Reward customer actions with multiple sweepstakes entries

The following tutorial explains how you can use the Contest lite module, Workflows, and API endpoints to reward specific customer actions by giving them an increased chance to win great prizes on sweepstakes running in the loyalty program.

1. Configure the sweepstakes contest

First of all, it is necessary to set up a new contest that provides the mechanisms to keep count of customer entries and to select the winner when the contest is closed. A new contest can be created in the UI by clicking on ‘Create new contest’, under the Contest lite module.

If you haven’t used Contest lite yet, contact the Antavo Service Desk to enable the module for you, and read the user manual for detailed information on how it works.

Using the editor interface you can configure both the game mechanics and design-related settings. The configured settings are available through the dedicated endpoint of the Display API. Use the information to promote the sweepstakes on the membership site. Please note, that the contest is only returned by the endpoint if it has been activated, no configured restriction applies to the specific customer and the current date is between the start and end (or if set, the ‘display until’) date.

This tutorial describes a mechanism that encourages customers to earn multiple entries in order to increase their chances to win. Therefore, you need to select a winner selection mechanism that takes the number of entries into account, the ‘Randomly from all customers’ option is not suitable in this case.

2. Implement API event trigger

Depending on the type of activity you would like to reward with contest entries, you need to make sure that it is tracked and properly registered with the necessary payload on the customers' event histories. On the condition that the event is already implemented and used in the loyalty program, then you can skip this step.
Else, you might want to employ one of the following solutions:

You define a new event in the Customer events module and use
- the Events API to register it through API calls, or
- already implemented events to trigger the new event through a workflow with a ‘Trigger event’ node.
Introduce a new module that has a built-in tracking mechanism (eg. Social share, Gamified profiling).

3. Configure the workflow

Once you have the trigger event, you can set up the workflow to assign contest entries to customers through the Workflow Management tool. If you’re not familiar with workflows just yet, learn more about them here.

As sweepstakes are time-limited benefits by definition, you need to create a Campaign type of workflow, that enables setting a start and end date in the Event trigger node.

Use Event or Customer attribute filters to restrict the workflow to a specific type of event or customer.
For example, if you want to reward purchases over $100 with 2 entries and over $200 with 5 entries, then two Event attribute filters should be connected to the action (lower) branch of the Event trigger, targeting the Total property of the trigger Checkout event.

Connect the ‘Participate in contest’ node(s) to the Event trigger directly in case no restrictions apply or to the filters inserted. Set the ‘Give this contest for free' option to ‘Yes’ so that no points will be deducted from the customer’s point balance even if you set the 'Points' setting of the contest to a non-zero value.

Use the ‘Number of entries’ field to configure the multiple sweepstakes entry boost. You can assign up to 20 entries per customer in each node.

4. Test the sweepstakes contest

Before you start testing, make sure your contest and workflow have been activated in your test environment.

Fire the API event that is rewarded with contest entries and check the test customer’s Event history and Workflow log tabs of their profile. If everything has been set up properly, you should find newly registered Promotion enter events on the Events history.

The new entry under the Workflow log will inform you about how the trigger event has been processed and evaluated by the workflow.

Especially if you have a branching logic with more filters included in the workflow, we suggest executing multiple test cases with various customers and events, some of them that meet the attribute conditions to earn entries, and some of them that do not. If you can see the correct number of entries triggered and success labels on the applicable nodes, it means that your configuration brings the expected results.