In this article you will find Best Practices for Financial Loyalty Reporting and FAQs.

Best Practices: Monthly Financial Report Vault and Schedulable Financial Reports

Below are tips for financial reporting for  loyalty programs with ASC 606 and IFRS 15. *Alpine IQ is not a financial advisor, please seek your own counsel to assure that you are in compliance.

Loyalty Financial Reports can be found under Settings : Loyalty Settings : Points Reports. The AIQ – Recommended Best Practices for Loyalty Financial Reporting is to utilize these reports exclusively to designate the financial liability from outstanding point balances.

USE CASE: These reports will show you the actual, usable loyalty point balances during the timeframe in which the reports are run. These are the ONLY reports in Alpine IQ that will display the true financial liability from outstanding points for the timeframe provided.

MONTHLY FINANCIAL REPORT VAULT: These are automatically created and report on the previous months data . Please compile these reports month over month to understand the financial liability of outstanding loyalty points across a larger time frame (than one month).

• Per Persona: You can report points based on each customer based on what they specifically redeemed, earned, etc. These records are not attached to a store and provide global liability.
• Per Store: You can also report points based on where the actions taken by the custom occurred (accrued points, redeemed points, etc.) as our system will attempt to assign a Persona’s points accrued / redeemed / expired to a store location to provide store level liability.
  • When a customer accrues points due to them doing something not tied to a specific store, those points are assigned to an “Unknown” row in the reports downloaded on a per store basis. These can be considered global liabilities.
  • Depending on your POS, some redemptions are “Groupon style” and rely on proper in-store SOP’s to align with Alpine IQ’s reports. Depending on your organization’s settings, it’s possible to have users redeem points without being at a store location. The opposite is also true with “Groupon style” redemption where if SOP’s aren’t followed properly, a clerk could simply give a customer a discount manually but they don’t actually collect the “coupon” by redeeming it with the customer. Most Alpine IQ clients leverage modern point-of-sale infrastructure which has Alpine IQ built in to redeem natively (AKA a Tier 3+ integration). Being natively integrated solves these discrepancies but it’s important for us to mention it in this article. 

SCHEDULABLE FINANCIAL REPORTS: These reports are identical to the Monthly Financial Report Vault Reports, however, they can be scheduled at different intervals beyond monthly (like the MONTHLY FINANCIAL REPORT VAULT)

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How do members earn points?
   1. Transactions: [Total spent on transactions] * [Point Accrual ratio]
   2. Visits: [number of visits (max applicable)] * [point per visit]
   3. Gifts / Boosts: When a customer falls into an audience or is sent a specific campaign there are options to boost additional points to the members’ loyalty accounts.
      1. Example: “When a customer abandons an online shopping cart, send them a message to come back and complete the order and gift them 100 points to incentivize it.”
   4. Points Multiplier: When a customer falls into an audience, they can receive a points multiplier on points accrued due to money spent on transactions or visits made while they are actively in the audience.
      1. Example “Purchase X brand name, get 2x points”, “Shop during 3-6pm and get 3x happy hour points”)
   5. Manual Adjustments: When staff member manually adds or subtracts points from an account.
   6. API-driven Integration Partners: Various integration partners you may have connected to your accounts.
      1. EX- Virtual clerk tools gifting points in exchange for customer reviews, flat csv files imported into your database with new points values, etc.
   7. Block Adjustments: When a customer’s points have a negative value, Alpine IQ deploys a ‘block adjustment’ to automatically adjust that user’s points back to 0. This is to protect you and your end consumers from a negative customer experience. You may turn off Block Adjustments by asking your account rep.
      1. Reasons Block Adjustments may occur:
         1. Bad merges resulting in a redemption made on an account that does not have the requisite number of points after the bad merge was corrected.
         2. Negative points adjustment by staff member or audience multiplier
         3. Changes to point accrual / point expiration settings which recalculates all historically accrued points for members. This causes some users to show that they accrued fewer points despite already having redeemed the requisite points before the point accrual logic was changed (example below)
      2. Example:  A clerk enters dummy information which causes two different members to incorrectly merge into one account. Persona 1 had 100 points, Persona 2 had no points, so the merged Persona resulted in 100 points. While this ‘merged Persona’ existed, Persona 2 redeemed the 100 points. Later, when the ‘merged persona’ is unmerged, Persona 2 now has “-100” as they redeemed a “100 point discount” without having the requisite number of points. A block adjustment would be applied here to get the member back to 0.
      3. Example: The original point accrual ratio is 100 points for every $1 spent and was live for 6 months. After 6 months of implementation, the point accrual ratio is changed to 1 point for every $1 spent. Upon changing the point accrual start date, all historically accrued points are re-accrued under the new point accrual ratio. This means members no longer had the requisite number of points to make the redemptions that already occurred. This would push them into the negatives. A block adjustment would be applied here to get the member back to 0.
2. How do I verify the report?
   1. If you are on a supported point of sale that sends Alpine IQ transaction ID’s, you may also access the discounts and the transactions they were applied to via API (). Additional documentation.
   2. If you are on a supported point of sale that DOES NOT send Alpine IQ transaction ID’s, or you leverage “Groupon style” redemption methodologies (i.e: Customer shows clerk discount and redeems via phone and not directly on the POS from a > Tier 3 POS) then you will not be able to tie redemption’s to exact sales within AIQ.
      1. Rather you would need to pull discount usage from your POS reporting directly and match it to UTC timestamps from redemption’s that occurred with your Alpine IQ ledger. This can be done by pulling redemption’s in our dashboard or via a downloadable CSV on the “Data analytics -> Member club (Tab in the report)”.
3. Why do some Personas have negative point balances?
   1. This is a bug that is being corrected and should not occur in future reporting
4. How are the columns in the report calculated?
   1. starting_points: any event prior to the start date of the report is put here
   2. legacy_points: legacy point values (raw file import, pos import)
   3. points_earned: from sales/collectibles/visits
   4. points_boosted: from boosts/multipliers/referral sales
   5. points_adjusted: manual adjustments
   6. points_redeemed: redemptions
   7. points_expired: any points that have expired.
   8. points_net: legacy+accrued+boosted+adjusted-redeemed-expired
   9. points_start: points_net+starting_points
   10. starting_points: any event prior to the start date of the report is put here
   11. legacy_points: legacy point values (raw file import, pos import)
   12. points_earned: from sales/collectibles/visits
   13. points_boosted: from boosts/multipliers/referral sales
   14. points_adjusted: manual adjustments
   15. points_redeemed: redemptions
   16. points_expired: any points that have expired.
   17. points_net: legacy+accrued+boosted+adjusted-redeemed-expired
   18. points_start: points_net+starting_points
5. How do I understand my Report URL?
   1. Example URL:
      1. https://lab.alpineiq.com/public/emailReports/1005-1005-2022-07-31-2022-08-30-rd.cs
      2. https://lab.alpineiq.com/public/emailReports/[Account Id]-[Account ID]-[Date Range]-[Date Range]-[report type]
6. What are merges?
   1. How do they occur?
      1. The Default Alpine IQ Merge logic merges Alpine IQ Personas that have the same phone number OR the same email on both Alpine IQ Personas.
         – https://support.alpineiq.com/how-customer-duplicate-merges-work
   2. Why do they occur?
      1. Merges occur due to Alpine IQ receiving multiple records of the same customer profile. Multiple AIQ Personas can result from multiple profiles being derived from various integrations (POS vs E-Comm, etc.) in addition to duplicate customer profiles being created from the same integration (multiple POS profiles, etc.)
   3. Why are merges important?
      1. Alpine IQ’s original goal was to act as the source of truth by providing you with meaningful data acquired from multiple tech platforms. In order for this data to be meaningful, it must be de-duplicated. In other words, your data must be clean and not redundant. This is accomplished via Alpine IQ’s merges. This way, you know you are looking at meaningful and valuable data.
      2. Merges also play an important role in loyalty programs as merges will change a Persona’s loyalty status and allow that customer to become a loyalty member and accrue points. Merges also make sure every loyalty customer is receiving ALL of their points, even if some points were accrued on another POS customer profile.
   4. How do merges impact reporting?
      1. Negative Point Balances
      2. Changes in point balances
      3. Changes in data allocation (fav store associated with points activity)
         1. De-duplication of contact records can cause shifts in store by store liability. If a customer’s favorite store changes, the liability can be shifted to the new store. You can see edge case scenarios related to contact record CDP/ CRM operations via this article.
   5. What are bad merges?
      1. Bad merges are defined as ‘Alpine IQ merges that occurred for two unrelated or individual Personas’. In other words, a merge in customer profiles occurred that should not have occurred.
   6. How do bad merges occur?
      1. Under AIQ default merging Logic, bad merges occur due to a phone number or email being associated with more than one individual account.
      2. Situations to avoid and common reasons why a phone or email would be incorrectly associated on more than one:
         1. The clerk is entering in ‘Dummy Contact Information’: instead of the clerk entering the correct contact info, or maybe to satisfy a customer that does not want to provide the required contact info, the clerk enters in a filler ‘dummy email’ or ‘dummy phone number’ that they use across multiple customer profiles (in POS, AIQ, or otherwise). Even though these customers are unique and unrelated to each other, they will all be merged together as they share the same email or phone number.
            1. NOTE- this can negatively impact customer experience as well as point balances and loyalty access will change as a result of merges. Entering in ‘dummy information’ is STRONGLY discouraged
         2. A couple uses the same contact info for individual loyalty accounts: Couples should be discouraged from using the same (home) phone number or email for their loyalty accounts unless they would like to share one account between the two of them.
   7. Can I change my merging logic?
      1. Under the Advanced section of Loyalty Settings, you can change the logic so that merges only occur if the [first + last name] match and [date of birth] match. Therefore merges are independent of phone numbers or emails collected.
      2. Please reach out to your CSM to discuss important edge cases in doing so:
         1. Promotes inaccurate data collection: With less motivation to collect accurate phone and emails, it is likely that messy / inaccurate data will be collected at a higher prevalence. This means marketing opt-ins and communications will likely be impacted if we are consistently collecting invalid phones / emails that cannot be leveraged for marketing opportunities.
         2. It is possible, while unlikely, for someone to have the same [first + last name] and [birthdate] as another Persona and therefore could be merged incorrectly despite following the implemented merging logic. 
   8. What is Purchase Protection?
      1. Purchase protection is the act of resetting the number of days before points expire, as long as the customer remains an active by purchasing as a member during your expiration window. Alpine IQ enforces this methodology to avoid mass support and customer backlash for all redemption types on the platform and in the future of loyalty.
         1. Example: Points expire 30 days after the customer’s last purchase.
         2. Purchase protection for non FIFO based programs should be implemented to achieve high CLTV outputs from loyalty programs. 
      2. FIFO (First-In-First-Out) reporting can be outdated for more modern programs running than programs with points purchase protection. You should also not use FIFO when members can choose individual points to redeem from a specific order or for programs whose points expiration can vary by point (gifted, manually adjusted, multiplied points during time windows only for specific audience members, etc.
   9. How do I run Breakage Estimates with Purchase Protection?
      1. Breakage estimates should allocate your redemption’s to points earned. When customers deplete their points for redemption, costs should be allocated to specific point earnings.
         1. Your main concern is around breakage balancing member loyalty and growing revenue and therefore estimating the percentage of open points that will never be redeemed. 
         2. Liability = open points x (1-% breakage) x the projected cost of each point that is redeemed. This is a constantly updating calculation in quarterly financials. 
         3. If your breakage forecasted is high then deferred revenue will be too low, requiring a material increase in program liability while the opposite will result in trapped revenue.
         4.  Alternatively some programs will be projected using Fair-Value-Per-Point estimates in order to discover deferred revenue. This is also a dynamic estimate that changes based on tier/ reward levels available to members at any given time, currency exchange rate, inflation.
      2. Points earned should be placed in deferred revenue based on the value cost of the points with breakage used to calculate it. Redeemed points should be recognized as new rev which lowers your deferred liability. Points that expired wouldn’t be adjusted unless your deferred revenue incorporates point expiration estimates

DO NOT USE: Audience Points Reports

Audience Points Reports show Personas who are currently in the audience at the time the report is run, regardless of the date range ran. This means the Audience Points Report will retroactively change as merges occur.

 The logic reflected in the Audience Points Report reflects the current logic in the account and does NOT reflect the logic in the account for the time frame in question. This means if the same, historical Audience Points Report is generated multiple times, the reports  will vary over time and have a variable outstanding point balances as logic in your account changes.

Because Audience Points Reports will inherently change over time, they are considered dynamic and should NOT be used to determine the financial liability from outstanding loyalty points .

Examples of Changes in Historical Audience Points Reports (and why they should NOT be utilized):

1. Change in Expiration Logic
   1. Loyalty Program begins Jan 1, 2022
   2. Expiration Logic is Changed on June 1, 2022 and applied retroactively
   3. However, from Jan 1 2022 through May 31st, 2022, that expiration logic was not implemented. Therefore, actual financial liability of usable loyalty points during Jan 1 2022 through May 31st, 2022 should NOT incorporate expiration logic as that logic did not exist at that time.
   4. However, Audience Points Report WILL incorporate the expiration logic from Jan 1 2022 through May 31st, 2022 as Audience Points Reports utilize the EXISTING logic for the historical timeframe and NOT the historical logic when reporting on the historical timeframe.
2. Merges
   1. In August 2022, I was incorrectly merged with an unrelated Persona as the clerk was using Dummy Contact Information when collecting contact information at check out. This resulted in me having 300 points for August 2022.
   2. However, in October, it was discovered that I incorrectly was merged with another unrelated individual. So, in October 2022 I was unmerged resulting in me having a remaining point balance of 200 points (as 100 points were a result of the ‘bad merge’ and were therefore removed once the bad merge was corrected).
   3. If the August 2022 report is regenerated after October 2022, my outstanding point balance will reflect my ‘un merged’ account with 200 points instead of the ‘merged account’ with 300 points that was seen the first time the report was generated. This would cause variable financial liability as a result of the variable outstanding point balances seen within the same report, generated at different times (pre Aug 202 VS post Oct 2022).

To get the latest updates on our suite of services, make sure to subscribe to our blog today!

Starting March 1st, 2022, some carriers will begin releasing heavier restrictions and fees. As a part of this rollout, Alpine IQ will now provide the ability for you to turn on T-Mobile/ Sprint at your leisure via the left navigation menu -> Configure Alpine IQ -> SMS Defaults. Please understand the associated risks and fees outlined below. It is important to note that although certain fines have been publicly marketed by carriers, Alpine IQ and it’s vendors for facilitating the sending of text campaigns have not had a single non-compliance fine or even warning. Given that these were enabled last year, we feel confident that you can explore leveraging these carriers.

10DLC Registration Fees

10DLC Carrier Fees

T-Mobile and AT&T have notified customers of increasing fees for traffic from phone numbers not registered for 10DLC, effective March 1, 2022.

T-Mobile Non-Recurring 10DLC Messaging Fees

T-Mobile 10DLC Non-Compliance Fees
Please note that Alpine IQ and it’s telecom providers have not received a single warning or fine in the history of these non-compliance fees being in existence.

Small Business Low Volume 10DLC Campaign Type Fees

This is a special campaign type that can be used by any small business with low volume needs. (Daily volume less than 2,000 messages). If this campaign type is applicable to your organization, we recommend that you use this. For this campaign, the registration fees noted above do not apply.

Update: November 16th, 2021

T-Mobile has expanded on their fee structure for unregistered traffic. Unregistered traffic starting January 1st, 2022 will be charged $10 per message. Using 10DLC program evasion tactics (snowshoeing, dynamic routing, or non-approved number replacement will incur a $1,000 per violation fee.

UPDATE: September 29, 2021

Censorship change notification:
T-Mobile recently announced that they will be making changes to un-registered text message traffic starting October 1st 2021. “Registration” previously was not required by T-Mobile in order to send messages. Going forward all traffic will need to be registered in order to avoid massive fines levied by the carrier. Federally scheduling of highly regulated markets has prevented you from registering for their new program.

What options were on the table:

Alpine IQ has aggressively fought the T-Mobile stance related to highly regulated markets and awaited feedback from T-Mobile before choosing alternative routes for our clients. We have obtained feedback from many of you and have decided that effective October 1st, all T-Mobile text messaging will be suspended until further notice.

UPDATE: April 2, 2021

In this article we hope to identify, explain, and address the most common questions related to 10DLC updates and carrier filtration in highly regulated markets. This is extremely important to the success of your business as it relates to text messaging as a marketing channel. At the end of the article we will tell you how we are moving forward to protect you, why we chose the path we did, and how it affects your return on investment for these campaigns.

Definitions/ terminology used in this article:
– A2P = Application-to-Person. Meaning a technology-driven message vs a person-to-person message.
– 10DLC 10-digit long code = A normal phone number, not tollfree and not a shortcode.
– AIQ = Alpine IQ

Carriers are updating their systems to provide better delivery quality and lower filtering risk for certain companies/ purposes. The reality is that this is most likely to pick and choose who is allowed to send messages over their networks. These updates will launch both for AT&T and T-Mobile in 2021 and AT&T requires a business or technology service register and pass a manual audit process to get approved. Smaller networks and aggregators such as Google Fi/ MVNO‘s are also affected if they are running on AT&T infrastructure.

So why does this matter?
Simply put, highly regulated companies are strictly forbidden from registering for approval and risk higher filtration rates or complete shutdown of SMS/ MMS messaging services starting June 1st. The reality is that the carriers have not voiced which of the two is likely to occur but slower delivery times is likely. As crazy as it is… they are letting payday loans and liquor register but not other highly regulated markets. Unfortunately, they are on the wrong side of history and it won’t change until federal legalization (Telus in Canada continues to be an issue even post-legalization).

Last week, Twilio banned over 100 highly regulated vendors/ brand accounts with less than 24 hours notice! Luckily Alpine IQ was not leveraging Twilio for messages at this time. Many of the largest SMS users/ tech platforms in the space were on this list and experienced rapid engineering sprints to recover.

Verizon launched its own 10DLC filtration system in 2019. Although its changes have not had much of an effect on highly regulated markets, they do tend to be one of the harder carriers to deliver highly regulated messages on and their filtration tactics have escalated in 2021. Telus in Canada has also leaned towards an anti-highly regulated market/ anti promotional approach regardless of the upcoming 10DLC changes.

What do I need to do IF I want to keep attempting to send highly regulated content? (See further down in this article for how to send whatever you want without losing your messages to filtration)

• Do not include highly regulated terms in your AIQ account brand name. I.E: “GreenAlpine” etc. This will prevent blocked terms from appearing on consumer-facing pages that can be audited by carriers when sending messages.

• Personalize your message with Alpine IQ macros as much as possible. This helps prevent spam flags because carriers can’t catch on to duplicate mass messages as easily.
  
• Do not send highly regulated terms within your SMS messages. Carriers are also much smarter with filtration and can easily find tricky alternatives such as (“S.AT..IVA” or weights “2(g)”). Avoid all mentions of weights, products, brands, categories, or word such as “reward”, “promotion”, “BOGO”, etc. When you create new campaigns in Alpine IQ, our system automatically will recognize and notify you that you are violating highly regulated markets promotional guidelines. This blacklist is updated often but it is important that you understand that you should avoid any terminology that a physical auditor at a carrier could consider highly regulated related will get flagged.
  
  Every time you send a message and you violate keyword/ content restrictions, carriers will flag the phone number, root domain for links shortened, server address of landing pages, etc. From this point onward, most of those assets will be useless/ blocked by carriers from further sends until replaced.
  
  NOTE: For Telus in Canada, please refrain from content restrictions common elsewhere in the world. They do not treat Canada differently due to it’s federal highly regulated status.
  
  To combat this, AIQ automatically rotates and isolates those resources within a private pool assigned to each client. This is why some users report delivery issues while other users can send millions of messages without issue. If you abuse content guidelines, your entire network of assets for sending will need to be replaced. Again, this auto-rotation happens by default within AIQ but charges are incurred for repeated abuse. Heavy violators can run through these assets as much as 3 times per day.

Why is it that e-commerce companies can deliver order confirmation messages, receipts, delivery/ pickup notifications but I can’t?

Notification messages are one-off sends that do not have any highly regulated related content in them:

• “Your order has been placed, click here to check the status so you can pick it up at the store: LINK”
• “Your order is ready for pickup”
  etc…
  
  These also have been known to be difficult to send in highly regulated markets and every major vendor has experienced filtration. However, these DO NOT have anywhere near the same carrier filtration patterns as they have variant time delays between sends, no highly regulated content within the message itself (sometimes only behind landing page URLs), and they also fall under separate TCPA restrictions related to opt-in consent. Again, carriers are trying to get rid of promotional messaging containing highly regulated terms and media files.

Highly regulated markets is an ever-changing landscape and Alpine IQ is dedicated to helping you achieve your most important work. We understand that changes to your SMS infrastructure can affect in-store revenue heavily and it’s important that our systems consistently deliver messages on your behalf. There are many ways to combat carrier filtration and we have tested every combination of them you could possibly imagine.

Here are just a few examples and the pros/cons to each:

• Send SMS without removing highly regulated terms and references
  Highest chance of filtration. Avoid this at all costs.
  
• Send nothing that violates guidelines in the text but instead send an MMS media file (PDF or IMG commonly) containing terms/ promos
  Carriers have been known to use image recognition software to detect text/ keywords and highly regulated products within images
  
• Send links through systems like Bitly that redirect to landing pages
  If you use a standard link shortening tool such as Bitly/ Rebrandly/ TinyURL, you run a severe risk of messages being undelivered. These are highly abused systems even outside of highly regulated markets and should be avoided at all costs. AIQ maintains your own link shortener private to your brands account that has highly regulated markets specific avoidance protections built into it.
  
• Send links to landing pages with highly regulated domains (Meta information, text on page, resources easily picked up with programmatic scanning of source code)
  Carriers will audit your page and easily can scan the meta information and text of your website to determine if you are a highly regulated brand. This same technology is commonly used by search engines and payment processing onboarding audit software packages.
  
• Auto rotate link shortening domains, servers, dedicated IP addresses.
  This works well but can prove to be expensive and failure rates increase if this pool is not dedicated to each individual brand. If someone else on the platform you use violates content guidelines, your messages could be affected at the same time. This is why AIQ doesn’t share your assets with other clients on the system. Even with all of this, you must still have a “captcha”, “Are you a robot”, “age gate”, “pin code” request in order to access the landing page on the other side of a link.
  
  Note: Alpine IQ will enforce a one click redirect “Are you a robot” until we see any reason to escalate this walled garden to something more severe. You can customize this message to create an age gate or pin code flow for further protection.
  
• Send links that lead to a landing page where the customer inserts a pin code that they previously setup. If they forget the code, they need to remember a keyword they can text to obtain it or they need to go online to reset it. After entering in their pin they are redirected to a landing page. This prevents the carrier from manually auditing a message and getting to the final landing page where highly regulated terminology is present
  This is not a terrible solution but it does decrease conversion rates due to customers having to remember pin codes vs simply clicking a button.

After extensive testing, Alpine IQ has decided to move forward with a new strategy to protect you from the massive resource burden it takes to create, submit, audit, revise and send messages all while following carrier guidelines. This cycle is extremely cumbersome and at the end of the day you just want to communicate with your customers without losing ROI.

FINALLY! Is SMS still a viable channel? What is Alpine IQ implementing to keep me competitive?

Absolutely SMS is a viable channel. We will continue to be as transparent as possible as carriers roll out and enforce content restrictions using new technologies. At this time, SMS is one of the most effective ways to get the attention of customers and direct it into sales both online and in-store. We are playing a short-term game to protect the voices of highly regulated operators from being silenced while awaiting an imminent federal legalization ruling in the USA.

We must all band together to achieve what we know to be right for highly regulated markets. As June 1st approaches, we will have you more than prepared to achieve the same ROI out of the AIQ platform as you do today. We wish we could share some of the amazing technology innovations we have in the works, but for now, we must put our heads down and prepare together.

Alpine IQ will automatically be switching all messages to use the highest performing strategy. You do not need to do anything for this flow to be in full effect.

As of April 6th, 2021 we will be switching all Alpine IQ customers to the following user flow/ strategy for text messaging:

If you wish to utilize texting as it was before this change, you can simply request that your account rep revert your account and you can proceed at your own risk.

1. You will create an SMS/ MMS message as you normally would
   
2. You will notice when creating messages that the preview will always show something along the lines of “You have a new {{Your Brand Name}} notification: {{Link to landing page}}”

3. When clicking on the URL you are directed to a landing page that regenerates your message in a formatted exactly for the device it’s being shown on. The example below is short but you may create longer more customized messages with multiple line breaks, emojies, macros, etc.

There are a ton of amazing benefits with this strategy and after a deep financial/ performance analysis found that it actually works heavily in your favor:

• You will only ever send 1 SMS segment at a time… saving you a ton! Being that your message body is on a landing page hosted in your own private ecosystem, Alpine IQ only needs to send the message notification + link. No (“2 credits” or the higher rates MMS costs)
  
• You can say and post practically anything you deem reasonable without worrying about keywords or ridiculous content variations. Alpine IQ personalization macros still operate the same. So does our click tracking, identity resolution, and conversion analytics!
  
• Being that your message is now on a landing page, the length of your message can be extremely long, contain emojis, MMS media, and more without paying for extra message “credits/ segments” or 2x spend on MMR. Alpine IQ is not an SMS-only company/ product. Therefore, our motivation is purely to help you succeed. We do not need to shove bulk SMS down your throat in pitches or skate around the truth to keep our ship afloat. We are a data company at heart and texting is one channel we became experts on.

How much are these SMS changes going to cost me from an ROI perspective?

At the end of the day we believe this is actually a positive shift for the highly regulated industry. Although it seems like you won’t get as many people engaged because messages will be behind a link, this is not the truth and our data proves it. As the only true CRM/ data lake/ data analytics company in highly regulated markets that also touches SMS, you can sleep easy knowing we did our math.

• From an optics perspective you will be functioning similar to non-highly regulated businesses. SMS notifications with attached links to read secure messages are actually very common… i.e (Uber, Amazon, Redirects into native apps, etc.)

• Click through rate will drop by only 2-3 contacts avg per 100 that normally would have engaged. Those that don’t engage generally wouldn’t have converted regardless when performing exposed vs control tests. Meaning those that were too busy to engage with your text anyways, will simply be less annoyed that they have to hide a highly regulated related message that pops up on their phone to be read aloud by google home or siri driving in the car with family. You are actually being less intrusive.
  
• Revenue for in-store traffic essentially stays the same with an avg 11% CVR and avg. revenue generated per send of $6-$8!

• This strategy also saves you capital by alleviating the workforce burden required to write/prep/ send text campaigns the old way

Should I also implement strategies using my Alpine IQ account to get a leg up on possible future filtration until federal legalization?

Yes! We have many messaging channels and partners within the Alpine IQ marketplace. Over 60% of our clients don’t even leverage blast SMS campaigns. Top tips:

• Collect email both within your POS systems and in your loyalty/ member club signup forms/ website forms etc.
  If you didn’t know, Alpine IQ automatically will send an email to a persona on file if they request a link to their wallet app or for post-order messages that notify them with wallet links/ points updates. This is to ensure that the customer has no interruption in their customer experience due to a carrier.
  
• Continue to use the Alpine IQ default SMS flow for delivery. This includes private network rotation for IP, server, link shorteners, captcha walled garden, and our automated message landing page generator.
  
• Communicate with your AIQ rep if you experience heavy filtration issues and they can assist in helping you uncover solutions.

To get the latest updates on our suite of services, make sure to subscribe to our blog today!

• Backups.
• Contact cookie syncing with programmatic vendors such as LiveRamp, Kochava, TradeDesk.
• As a constant source for marketing teams to gather files from in order to sync to FB, TikTok, Twitter, Google audience builders.

Tutorial:

Navigate to AWS and go to your S3 service homepage. You will now need to create a bucket where you want your files to be stored within/ sync’d to.

Add your bucket name and select a region:

Turn off “Block all public access” and consent at the bottom where necessary (Alpine IQ is a 3rd party that will need access. We will restrict access via IAM policies shortly):

Next we will change the bucket policy. Under the permissions tab you will see a bucket policy section. Copy and paste the following JSON code into the bucket policy section. Please make sure to change your account ID + bucket names where the placeholders are:

– Placeholders are: yourAccountID and bucketName

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "DelegateS3Access",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Principal": {
                "AWS": "arn:aws:iam::yourAccountID:root"
            },
            "Action": [
                "s3:DeleteObject",
                "s3:GetBucketLocation",
                "s3:GetObject",
                "s3:ListBucket",
                "s3:PutObject"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:s3:::bucketName”,
                "arn:aws:s3:::bucketName/*"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

After you save we will now go to the AWS “IAM” service to add your user that will have access to this bucket. Go there now, then head to the users section in the left navigation bar. Click on “Add user” and select programmatic access. Please note that if you are just going to use this for Alpine IQ, go ahead and make the user “alpineiq” so that it is easier to track and control your security protocols. Please download the access key + access secret credentials when you have completed creating this user. You will need it at the end of this tutorial.

On Step 2 you will select “Attach existing policies directly” and then click the button in the lower-left corner “Create Policy”.

Then select “JSON” in the tabs from the new window that opens:

Copy and paste the following JSON. Make sure to replace your bucket names where applicable:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor0",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "s3:PutObject",
                "s3:GetObject",
                "s3:ListBucket",
                "s3:DeleteObject",
                "s3:GetBucketLocation",
                "s3:PutObjectAcl"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:s3:::sampleBucket",
                "arn:aws:s3:::sampleBucket/*"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Congratulations! Your bucket is now setup for us to sync to it. You can make other IAM users to allow 3rd parties access to your backups.

Now all you need to do is head into Alpine IQ and connect AWS S3 as a destination. When connecting your integration you will need the access key + secret for the IAM user + the bucket name and region for us to access. Your CSV files will automatically sync to this bucket by default every 4 hours.

Bucket          // bucket name
Region          // region bucket was created in
AccessKeyID     // your new user's access ID
SecretAccessKey // your new user's secret access key

To get the latest updates on our suite of services, make sure to subscribe to our blog today!

• You will earn points based on dollars spent within any of our stores. For every $1 you spend, you will earn 1 point. This accrual includes orders made online!

• In order to sign up you will need to provide us with your mobile phone number:
  – You can do this by placing an online order, giving your phone number to the clerk at checkout time, or by signing up on our website/ through our signup form here: https://lab.alpineiq.com/joinMembers/{{Insert your brands UID here}}

• When you make a purchase, your points and discounts will be updated within 5 hours and in most cases, you will receive a text message clarifying as well

• You can access your wallet anytime by clicking on the link sent via text after every order or by logging in here: https://lab.alpineiq.com/wallet/{{Insert your brands UID here}}

• In your member app, you can connect with our stores like never before. Access exclusive discounts, points-based rewards, store-level promos, and access our shop online features with one click. When you select a discount, you will be presented with a page that you need to show our checkout staff when picking up your merchandise/ checking out in-store. They will redeem/ sync your discounts to your order. In some cases, you can also do this directly within online ordering menus.

Common discounts we will include in our program include:

• Lotteries! (We will automatically pick random users from our member club to receive massive discounts)

• Exclusive discounts generated JUST FOR YOU based on your order history and favorite products.

• Holiday specials

• Merch specials

• Online only specials

• Permanent discounts to all club members (I.E: 5% off of every order)

• Weekly promos
  – Senior Happy Hour (10-20% off 55+ Patrons)
  – Regular Happy Hour (same format)
  – Topical Tuesdays (% off all topicals)
  – Wax Wednesdays etc…

• Weekend promos
  – Brand promos
  – Special Promotions
  – Event specials

F.A.Q:

• Is there a reason I have to pay taxes for rewards?
  Yes. Regulations on some products require multiple taxes, some of which based on the cost of the product and must be paid by the consumer and listed on the receipt.

• Can you offer any free product?
  Compliance regulations stop us from giving some products away for free.
  

• My points seem incorrect, how can I resolve this?
  We can only attach points to your member account if you provide us with a phone number when you make an order. Please make sure that you are giving us the same phone number/ email you signed up with in order for your points to calculate correctly. If have us apply a phone number to a previous order, your points will update automatically a few hours later. If you still believe your points are wrong, please send us an email to sales@alpineiq.com with your name, phone number on your member account, the company’s loyalty program you are referring to, and we will work to get your points resolved as quickly as possible.

• How do I delete my data?
  You can visit: https://lab.alpineiq.com/trackingPreferences/{{Insert your brands UID here}} at any time to access/ delete your data from our system. Please note that by doing so you will forfeit any points you have within your account.

• I forgot my phone or I deleted one of my discounts from my SMS history. Can I still get this discount?
  Yes. Please ask your clerk to look up your phone number/ account via the Alpine IQ portal and they will be able to find/ redeem your offers manually.
  

To get the latest updates on our suite of services, make sure to subscribe to our blog today!

1.) Via your POS and clerk script
– Customer is asked via checkout if they are a member. If so they are asked for their phone number to track the order.
– Customer is not a member, the clerk asks for the required information to signup and inputs it as a customer record in the POS. To maximize your data analytics we recommend collecting first name, phone, address (or zip at minimum).

2.) Via tablet kiosk
– Navigate your tablet kiosk to your Alpine IQ pre-configured member signup form.
– Place tablet kiosk in an easily accessible place in your retail store.
– Customers sign up at their leisure and they are notified via SMS instantaneously with a double-opt-in confirmation. If this user can be synced back as a customer record to your POS, we will do so within the next audience calculation window.

3.) Via your website/ pixel event
– The user navigates to your website/ app and a popup or form is available where they can signup to be a club member.
– Customers sign up at their leisure and they are notified via SMS instantaneously with a double-opt-in confirmation. If this user can be synced back as a customer record to your POS, we will do so within the next audience calculation window.

Generally, in-store flows have a human element associated with them. Below we give two examples related to those interactions.

1.) Customer approaches checkout and needs to signup

Clerk: Hey there! Did you find everything you wanted today?

Customer: Yes I did!

[Clerk should initiate upsell at the counter if desired]
[Once the transaction is totaled and ready for payment]

Clerk: Are you a part of our new exclusive customer list?

Customer: No I am not.

Clerk: We set up a new customer list that uses your mobile phone number so we can give you exclusive discounts on your favorite products through text. All we need is your mobile number, first name, … (other optional fields).

Customer: Sure

[Clerk should attach their phone number to a new or existing customer record]

Clerk: Thanks so much! You should receive a text shortly to confirm you joined the club!

2.) Customer is already a club member and needs their customer record attached to their order for tracking purposes (or earning points for loyalty)

Clerk: Hey there! Did you find everything you wanted today?

Customer: Yes I did!

[Clerk should initiate upsell at the counter if desired]
[Once the transaction is totaled and ready for payment]

Clerk: Are you a part of our new exclusive customer list?

Customer: Yes I am!

Clerk: Excellent, can I have the mobile number that is tied to your account?

[Clerk should attach their phone number to the order/ attach the customer record]

To get the latest updates on our suite of services, make sure to subscribe to our blog today!

You can do this with any email template you desire, however we recommend the following body message:

Introducing SMS

[Button To Signup FORM]
I.E: https://lab.alpineiq.com/joinMembers/{{UUID}}

Hi {{firstName}},

We’re excited to be trialing SMS customer communications and invite you to be a part of it for member club perks by opting in.

Get exclusive discounts you can use to pickup your favorite product.

And, if it turns out that SMS is not for you, you’ll always be able to opt-out by replying “STOP”.

To be part of this trial, simply opt-in to SMS alerts today!

To get the latest updates on our suite of services, make sure to subscribe to our blog today!

Customizable items:

Logo: 400×400 | JPG, PNG, GIF (Max animation 30 seconds)

Cover image: CustomXCustom | JPG, PNG, GIF (Max animation 30 seconds). Cover images are dynamicly sized to fit each device. Thin horizontal orientation is recommended.

Recommended max file size for best user experience: 600kb

To get the latest updates on our suite of services, make sure to subscribe to our blog today!

Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA):
A Canadian federal privacy law that regulates how private-sector organizations handle personal information when engaging in “commercial activity”.

Commercial activity is defined as: “any particular transaction, act or conduct or any regular course of conduct that is of a commercial character, including the selling, bartering or leasing of donor, membership or other fundraising lists.” You must follow PIPEDA if you are located in Canada and do business with Alpine IQ.

Your main concerns should revolve around your ability to provide customers with:

1. How their personal information is collected & stored
2. How their personal information is used
3. Who has access to it
4. How do they correct it or delete it if requested

Alpine IQ customers are responsible for their own compliance with PIPEDA, but we understand and take our role in the transfer of data across borders very seriously.

At Alpine IQ, all Personally Identifiable Information (“PII”) is stored in a highly secured cloud infrastructure managed by Google.

With that said, Google has a whitepaper to help you understand how PII is secured in Google Cloud and how it correlates to PIPEDA.

Google Cloud Platform has passed the following audits for security standards:

• SSAE 16 / ISAE 3402 Type II:
  SOC 1
  SOC 2
  SOC 3
• ISO 27001
• ISO 27017
• ISO 27018

Alpine IQ also automates some aspects of PIPEDA by providing you with a data preferences page specific to your organization and the integrations you have connected with your Alpine IQ data infrastructure. This custom page URL should be placed in the footer of your site to give customers the option to opt-out, delete, or lookup their currently stored PII. For information about finding your data preferences page, please contact your Alpine IQ account representative.

To get the latest updates on our suite of services, make sure to subscribe to our blog today!

1.) Geo insights
Provides you with a global view of customers for your selected audience, brand, company, or enterprise. The map generally has a heat map of customer locations as well as relevant retail locations. When zoomed in, the map will have zones color-coded for common geo-restricted areas such as schools, public transport, e-sports complexes. Customers use this insights page to discover potential M&A targets, licensing opportunities, locations for legal promotion of goods, and much more.

2.) Demographic insights
Contains breakdowns for gender, age, race, income, and housing in percentages based on what is selected.

3.) Order insights
An overview of analytics related to orders made via e-commerce or in-store transactions.

• Total orders
• Avg. order checkout price
• Avg. cart items per order
• Avg. days between customer visits
• Number of orders by product category
• Number of orders by brand
• Number of orders by payment type
• Top 20 purchased SKU’s across all orders
• Orders by day of the week
• Orders by month
• Top performing products by category

4.) Predictive analytics
Machine learning derived insights related to orders and geo signals.

• Predicted purchase frequency
• Predicted order value
• Predicted customer lifetime value over 3 years
• Net CLV based on actual margin
• Maximum ideal customer acquisition cost
• Maximum CAC with margin taken into account (Uses 1/3rd rule)
• Likely to return to the store soon (Tells you what percentage of users in an audience who are within 30% of the median time between store visits.)
• Likely to be in top 20% of spenders (Percentage of audience members that are in the top 20th percentile of customers based on order history)
• Predicted top X (Looks at current users purchases or cart history and predicts SKU pairings/ brands/ and categories a user will buy next.)

5.) Event analytics
Your custom tracking pushes and occurrences for each key/label

6.) Action analytics
Actions are engagements or “events” your destinations track on your audiences. Conversions are orders made by personas either online or in-store that can be linked to an action from a destination in the last 30 days. When attributing a conversion, we assign it to the last destination that there was an action generated for a persona.

7.) Member club

Member club stats give you exact breakdowns of:

• Total club members
• Optin requests + Pending
• Optins
• Optouts
• Rev % from members
• Club member avg. order value
• Avg. order value vs non-club members
• Total club members by day
• Total club members by store by day
• Club signups/ unsubscribes/ optin requests sent per day
• Club member orders by day

To get the latest updates on our suite of services, make sure to subscribe to our blog today!

With Alpine IQ and Cova you are able to seamlessly deploy loyalty/ club membership tracking and on-boarding across all order types and multi-store, multi-province/ state hubs. Order analytics and customer engagements can be mapped to Alpine IQ store names so that you have clean usable data that instantly works to trigger promotional SMS campaigns.

To connect Cova all you need to do is go to your Alpine IQ left navigation bar and click “Connect data” -> Select Cova from the list of sources -> enter your API credentials -> save”. We will then pull in historical orders + customer records and you can then map Cova store names to Alpine IQ names under your store settings page. Once that is complete, your analysis insights will update to consolidate users and de-dupe them from your other data sources.

The Cova integration also allows you to sync unknown contact fields from Alpine IQ personas back to Cova customer records on in-store tablets. This ensures that no matter where a user comes from into your network, they will be seamlessly available across all store hubs and Alpine IQ integrations. This is particularly useful when migrating club members from other vendors.

We continue to innovate alongside our partners and hope to offer even more advanced functionalities with Cova in the future.

To get the latest updates on our suite of services, make sure to subscribe to our blog today!