Create Advanced User Tiers Using Audiences

Introduction

The Tiers module in the Loyalty Engine is designed for point-based tier progression, where users move up through tiers solely based on the points they earn.

However, if you want to create a more advanced tier system that isn’t limited to points alone, you can use Audiences instead. Audiences allow you to define tiers based on a wider range of criteria, such as specific behaviours, actions, or user profile data, giving you more flexibility than the standard tiers module.

Configuration

Overview

Imagine we want to create an advanced tier system for a loyalty program that rewards users based on the number of transactions they’ve made, rather than the points earned from those transactions.

In addition, we’ll incorporate other desirable behaviours for higher tiers, offering a more nuanced and behaviour-driven approach to tier progression.

Bronze tier

Bronze tier will be the first tier that an end-user joins. The criteria for this should be relatively simple to achieve.

For our example we'll say that a user need to have at least one PURCHASE_COMPLETED event recorded to join the Bronze Tier audience.

Silver tier

In Silver tier we can start to introduce extra conditions that the end-user must satisfy. The number of transactions needed to move to the next tier is also greater.

For our example we'll say that a user needs to have at least three PURCHASE_COMPLETED events and also have opted in to email marketing.

Gold tier

Gold tier is designed to be even more challenging to achieve and again introduces new elements that user must satisfy. This tier requires users to have also spent some of their points, encouraging end-to-end interaction with your program.

For our example we'll say that a user needs to have at least five PURCHASE_COMPLETED events, have opted into email marketing and also must have at least two PURCHASED_REWARD events recorded.

Platinum tier

The final tier is our setup is designed to reward users who become ambassadors for your program, by requiring that they have interacted with you on social media.

For our example we'll say that a user needs to have at least ten PURCHASE_COMPLETED events, have opted into email marketing, must have at least fivePURCHASED_REWARD events recorded and have at least two MENTIONED_YOU_SOCIAL events recorded.

Tier Visibility

As an audience-powered tier system does not utilise the native Tiers module, the user's 'tier' in the Get Wallet endpoint will be null. So, it’s important to consider how you’ll communicate tier status and progress to your users

One approach is to create a 'Tiers' reward category, and an offer-type reward per tier, to represent each tier. Use the information in User availability to show the relevant reward to the relevant user depending on their current tier.

Tips

• Incorporate time-based criteria: To ensure you’re rewarding active users, consider adding time-based conditions to your audience logic. For example, to qualify for the Bronze tier, a user must have at least one PURCHASE_COMPLETED event in the past 12 months. This incentivises ongoing engagement while ensuring that users remain active in your program.

• Create complex audience logic: You can also add more advanced logic to automatically assign specific tier levels. For instance, if a user is a staff member, you could grant them Platinum status as an employee perk. For more details on how to structure these audiences, check out the Create an audience with multiple or nested groups tutorial.