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Integrating loyalty and reward data with your everyday communications running through your email service provider (ESP) can add a level of personalization that will help strengthen the connection between your customers and your brand. This article provides some examples of how to effectively tailor those emails for maximum effect.
Feature availability: App integrations are available on Essential, Standard, Growth, Plus, and Enterprise plans. The number of app integrations you can connect depends on your plan.
Note: For the purpose of this article, we will be using Mailchimp as an example email service provider (ESP). You may be using one of the other Smile App integrations but the same principles will apply.

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What rewards information can be used with Smile ESP integrations

Each of our email service provider Smile Apps allow you to build custom email campaigns based on data pulled directly from your rewards program. This data includes a customer’s:
  • Current points balance
  • Current tier name
  • Current tier ID
  • Referral URL
  • Customer State
  • Birthday information (with some Smile partners)

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How to send emails to customers based on their rewards information

Smile ESPs make it easy for you to send customized messages to the different customer segments you’ve already set up with your email service provider. To do this, log into your ESP. Create a new email campaign and open up the To field. You can then customize which customer segment you’d like to send your email to. In the example above, only customers who have over 500 points will be sent this email. Ideas for using customer reward segmentation:
  • Let customers know about new rewards by sending messages to only those with enough points to redeem it with the Smile Points Balance condition
  • Run a VIP sale and only invite members of your highest tier with the Smile VIP Tier Name condition
  • Encourage customers to refer their friends by reminding them about their referral link by adding the Smile Referral URL and is not blank conditions.

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How to use properties to personalize emails

You can go further than simply segmenting your messages by personalizing emails with your rewards data. You can do this by using reward properties. With properties, you can add the following information to any email campaign:
  • Points balance
  • VIP tier
  • Referral URL
Each ESP has its own nomenclature for their properties:
  • Mailchimp: *|PROPERTY_NAME_HERE|*.
  • Klaviyo: {{ person|lookup:'Property Name Here'|default:'' }}
  • Dotmailer: @PROPERTY_NAME_HERE@
Note:You will need to manually type in the name of each property to add it to your subject line.
You can also use these properties in a similar way in the body of your email. Unlike in the subject line, your ESP will automatically format the properties for you, all you need to do is select the property from a dropdown menu in the email’s text editor (as shown in the image below). When you actually send out the email, the finished copy will automatically populate each property with each customer’s individual information.

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Examples of rewards emails

There are countless examples of using your loyalty and rewards data to personalize your communications. Here are just a few from some of our merchants.

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VIP sale

In the editor: As viewed by your customers:

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Entering a new VIP tier

In the editor: As viewed by your customers: image of an email congratulating on tier entry, photo of a person wearing a toque