Introduction
Adding an expiration date to your rewards is a powerful way to boost reward redemption. When customers know their rewards will expire, they’ll be more motivated to use them towards a purchase to avoid losing them.
When they use their rewards towards a purchase they’ll get to experience the tangible value of your rewards program, giving them every reason to continue engaging with your program in the future.
Overview
✅ This feature is only available on the Growth plan and above.
✅ This feature is available for merchants using Shopify or BigCommerce.
Types of rewards you can set to expire
You can enable reward expiry in Smile Admin for points spending rules, referral rewards and VIP tier entry rewards.
Points spending rules
How it works: You can set an expiry date for each of your points spending rules.
Recommended expiry date: 6 months
Why it's important: Adding an expiry date to rewards that customers redeem through your points program creates urgency, giving them that extra bit of motivation to use their reward before they lose it. Your customers will see more value in your program if they've used a reward towards their purchase. It's this value that will keep them coming back to re-engage with your program again in the future.
📋 Note: You cannot set gift cards or POS rewards to expire.
Referral rewards
How it works: You can set an expiry date for the reward issued to an Advocate for a completed referral and the reward issued to a Friend to use towards their first order.
Recommended expiry date: 6 months
Why it's important: Referral rewards are more likely to be redeemed if they're used within the first 6 months. Creating urgency for referred Friends will increase the likelihood that they'll use their reward, to avoid losing it. This not only creates a new customer for you, it shows your new customer first hand the value they can continue to gain from ongoing engagement with your program.
VIP tier entry rewards
How it works: You can set an expiry date for your VIP tier entry rewards, that are issued to any customer that unlocks a new VIP tier.
Recommended expiry date: 6 months
Why it's important: In the excitement of entering a new VIP tier, it can be easy for your customers to forget about entry rewards they've earned with their new status. Setting this reward to expire gives them additional urgency, helping them get the most out of your VIP tier. When they see this value, they'll be more likely to complete additional actions to stay in their current tier or progress to a new one.
How to enable reward expiry
Go to Points > rewards and select the reward that you’d like to assign an expiry date to. We’ll use a fixed amount reward as our example for this article. You can also set reward expiry for referral rewards and VIP tier entry rewards.
Head to the bottom of your reward details page to locate the reward expiry card. Once you’re here check the “Expire issued rewards after an elapsed time” box.
You’ll see the options available for the reward you’d like to expire. The expiry timelines will vary based on the action you’re rewarding. We recommend setting shorter timelines to encourage customers to redeem their unused rewards sooner. Once you’ve selected your expiry period, click Save.
Once you’ve saved your changes, rewards that are issued moving forward will show their expiry date in your customer Panel.
To make your reward expiry even more effective, we’ll also automatically enable a reward expiry email. This email will be sent to customers a few days before their reward is set to expire. You can enable the email by going to Notifications > Reward Expiry Reminder.
📋 Things to note:
1. Enabling reward expiry will not impact any rewards you’ve already issued to program members, only new rewards that are issued after you’ve enabled it.
2. If there are multiple rewards that you’d like to set to expire, you’ll need to enable reward expiry for each of them individually.
What's next?
Points expiry feature FAQ
Learn more