Fraktura has spent almost a year now solving that with a loyalty program built into their mobile app, developed by Appworks. The idea was to stop treating each sales channel as its own island and instead give every purchase, wherever it happens, a single home: one profile, one points balance, one history.
What it actually tied together
The app connects to Fraktura's webshop and to the point-of-sale system running in their physical store, so a purchase made on the website and a purchase made at the register both feed the same account. Shopping online just means being logged into that account already. In the physical store, it works through a unique QR code shown in the app, or a coupon code a customer has already earned, scanned at checkout and matched back to their profile on the spot. Either way, the points or the reward follow the person, not the channel they happened to be shopping in.
Points build up per purchase, at different rates depending on what's being bought, and they push customers up through tiers named after typography styles, a nice touch for a publisher: Normal, Italic, and Bold. Once someone reaches a tier, they don't fall back down to a lower one later, so the program is built to reward people over the long run rather than penalize a slower month. The more someone buys and engages with Fraktura, the more they earn, and redemption works the same way no matter where it happens, a coupon applied at checkout online or shown at the till in-store. It's one of the more developed loyalty setups we've come across in the region for a business like this, and it's built with the long-term customer in mind rather than a one-off promotion.
Buying isn't going to stay the only way to move up
Fraktura is building out ways for people to earn points without necessarily making a purchase at all: quizzes and polls, joining in-app forum discussions, engaging with the push notifications the team sends out, and a few other mechanics along those lines. More of this is planned through the rest of the year, so the app is worth checking back on as new ways to earn points show up.
There's also a live events piece that goes beyond the app itself. Fraktura runs conferences and author events throughout the year and takes part in the Zagreb Book Fair, one of the biggest dates on their calendar, and the plan is to connect those events directly to a customer's digital profile. Since Fraktura already knows who their most engaged customers are through the app, they can identify the people showing up to events in person and reward or target them specifically, turning a one-time event visit into another point of contact in an ongoing relationship rather than something that ends when the event does.
