Point Expiration User Guide

 

Table of contents

Overview

Point Expiration Schemes

Last Activity

Every Activity 

Program Date

Configuration Guide

Last Activity Expiration

Rules and Limitations

Every Activity Expiration

Program Date

Automatic Point expiration job

Overview

Points expiration help you monitor activities and save the rewards customers may accumulate. In this article, we discuss best practices in understanding and using points in terms of their expiration.

Point Expiration schemes

Currently we support 4 different types of Point expiration schemes:

1. Last Activity
2. Every Activity
3. Program Date and Program Date with a delayed cycle

Last Activity

This type of expiration is to ensure loyalty members keep coming back to the brand and perform a qualifying activity to prevent their points from expiring. Last Activity expiration is a type of expiration scheme where a loyalty members points expire if they have been inactive for a defined period time. What constitutes a member being active can be defined by the marketer in terms of activity performed using the UI while configuring the expiration scheme.

Every Activity

This type of expiration is to ensure that points earned on every activity expire independently from any other activity that the user performs.

In Every Activity expiration, member points expire in a First In First Out (FIFO) manner. This means that client(s) can set an expiration period and as the member performs an activity, the member has the duration of the expiration period to use those points otherwise they expire. The duration is applied to every activity that a member performs and the member has that amount of time to use the points earned on the activity. The advantage for the user is that not all their points expire at the same time. Instead, points expire at a fixed duration after they are earned on a per activity basis.

Program Date

In the Program Date type of expiration, points expire on a fixed day after they are earned. The time is typically at the middle of the year for a 6 month cycle and at the end of the year for a 12 month cycle.

There is a variation to this scheme where we can introduce a delay where points earned in the first 6 months cycle can be delayed to expire by how many ever months the client chooses. Similar rule would apply to the points earned in the next set of 6 months.

Important Customers moving forward will not be able to switch expiration type once they have configured. Please ensure that you are selecting the expiration you want. If for whatever reason expiration needs to be changed, Product and Engineering would need to be involved. The process would involve creating a LOY ticket in the Jira project and ticket assigned to the Product manager for assessment. Customers who are configured with other types of expiration other than Last Activity will see no changes in their UI and can continue to use Settings > Earn Rules > Earn Metric Expirations.

Configuration Guide

The document will describe how to setup Points expiration for clients.

Configuring Points expiration involves two steps:

1. Configuring the scheme of choice the client wants to use in the Admin console.
2. Configuring the automatic point expiration job via the scheduled job UI.

A new User Interface (UI) has been introduced to configure the Last Activity expiration. The UI is located under Rules > Metric Expiration. For the other three types of expiration, we have a legacy UI located under Rules > Settings > Earn Rules > Earn Metric Expirations. Marigold Loyalty plan to move the legacy UI to the new Metric Expiration page in the near future.

The UI for configuring Metric Expiration via Program > Settings > Program Settings has been disabled. Please use the above UI to configure expiration.

Last Activity Expiration

The platform is flexible in allowing any activity type to be set as a qualifying activity. The only activities excluded are expire type of activities. The most common use case for qualifying activities take the form of purchase activities as clients want to encourage loyalty members to make purchases to be considered active.

Clients can set an expiration period, which is a time period until  a member can keep using their points before they expire. Once a member performs the qualifying activity, the expiration on all their points is extended by the expiration period set by the customer.

Marigold has a new self service UI to empower marketers to configure Last Activity type expiration. This UI will exist under the Rules tab in the Admin console.

To create a new expiration rule:

1. Click Create Rule. This takes you to the Detail page for configuring the Last Activity Expiration. Note: This rule will currently apply to all metrics, which are marked as expire-able. Currently we do not support different rules across different metrics.

2. Enter the Title, Description, Start Date, Expiration Period, and a whitelist/blacklist of activities enabling the member to remain active.

3. The expiration is defaulted to Last Activity for now. Click Save and the rule will be created. Ensure you have enabled the rule for it to take effect.

• Whitelist configuration: Only the selected activities in the whitelist keep members points(metrics) from expiring. For instance, if Purchase is the only activity specified in the whitelist and a loyalty member performs other activities other than Purchase, then they will obtain points for those activities. However, those activities do not keep the points from expiring once the expiration period (in months) ARE reached, without the member performing the Purchase activity. As soon as a member is awarded a Purchase activity before their points expire, the member’s expiration for all their points get extended.
• Blacklist configuration: This works opposite of the whitelist configuration. You can add activities in this configuration that prevent the user from being considered active for the purpose of expiration. For instance, if you add the Purchase activity in the blacklist, any activity will extend the member’s expiration, but not the Purchase activity.
• Minimum metric value for activities: This is a value a client can configure to set a minimum metric on activities, which are whitelisted or blacklisted. The minimum metric is the value a member has to earn on an activity to extend the expiration. For instance, if we have a Purchase activity that is whitelisted and a minimum value set to 10 points, members performing a Purchase activity that gives the member 8 points, does not extend the member’s expiration. However, if the member(s) makes a purchase awarding 11 points, then the expiration gets extended.
  • It is important to understand the minimum point value set is applicable to all activities and cannot be customized per activity type.
  • The typical use case for using this is to
    • Ensure that Zero point activity does not keep the member active and extend their expiration.
    • Ensure returns does not keep members active. Returns for clients in some instances send a purchase with a negative metric value.

Once a rule in configured we do not allow editing certain fields

Editable fields are as follows:

1. Title.
2. Description.
3. Whitelist/blacklist of activities.
4. Minimum metric for activities.
5. The enable disable configuration.

Non Editable fields are as follows:

1. Expiration type.
2. Start Date of expiration.
3. Period of expiration.

Expiration rules are meant to be program configurations to be set only a few times, preferably once during life time of loyalty programs. In case you need to update the configuration please contact your Marigold representative.

Rules and Limitations

1. There is currenctly no matching of purchase and returns. A purchase with a return will extend the expiration for member, unless Minimum Metric values for activities is set to be zero or greater.
2. Only activities in the whitelist or excluded from black list will count against expiration. At a given time, only one of white list or blacklist can be configured. 

Every Activity Expiration

To configure Every Activity expiration a marketer, navigate to:

1. Rules → Settings → Earn Rule Settings → Earn Metric Expirations.
2. Specify the following:

3. Click Save.

Program Date

Automatic Point Expiration job

The Automatic Point Expiration job should be configured via the Scheduled Job UI. The job can be scheduled to expire member points. For new clients the job can be configured directly without having to reach out to support.

For existing clients the batch job might be already running as it would have been configured earlier by support. Before scheduling the job via the Scheduled Jobs UI, please contact support to stop the existing batch expiration job.

There are two jobs in all which are related to point expiration

1. An initialization job which is only needed if the expiration policy is Last Activity expiration
2. A Batchv2expiration job which is required to expire points.

For only Last Activity Expiration, an initialization job is required before setting up the actual expiration. job.to set the initialization job via scheduled jobs select the following. The initialization job does not require a scheduler since it is a one time job.

 

To set up expiration, pick the Metric Expiration and the job will automatically process the type of expiration configured on the client.

 

In the UI, we provide an option to select specific members that need to be expired.

There are certain technical parameters that support can configure but are not in the UI. Please communicate with support or your account manager if any of these parameters are needed to be changed. 

Parameters not in UI

• Batch size
• FilePath
• MinimumPartitions
• AckImmediately
• ExecuteRules
• BatchSize