Introducing Time-Based Reward Points

Introducing Time-Based Rewards, our powerful new feature designed to give you additional reward point allocation options in your online store experience. Now you’ll have the flexibility to set the frequency of reward point resets—whether it's monthly, quarterly, or yearly—according to your business or client’s needs. This streamlined approach saves you time and ensures consistent rewards for your customers. Here’s some of what we’ve added to allow for this capability:
Set your customer’s custom date
First, you’ll want to create a customer custom field with an input type of Calendar/Date Picker. You can name this field Hire Date, Birthday or anything you’d like. We’ll use Hire Date for the purpose of this article. If you have dates relevant to your customers you can import those dates into that custom field using our Customer Import in Tools and uploading the dates via CSV. Once you have dates set for your customers, let’s dive into the new rule engine conditions! 
Create your custom rule
For this exercise, we’ll build an automated rule in the Rule Engine to give 500 reward points to a customer to spend monthly. Once you’ve created your date custom field (Hire Date) you can check against that field using a new condition in the rule engine. Navigate to Rule Engine > Customer Events > New where you can create a rule based on a trigger like “the timed follow-up for a customer is triggered” and add our new condition “Time since date-based customer custom field”. Select Hire Date custom field with an operation set to “Equal To”, and an interval of “1” with an interval type of “Months”. Then add the action “Give Reward Points to Customer” with a value of 500. This will now reward the customer 500 reward points every time this rule is triggered. 
Add additional validation
Next, we’ll want to be sure that the store doesn’t give out points in error, so we advise adding a second calendar/date-picker custom field to customer records that will let you know the last date the points were received. We named this field LastRewardSentDate. Once you have your new custom field available you can add two additional conditions to the rule you made above: 
Check customer-level custom field > check LastRewardsSentDate, not equal to, today. This will verify that you don’t give them a renewal multiple times in the same day
Time Since Date-based customer custom field > check LastRewardSentDate, equal to, 30 days. This will add the condition to verify it’s been 30 days since they’ve last received reward points, not just since they’ve been hired. Think of this as a double check! 
Set the conditions to Match All. 
Add one more action to your rule: Set Customer-level Custom Field > select LastRewardSentDate with a value of Today.
Need points to expire?
Don’t forget you can navigate to Settings > Marketing and adjust your reward point settings at the store level for when you want any new points added to a customers account to expire or if they should expire at all! 