Open the Members page six months after launch and you will recognise it: members who joined with a flourish, collected four stamps in a month, and whose faces you have not seen at the counter since. Some moved. Some changed jobs and changed their route. Some just drifted. A card cannot tell you which, and the first thing to accept is that you will not get them all back. The second is that you can do something, carefully, for the ones who are still around.
Read what the list can tell you
Counter Club shows each member's stamp count and the day they joined. It does not show the date of the last stamp, so you cannot sort by who went quiet. What you can do is scan for the pattern: a member who joined months ago sitting on a low, round count that has not moved. You will recognise names. That is enough to know roughly how many lapsed members you have, and whether it is a trickle or a flood.
A trickle is normal. People's lives change. A flood, a whole cluster from one month who all stopped, usually points at something you did: the rule changed, the reward got meaner, a staff member left who everyone liked, the hours moved. Fix that before you message anyone.
What you may do
A member who joined and has not opted out has agreed to hear from you. The campaign goes to all of them, lapsed or not, because Counter Club does not segment. That is fine, because the best message to a lapsed member is the same message that works on an active one: real news, said plainly, with the price in it. The lapsed regular reads that the new season is in, or that the mangoes have landed, and remembers they liked the shop.
Do not write a message to lapsed members. Nobody wants to be told they have been missed by a shop. Write the message to the club and let the lapsed ones overhear it.
Timing matters more for lapsed members than for active ones. A text at noon on a Tuesday reaches someone who has stopped thinking about you at a moment when they might act on it. A text at nine on a Monday is deleted with the others.
The card itself is the reminder
A member on four stamps is a person who is four stamps from a reward they half remember. Your message does not need to mention the card at all; the next visit, when you press Stamp and say they are on five, does the work. The reward nudge campaign, a single message to everyone saying "if your card is nearly full, this might be the week", is the one time it is worth being direct about it.
What you must not do
Do not try to contact lapsed members any other way. The number they gave was for your club's messages. Ringing it, or texting it from your personal phone, is outside what they agreed to and outside what Counter Club will do.
Do not message anyone who opted out. They are marked on the Members page and the send skips them. There is no override and you should not want one; an opted-out member who hears from you again is a complaint, and the law is on their side.
Do not re-add anyone. There is no way to, and a member who left and is typed back in by an owner is the single worst thing a loyalty scheme can do. If a member who opted out wants your messages again, they ask you and you email us to clear it; scanning the QR again does not undo an opt-out, because the same mobile comes back to the same record.
Do not delete lapsed members to tidy the list. Their stamps are theirs, and the Members page cannot delete anyway. A regular who comes back after a year and finds their four stamps still there is a regular who tells people about it.
When a member asks to be removed entirely
Sometimes a lapsed member wants more than an opt-out: they want their number gone. Honour it. Email hello@notachain.com.au with their first name or mobile as shown on your Members page and the record is removed. Tell them you have done it.
The quiet way to shrink the lapsed list
The lapsed list grows when joining is easy and the card is hard to fill. Look at the target. If a lot of members are stuck on three or four of ten, the card is too long for how often people come, and the lapsed list is really a too-long-card list. Lower the target, tell the regulars, and watch some of the stuck ones fill a card on their next visit.
The lapsed list also grows when nobody at the counter asks. A regular who joined in a burst of enthusiasm and was never asked for their number again never got stamped and never thought about it. Make the ask part of every sale: "Are you in the club?" Five words, and the lapsed list stops growing.