figure is compelling, but the operative word is "average." Programs below that line are being identified and closed.
This is not a warning sign for the sector. It is a quality filter. Brands that can articulate which customer behavior their program is designed to change, and can show evidence it is working, will secure investment. Those measuring only sign-up volume will face an uncomfortable conversation before the year is out.
Consolidation is also making room for one specific model that tends to hold up well under ROI scrutiny: subscription loyalty.
Amazon launched amazon.ie in March 2025, bringing Prime membership to Irish consumers at €6.99 per month. With over 200 million members globally across 27 countries, Prime is now a consumer reference point in Ireland: a paid loyalty program must deliver visible, consistent value every month.
The subscription model is worth serious evaluation for hotels, hospitality groups, and specialist retailers. The economics require a benefit stack that clearly exceeds the fee, but the commercial upside is substantial. Members who pay a monthly or annual fee have made a financial commitment. They visit more often to justify the cost, and they are pre-disposed to choose the brand offering them status over a competitor offering nothing.
The model also solves a persistent reporting problem with free programs: the gap between total enrollment and genuinely active members. If someone pays a fee, they are active by definition.
Gamification is frequently mentioned alongside subscription loyalty as a way to lift engagement further, though the evidence for it is more mixed.
Gamification has attracted consistent enthusiasm in loyalty circles for several years. Progress bars, streaks, challenges, leaderboards, and badges borrow from game design to create a sense of momentum and reward that goes beyond the transactional.
The interest among practitioners is real. A 2025 survey of loyalty professionals found that 45% identify gamification as the most influential trend for the next two to three years. In Ireland, KFC's Rewards Arcade incorporates game-style mechanics to make the loyalty experience more engaging for its customers, according to a 2025 GlobeNewswire Irish loyalty market report.
But gamification layered onto a weak program is decoration, not strategy. Challenges that nobody completes. Leaderboards that only the most frequent visitors can reach. Badges that track existing behavior rather than driving new behavior. These generate clutter rather than commitment, and members learn to ignore them quickly.
The gamification that delivers results is tied to specific behavioral objectives. A challenge designed to drive a first purchase in a new product category. A streak mechanic that builds a weekly visit habit that did not exist before. The business objective comes first. The game mechanic is the vehicle, not the strategy.
Strong engagement mechanics generate rich behavioral data. What happens next with that data is the final trend on this list.
The most consequential shift in Irish loyalty right now is not a mechanic, a platform, or a consumer preference. It is how brands are learning to measure whether their programs are actually working.
Loyalty performance reporting has centered, for most of the past decade, on enrollment numbers, points issued, and redemption rates. These metrics describe activity. They do not answer the question that boards and CFOs are increasingly asking: are we retaining customers who would otherwise have left, and are enrolled members spending more than they would have without the program?
The shift toward incremental measurement, comparing member behavior against a matched control group of non-members, is becoming standard in mature programs. Industry analysis from 2025 indicates that well-run programs typically deliver member spending 12 to 18 percent above comparable non-member spending annually.
Brands that can bring that figure to a budget conversation will get the investment they need. Those that can only point to enrollment totals will find themselves under pressure from exactly the consolidation dynamic described in Trend 7.
These 10 trends do not all demand action at the same pace. GDPR compliance and measurement infrastructure are urgent for most programs. Receipt mechanics and B2B loyalty are practical near-term moves for brands in the right sectors. AI personalization and coalition loyalty require more infrastructure investment and sit realistically in a 12 to 24 month horizon.
What they share is a direction: loyalty programs are being asked to prove themselves in harder terms, operate within tighter regulatory limits, and deliver more relevance to individual members than five years ago.
If you are building or reviewing a loyalty program in 2026, Brandfire has direct experience across Irish energy, insurance, grocery, FMCG, and financial services. Talk to us about your program.
How big is the Irish loyalty market right now?
A ResearchAndMarkets report published in February 2026 valued Ireland's loyalty sector at US$199.5 million in 2025, with a forecast of US$355 million by 2030 at a compound annual growth rate of 11.8%.
What is the practical difference between a free loyalty program and a subscription loyalty model?
A free program rewards members for purchases without upfront commitment. A subscription model charges a recurring fee for a defined, ongoing benefit set. Paid members tend to be more engaged because they visit or purchase more often to justify the cost of membership.
What does the DPC require from loyalty program operators specifically around marketing?
A separate, explicit consent is required for each marketing channel and purpose. Collecting an email at sign-up is not automatic permission to send marketing emails. In 2024, the DPC issued 49 warning letters to companies sending unsolicited marketing communications and prosecuted 8 companies for breaching consent rules.
Do Irish consumers actually respond to sustainability rewards?
Consumer data cited in a 2025 Irish loyalty market intelligence report found that 60% of consumers consider sustainable features in loyalty programs important, and 31% specifically want eco-focused rewards. SuperValu's Bring Your Own Bag initiative is an Irish example of eco-linked rewards operating at grocery scale.
When does gamification add value to a loyalty program, and when does it not?
Gamification adds value when it is designed to drive a specific new behavior: a first trial of a new product category, a visit cadence that did not previously exist. It does not add value when it rewards behavior that was already happening without the mechanic. The question to ask before building any gamification feature is: what behavior does this change, and how will we measure whether it has changed?
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