SheerID allows you to automatically update existing customer records within your CRM or marketing tech stack (account tagging). The article below discusses best practices for implementing an account linking flow.
Account tagging relies on webhooks and REST APIs to indicate in a verified customer's record that they have been granted access to your gated offer.
Additionally, you can require a customer to be signed in before making a purchase in order to ensure their customer record is known at the time of verification. This method is highly recommended by SheerID, and requires passing a unique consumer identifier (such as a customer's account ID) through to the offer landing page post-log in.
Best practices for account linking
It is recommended that visitors to your website or online store first be prompted to sign in to their account before being prompted to verify with SheerID. This will ensure a connection to a known customer record.
Below are recommended steps and tips for success with account tagging utilizing different offer and account management resources. Once you have implemented account tagging you can use this checklist to make sure you didn't miss anything: Account tagging implementation checklist.
Your store
- Create a simple offer landing page that uses enticing imagery and clearly describes your offer and the steps to get that offer.
- You want to set expectations for customers that they will need to verify themselves in order to access your offer.
- This page should be public and readily accessible.
- Point your offer marketing campaigns to that landing page URL.
- The call to action (CTA) should be to create an account in your store (or sign in to an existing account).
- Make sure that signed-in customers see the prompt to get verified for access to your offer.
- We recommend putting this prompt in the My Account page of your store and/or in a site banner.
- Make the prompt conditional: if the user is signed in and not already verified, then show the prompt to get verified. If they are signed in but have already been verified, do not show the prompt.
- When opening the SheerID verification form, pass in the unique customer identifier as
externalUserId.
- Make sure a SheerID-tagged customer can redeem the offer.
- This depends on your desired offer definition and the capabilities of your platform.
- You may choose to restrict certain products so that they're only visible or purchasable by customers with a particular tag on their customer record.
MySheerID
- Create a generic program for your target consumer audience.
- In the reward strategy section, select Account Tagging (note that you can also choose to offer a coupon code)
- Require a consumer ID: if you want to require a consumer to be logged in, hit +Add and toggle the feature to ON. You can also set the messaging a customer will see if they access the form without logging in. Note that you will need to pass your consumer's ID through to the SheerID form post-log in as a value for the key externalUserId. For more information, see our article on Passing a consumer's account ID.
- Set up webhooks: Click +Add to set the destination URL to which SheerID should post events.
- Add a failure webhook URL destination. This will tell you when a consumer attempted to verify but was unsuccessful in doing so. You may still want to add them to a marketing cohort or otherwise engage them as they have expressed interest in your offer.
Microservice
- Ask your developer to set up a webhook handler.
- This will listen for the real-time Success events from SheerID, securely pull the relevant PII and verification metadata, and correctly tag the correct customer record.
- You can optionally add additional verified data about the customer to their customer record.
Account tagging in Shopify store
The SheerID Shopify app does not support account tagging. Instead, we recommend tagging Shopify customers and orders using the Shopify Flow app.