Creating an Anniversary Reward Earning Rule
Creating an Anniversary Reward Earning Rule
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The Anniversary Reward earning rule (previously known as a campaign) allows you to give customers a special gift celebrating the date they joined the loyalty program or for a more personal anniversaryIt's a great way to make your loyalty program a more personal experience for your customers.
In this article, you’ll learn how to create the earning rule and how to customize every aspect of it.
Is this article for me?
For Shopify and Shopify Plus, refer to this article
How it works
The earning rule allows you to reward your customers for an anniversary of your choice. It could be the anniversary of them creating an account with your shop, or it could be a more personal anniversary - marriage, pet’s birthday/adoption day, child’s birthday, etc.
The account creation anniversary will register the account creation date as the date for the anniversary by default and reward the customer a year later.
If you let your customers add their own personal anniversary, they will be rewarded when that date comes along.
You can choose whether the reward is a discount or points and you can create several Anniversary Reward earning rules for different customer segments. Click here to learn more about how the reward-giving logic works when there are multiple anniversary earning rules.
Multiple earning rules reward logic
When a customer is supposed to receive a reward, our system goes through all the existing anniversary earning rules.
The existing earning rules are reviewed in the following order
- Rules that are restricted to VIP tiers.
- Rules applied to specific customer segments
- Rules that apply to all customers
Each customer can receive only one reward for this earning rule. This means that if you have an earning rule that is restricted to VIP tiers and one that applies to all customers, a customer with the relevant VIP tier status will receive only one reward on their anniversary.
Creating the earning rule
Shopify and Shopify Plus
- In the Yotpo Loyalty & Referrals main menu, go to Set Up Program > Rewards Program.
- Click Create earning rule.
- Under Account select Anniversary Reward, then click Next.
All other eCommerce platforms
Click Select on Anniversary reward.
- In the Yotpo Loyalty & Referrals main menu, go to Set Up Program > Earning Rules.
- Click Create earning rule.
Now you can go ahead and configure the earning rule settings.
Setting up the earning rule
Do you see a different interface?
If your earning rule settings are different from the image shown below, please follow this guide.
Rewards
What kind of reward - Choose either points or a coupon
- Coupon - Which coupon should the customer get? You can only choose from a list of coupons you have already set up. To learn more about how to set up a coupon, click here.
- Points - The number of points the customer will receive as a reward.
Anniversary date types
Important:
You can have only one anniversary type per loyalty program. This means that all the Anniversary Reward rules you create will either have the account creation date or a personalized date. Creating multiple earning rules with different settings will cause unexpected behavior.
You can choose between 2 different anniversary types for when to reward your customers:
- Customer enters the date - Similar to our Birthday reward earning rule functionality, the customer will input the date of their anniversary into the Rewards Popup or Earning Points Module and will be given a reward on that day.
When choosing "Customer enters the date", you can edit or remove the customer's anniversary date from the Customer's page. Additional information can be found here.
- Account creation date - You can choose this option to celebrate the customer's account creation anniversary. The customer will not be able to manually input a date.
Please note:
When choosing to reward the customers based on account creation day, customers will receive a reward only 1 year after their account was created.
To reward customers on the account creation day, you can use the Create Account earning rule.
On-site settings
Campaign Name - The name of your Anniversary Reward earning rule as seen by your customers.
Reward Text - Enter the value you want to display to the customer. Your customers will see the reward they earned in the ‘My activity’ section of your store's Rewards page.
Please note:
If you change the Reward Text field, don't forget to also update the Points field. Make sure they always reflect the same number. This will not be done automatically.
- Description Text - After the customer clicks on the earning rule, they will see a short sentence describing the available action and reward.
- Icon - By default, this is the anniversary icon but you can also choose from hundreds of other options. Click Use Font Awesome Icon Names and copy and paste the icon name
- Call To Action - You can customize the text that appears on the call-to-action button
The Anniversary Reward earning rule settings below are only relevant for the "Customer enters the date" anniversary type:
- Fraud Prevention Message - Fraud prevention is an optional feature that helps ensure shoppers will enter their true anniversary date. If you do not wish to use this feature, simply erase the text and leave it blank.
Learn more about fraud prevention
- Success Message - The Success Message is shown after a shopper successfully inputs their anniversary into the earning rule, and will also be shown if the customer clicks the same earning rule again after they already signed up.
- Anniversary Month Selection - Enter the names of the months exactly as you want them to appear, separated by commas. The default names are set in English.
- Also ask for anniversary year? - Choose whether to ask for the anniversary year by using the dropdown menu to select yes or no.
Please note:
The anniversary year is optional on the rewards popup, rewards page, and when implementing using our SDK.
When implementing the Anniversary Reward earning rule as part of the Earning Points module, the anniversary year setting cannot be turned off.
VIP Tier advanced setup
You have the option to give different rewards to different VIP tiers using the Restrict To VIP Tiers setting.
To do so, follow these instructions:
- Create a separate Anniversary Reward earning rule for each one of your VIP tiers.
- Assign one VIP tier to each earning rule in the above-mentioned setting.
- Set up a generic earning rule with no VIP restrictions. A generic earning rule ensures the customer will receive a gift:
- Even if they have no VIP tier status
- Even if their VIP tier status doesn't have a dedicated Anniversary Reward earning rule
If multiple earning rules are configured for the same VIP tier, customers will be awarded according to the first earning rule that was created in Yotpo Loyalty & Referrals.
Fraud prevention
The fraud prevention setting prevents customers from trying to get the reward sooner than their true anniversary, for example, during high-traffic times such as holidays.
Tip:
After a customer submits a date, it's impossible for them to change it. They can only change it by contacting customer support.
To learn how to manually update a customer's submitted anniversary date in Yotpo, check out our Customer Management Actions article.
Turning on fraud prevention
To turn on fraud prevention, populate the field with any text of your choosing. As soon as you write text in the field and click "save", fraud prevention will be turned on.
One reward per calendar year
The system will allow customers to receive only one anniversary gift per calendar year.
Regardless of whether fraud prevention is turned off or on, and regardless of how many times you update a customer's anniversary, the system will not grant more than one gift per calendar year.
30-day waiting period
Fraud prevention ensures all customers will have a waiting period of at least 30 days, from the day they input their anniversary date into the earning rule.
- If the customer signs up and sets their anniversary to more than 30 days in the future, there is no issue. They will receive the reward on their anniversary
- If the customer signs up and sets their anniversary to less than 30 days in the future, they will need to fulfill a waiting period of 30 days from the date they signed up for the earning rule
For example, if the customer signed up for the earning rule on January 5 and claims their anniversary is January 6, the reward will only be granted on February 5 [January 6 + 29 days], ensuring each customer waits a minimum of 30 days for their reward.
Turning on fraud prevention
Fraud prevention is optional. To turn off fraud prevention, erase the default text, and leave the field empty. This will automatically turn off the setting.
Please note:
Each time you manually turn off fraud prevention, the system triggers an action that sends a reward to all customers whose anniversary passed but they were still in the 30-day waiting period.
Fraud Prevention FAQ
I changed the customer's anniversary date in the admin. What will happen now?
If you change a customer’s anniversary date in the back-end admin after the customer has already received a gift this year, the customer will not receive a second gift in the same year. They will receive their next reward on the new date in the upcoming calendar year.
For example, if a customer received an anniversary reward in March 2020 and then contacted the store to ask and change their anniversary date to April, the customer will receive another anniversary reward only in April 2021.
I decided to disable fraud prevention. Who will get a gift now?
Every time you disable the Fraud Prevention feature, it triggers a backfill action that automatically sends an anniversary gift to all customers who had an anniversary but their reward was delayed due to fraud prevention.
These customers will automatically receive their reward immediately.
I changed my Fraud Prevention settings several times - How do I know who is getting a gift and when?
The system runs one daily check at 11 a.m. UTC and checks who is supposed to receive an anniversary perk today.
It makes no difference how many times fraud prevention settings were changed prior to this daily check. The system only sees the current status (on or off) during the daily check.
For example:
- If during the daily check fraud prevention is turned off, the customer will receive a reward on that day (their anniversary.)
- If during the daily check fraud prevention is turned on, the system also checks if the 30-day waiting period has passed. If the waiting period has passed, they will receive a reward on that day.
What time of day are the gifts sent out
All of the anniversary rewards are sent out every day at 11 a.m. UTC.
Does re-enabling fraud prevention reset the 30-day waiting period for customers?
No matter how many times you enable/disable fraud prevention, customers will still wait 30 days from the day they signed up.
Unless of course, you turn off fraud prevention exactly on the day of the customer's anniversary, or their anniversary has already passed. In that case, a gift is sent out right away to these customers.
However, the system still will only allow 1 gift per calendar year per customer.
Examples:
- The customer signed up for the Anniversary Reward earning rule when fraud prevention was off. Their anniversary is next week. Tomorrow you decide to turn it off. When will the customer get the reward?
Answer: 30 days from the date when the customer signed up for the earning rule
- The customer signed up for the Anniversary Reward earning rule when fraud prevention was enabled. Their anniversary is next week. Tomorrow you decide to turn it off. When will the customer get the reward?
Answer: On the day of their anniversary.
- The customer signed up for the Anniversary Reward earning rule when fraud prevention was enabled. Their anniversary was today. In 2 weeks you decide to turn it off. When will the customer get the reward?
Answer: On the date that you decide to turn off fraud prevention.
I have multiple Anniversary Reward earning rules. What if one has Fraud Prevention and the others don't?
If even one Anniversary Reward earning rule does NOT have fraud prevention, this will take precedence and will cancel fraud prevention on all your anniversary reward earning rules.
For this reason, it's important to make sure all fraud prevention settings are the same across your different Anniversary Reward earning rules.
Next steps
Setting up email notifications - The anniversary reward email can be sent through an integrated Email Service Provider (ESP).
Click the ESP relevant to you to integrate it and configure the Happy Anniversary trigger:
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