Advanced Rewards

Build dynamic tiers for rewarding Advocates, based on referred-Friend purchase behavior or number of referral conversions accrued

Samantha avatar
Written by Samantha
Updated over a week ago

OVERVIEW

Advanced Rewards is an exclusive feature within the Referral & Sharing widget configuration when enabled for your account. With Advanced Rewards, you can select upon which criteria and range to base the reward model, and build up to 3 reward tiers. Dynamic rewards can take a static, Evergreen campaign to the next level, encouraging more, high-value referrals for power-Advocates, with flexibility for reward amount and type, based on the following criteria: number of conversions (either lifetime or specific campaign/widget), products purchased by Friend, or purchase amounts of referred Friends. 

We'll mention some ideal use cases below, but check in with our squad at support@friendbuy.com for consultation.

Enabling Advanced Rewards for a Referral & Sharing Widget
Advanced Rewards is a specialized feature. To request adding this feature to your account, speak with your Customer Success Manager, or email Support. Note, additional charges may apply.

Once this feature is enabled, when editing Referral & Sharing widgets, within the reward configuration section of the widget editor, there will be an option to toggle to the Advanced. Once switching to Advanced, you'll progress to set up Reward Criteria and then Reward Configuration.

To edit an existing Advanced Reward, click the 'Preview' button, and then 'Edit' option within the modal screen. To return to Basic, click 'Switch to Basic'.

Setting Reward Criteria

Once a widget is switched to Advanced, you'll begin on the Reward Criteria screen by selecting one foundational 'Criteria for Reward,' for which to base the Advanced Reward configuration.
The available criterion and descriptions are:

  1. Number of conversions for (this) campaign: This selection tracks referral conversions accrued for the Advocate for this specific Referral + Sharing widget, ideal for a limited time campaign or sweepstakes.

  2. Number of lifetime conversions: This will take into account all referral conversions captured by Friendbuy to date for the given Advocate, best for an Evergreen campaign with multiple widget placements, at a program level.

  3. Friend purchase amount:  This selection allows setting more than one reward tier relative to a Friend's purchase amount, within ranges. Be sure you're passing Friendbuy a value for "amount" with order tracking, via JavaScript or API.

  4. Product(s) purchased by Friend: Selecting this criteria will allow specific rewards aligned with the specific products by SKU. This may be ideal to promote Advocates to share a high-end or featured product for a higher reward. Note: Product tracking is required for rewarding based on product(s) purchased. 

Configuring your 1-3 reward tiers for the widget will be the next step, and specifications about each are described below under 'Reward Configuration.'

After selecting the 'based on' criteria, continue to set additional referral conversion criteria for evaluating a reward. These will function in the same manner as Reward Criteria for a basic reward configuration, for which the help article can be found here.

A couple of notes:

  • New Customer Only is set to 'True' by default. Uncheck if this is no a requirement.

  • Minimum Purchase Amount input is not available when basing rewards on Friend purchase amount, as that minimum can be set in the default reward tier within configuration.

  • Multi-conversion Reward is not available for Advanced Rewards, as this can be configured within the reward tiers when based rewards on number of conversions.

Reward Configuration

After setting Reward Criteria, you'll progress to the Reward Configuration screen, based on the selected criteria for reward. One reward tier is the default and required. Within this modal screen, 2 more reward tiers can be added (3 total) by clicking 'Add a tier.' To remove a tier, simply click 'Remove Tier'.

For each reward tier, Type, Amount, Currency (if applicable), Reward Email, and Coupon bank can be selected. It is recommended to create a Reward Email template for each tier, clearly differentiating the reward. Additionally, if coupon codes are being used to reward Advocates, ensure appropriate banks that are named clearly are uploaded to Coupons, and selected within the appropriate tier.

Configuration based on number of conversions (for this campaign or lifetime)
Set up to 3 reward tiers based on number of referral conversions generated via the Advocate, for this widget or lifetime, depending on your selection on Reward Criteria screen. 

By default, each reward tier is set to 'Every Conversion' for When to Reward. This can be switched to 'Final conversion in tier.' A specific use case may be that tier 1 is your 'standard' tier, and you'd like to reward Advocates each time. However, once the Advocate advances to a higher tier, where the reward as far more value, you may choose only to distribute a reward upon the final referral conversion of that tier, gamifying your program. We recommend heavy promotion of the reward(s) associated with upper thresholds, and be clear in program awareness efforts.

To create a reward tier of a single conversion, simply use the same conversion amount for lower and upper threshold, e.g. 3 to 3 would mean '3rd conversion.'
Note, there cannot be any gaps or overlap in conversion numbers from tier to tier.

Configuration based on Friend Purchase Amount
When building your configuration based on the amount of referred Friend's purchase, make sure your 'minimum purchase amount' if any, is the lower threshold of your default tier. If you have no upper limit, for highest tier, just insert a very large monetary amount as the upper threshold. You must be passing a value for 'amount' with your order tracking, via JavaScript or API for this configuration.

Note, there cannot be any monetary gaps or overlap from tier to tier, but our validation and helpful messaging should have you covered!

Configuration based on: Product(s) purchased by the Friend
If building more than one reward tier based on specific products purchased by a referred Friend, you'll likely leave the product SKU input field empty on the 1st, default reward. An empty value essentially translates to 'all product SKUs not listed within another reward tier for this widget', which should be your 'standard' reward for the campaign. Up to 2 additional reward tiers can be added, with specific product SKUs added to the input field. A recommended implementation would be promoting a product as a part of a post-purchase overlay, for Advocates to recommend a specific product to Friends for a high-value reward. This could also be used in conjunction with the Widget Targeting feature, to load a specific post-purchase widget based on a product purchased by Advocate, to continue to share that product to Friends.

A couple of notes: If a referred Friend buys products that match more than 1 reward tier, the highest tier reward will be distributed to the Advocate if approved.
SKU numbers should be comma separated when inputted.

Reporting

Reporting in the Rewards report as well as Customer Search will clearly report the reward tier and range matched when there is an approval. If rejected, the reason for validation failure will state 'conversion does not match to a tier' if this is the case, and/or any other Reward Criteria set for the campaign.

Reward Webhook for Advanced Rewards

If you're using our Reward Webhook to automate reward distribution, you may need to make a change to existing implementation. Please note amount and type properties at the top level within the reward object request will be populated with the approval of an Advanced Reward, rather than nested within referral_incentive. See an abridged sample below for these properties:

{
    "amount": 200.0,
    "conversion": {
        "campaign": {
            "advanced_reward_tiers": [
                {
                    "type": "other",
                    "value": 100.0
                },
                {
                    "type": "other",
                    "value": 200.0
                }
            ],
            "created_at": "2019-02-06 15:13:09.004742-08:00",
            "id": 274523,
            "name": "New Referral - Advanced Reward",
            "published": true,
            "referral_incentive": null
     
...

    "rejected_reasons": {
        "minimum_purchase_amount": "minimum purchase amount of 50.00 is required but conversion purchase amount is 18.00"
    },
    "status": "invalid",
    "type": "other"
}
 

API v. 1 for Advanced Rewards

We've made some enhancements to our REST API v. 1 to support Advanced Rewards on a campaign (widget). 

Applicable endpoints:

  • GET\Campaigns

  • GET\Shares

  • POST\referral codes

  • GET\referral_codes{code}

When Advanced Rewards is enabled for a campaign (Referral widget), a new property advanced_rewards_tiers will return an array of reward tiers (Reward Tier 1, reward tier 2...) as objects, each expanding for the type and amount for each tier.

Values in existing referral_incentive object for type and amount will have value of 'none'.

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