Best practices for reverification

What is reverification?

Reverification is the process of reconfirming someone's status and eligibility for your gated offer.

Subscription brands or brands with loyalty programs that have discounts, particularly for student discounts, can benefit from reverification to:

• Prevent offer abuse: Periodically reverifying a consumer's status prevents those who are no longer eligible for your deals from taking advantage of your exclusive discounts. For example, students who have graduated would no longer eligible for offers targeting the Students consumer community.
• Upsell customers: Reverification allows you to identify customers that can be transitioned to full-priced options.
• Maintain discount exclusivity and brand reputation: By reverifying consumers, you can ensure that only eligible customers are receiving discounts to maintain the exclusivity and reputation of your offer.

There are some brands for which reverification may not be a good fit. For example, if you are seeing strong consumer lifetime value with your discount in place and you don’t want to risk churn from customers by reminding them about your subscription, reverification should not be pursued.

Best practices for reverifying customers

Below are some of the recommended best practices when reverifying your customers. By following these recommendations, you can ensure that your gated offer remains effective in driving customer loyalty and differentiation.

If you have any questions about the below or would like to discuss your reverification plans further, please reach out to your SheerID Customer Success Manager.

Clearly communicate the eligibility requirements for your gated offer

Make sure that consumers understand the qualifications needed to take advantage of the offer through SheerID, and ensure that the requirements are clearly stated in any marketing materials or terms and conditions.

Perform reverification yearly for all consumer communities*

Reverifying yearly will ensure that your customers continue to meet the eligibility criteria for your gated offer. This will help to maintain the integrity of the program and ensure that only eligible individuals are receiving the benefits.

*Military veterans are an exception to this recommendation, as their status is not generally expected to change with time.

Adding metadata allows you to isolate which users are being reverified

In order to track when users have been reverified within SheerID reporting, you will need to add metadata to reverification requests so that they can be isolated in the downloadable reports for more discrete analysis. We recommend using the consumer’s previousVerificationId as this metadata value. This will give you not only the ability to know when/which users are being reverified, but will also give you visibility into that consumer’s entire verification history.

Make the reverification process easy and convenient for consumers

Send customers automated emails and/or in-app messages with a link to your reverification program form when it's time for them to reverify. This can be accomplished using the following steps:

1. Set an expiration date for a consumer audience’s eligibility (e.g., set Student flags to expire in your CRM/CDP after 12 months)
2. Set up a trigger to automatically notify customers 2-3 times before the expiration date with a link to the reverification form.
   
   • It's recommended that brands send out these notifications with enough time in advance, ideally at least a month prior to the expiration date, to give customers sufficient time to verify their eligibility and avoid any disruption in their access to products or services.
3. For those that fill out the form and are still eligible, they will continue to receive the offer. For those not eligible, you can go through the process of removing their discount and transitioning them to full price.
   
4. If a customer does not complete the reverification process within a specified timeframe (e.g., 1 month after their offer expires), you should set up another trigger to remove their discount and transition them to full price.

Offer incentives for reverification

This can help encourage participation and make the process more appealing to customers.

A simple incentive might include providing $10 off their next purchase to customers who complete reverification successfully within the specified timeframe.