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Overview

A loyalty program only works if participants can see what they have earned and understand what it is worth. This page covers what a member encounters, from enrollment through redemption. Participants join through an experience you brand and place where it makes sense — an account page, a landing page, or an in-app screen. Enrollment can also come from your side, by adding participants to an audience you maintain and sync to Extole, or from the participant’s own activity, by targeting the program at an event that qualifies them — a purchase over $500, for example. See How to Target a Program. Treat enrollment and marketing consent as separate decisions. Joining a loyalty program is not by itself consent to receive marketing email or SMS, and where you capture both, record them separately. Extole can sync opt-in and opt-out state with your other systems; see the Extole Opt-In and Opt-Out Sync Guide.
A branded loyalty enrollment block with an email field, a Join rewards button, and an unchecked marketing consent box

An enrollment experience that takes an email address to join and captures marketing consent as a separate, optional checkbox.

For the compliance obligations that apply to the data you collect, see GDPR and CCPA.

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How Extole Recognizes a Member

A loyalty balance belongs to a person, so the program depends on Extole resolving each participant to the same profile every time. Pass your own identifier for the participant along with the events you send, so activity from your site, your app, and your back-office systems lands on one profile. Because a balance is valuable, the Reward Bank requires the participant to be a verified consumer before it will show a balance or accept a redemption. Access from an email link is authenticated with a JSON Web Token appended to the link. See Verifying Consumers.
A participant who reaches the Reward Bank without being verified sees an empty bank rather than their balance. Confirm the verification path works before launch, from both a logged-in page and an email link.

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The Balance and Redemption Views

Members interact with their points in two places, and you choose which to use: Within either, a member can see:
  • My Rewards — the rewards they have earned and their current balance.
  • Redemption Options — what the balance can be exchanged for at the current Redemption Ratio.
  • Redemption History — a record of past redemptions.
  • Ways to Earn — the actions that earn points, and the share link where the program rewards referrals.
Members can redeem everything at once or select specific rewards, subject to the minimum and maximum redemption values you configured. You can also surface a balance outside the Redemption Center. Where you need a balance on your own page or in your app, read it through the Reward Bank endpoints and render it yourself; see Points and Balances.

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Ways to Earn

The same experience tells a member how to earn more. List the ways to earn alongside the balance so a member who has just looked at what their points are worth can see what moves them closer to it. Each way to earn is described in the member’s own terms — what the action is, what it pays, and how often it is available. Referrals sit in the same place: where the program rewards a referral, the member’s share link and share channels appear with the other ways to earn, so a single view covers earning, referring, and redeeming. For the actions a program can reward and how each is configured, see Ways to Earn.
A Ways to earn panel listing a Shop and a Birthday bonus way to earn above a Refer a friend block with a share link and share channels

Ways to earn shown in the redemption experience, with a refer-a-friend block carrying the member's own share link.

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Status and Progress

Extole provides a stats dashboard that shows a participant their activity and the rewards they have earned. It can be displayed on your sharing landing page, embedded behind login on your own site, or driven entirely by the APIs for a custom implementation. A loyalty dashboard leads with points and the rewards a member holds; for the setup paths and the metrics a dashboard can show, see the dashboard setup guide.
A My rewards page showing points available and earned all-time, a list of claimed rewards with their codes and status, and a reward catalog priced in points

A member's view of their balance, the rewards they have claimed, and what their points can still buy.

For anything beyond what the dashboard shows — distance to a redemption threshold, a tier badge — build it from data you already hold: the balance from the Reward Bank endpoints, and the tier attribute from the participant’s profile.

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Ongoing Touchpoints

The messages that keep a loyalty program alive are the recurring ones. Earned reward emails confirm that an action produced points and link the member to the Redemption Center. See the Earned Reward Emails Asset Guide. Pending reward emails tell a member that an action has been recognized but the reward is not released yet, which matters where you hold rewards through a return window. See the Pending Reward Email Asset Guide. Redemption emails confirm a redemption and deliver the reward, unless the reward provider handles that message.