The Customer portal announcement displays announcements to your customers when they are logged into the Affinity customer portal. Use this feature to highlight discounts, customer order streaks, or to announce new products or specials.

This guide explains how to set up this feature in your store, things to consider when using this feature, and a list of use cases to highlight different ways to use Customer portal announcements.

Before you start

• The Customer portal announcement feature is available to stores with the Retain package enabled. 

Overview

Motivate customers logged in to their customer portal with announcements that:

• Showcase their progress toward rewards
• Highlight new products with learn more links
• Announce upcoming discounts

The Customer portal announcement feature allows you to build creative announcements that keep you in touch with your customers when they are logged into their customer portals. These experiences can:

• Show timely announcements based on customers’ actions, such as reaching a specific order streak, or a specific spend amount
• Target customers based on their behaviors and actions, ensuring any communication with customers feels tailored to their journey
• Reflect your brand’s identity through customizations

How it works

Recharge provides a prebuilt template that you can quickly activate. It triggers when a customer loads their customer portal, and the announcement shows up in the portal, alerting customers of their upcoming rewards.

This template uses conditional branches to provide different experiences to customers depending on their streak count. By default, this template triggers when customers hit streak counts of 1, 2, and 3. You can add or adjust the conditional branches to set different conditions that trigger the announcement in the customer portal. See Optional—Add or update conditions for more details.

While Recharge offers a pre-built template, you can completely customize the experience and:

• Specify when customers see an announcement in the customer portal
• Set conditions to determine what customers can see
• Customize the announcement message

Use cases

Review the following use cases to understand how you can use Customer portal announcements in to communicate with your customers:

Step 1 - Create the experience

Create the experience in the Recharge merchant portal:

1. Click Retain in the merchant portal and select Rewards from the dropdown.
2. Click Create from template and select Show rewards punch card.
3. Click Get started! to access the template.

Step 2 - Review the default experience

Recharge provides a pre-built experience to get you started. You can keep the experience as is, and customize the announcement experience for your customers, or add/adjust the conditional branches to customize the experience.

Trigger node

The experience is set to trigger after the customer portal loads for a customer. You cannot adjust the trigger for this experience.

Conditional branch node

Use the conditional branch node to create multiple branches, allowing you to display different announcements to customers depending on the configured conditions. This template is configured by default to have three different branches that use the customer’s streak order number.

For example, if a customer is on streak order 1, you could display a punch card that says only two orders away from 50% off the entire order. If the customer is on streak order 3, you could show an announcement letting the customer know they’re receiving 50% off their upcoming order.

See Optional - Add or update conditions for instructions on changing the conditions used in the prebuilt template.

Announcement node

The announcement node displays an announcement to customers directly in the Affinity customer portal. This template is set to show customers announcements when they hit their first, second, and third streak order milestones.

While Recharge provides a basic announcement template, you are highly encouraged to update the announcement to better match your brand’s tone and identity. See Step 3 - Update the Announcement node for set-up instructions.

Step 3 - Update the Announcement node

The Announcement node displays the announcement to customers directly in their customer portal. Each announcement node associated with a conditions branch is a different customer experience. Make sure to update all three nodes to reflect your brand’s identity.

Click on the announcement node to start making changes:

1. Choose one of the following methods to configure the announcement node:
   • Text and image: Customize the text and image of the announcement and an additional button.
   • Custom: Customize the announcement with HTML and CSS markup
2. Click Customize announcement to open the announcement site builder.

The announcement site builder is what customers see when they interact with your announcement in the customer portal. What you can update on the builder depends on whether you use the Text and Image method to display your announcement, or if you use HTML or CSS to customize the announcement.

Text and Image

If you are adding text and an image to your announcement, you can also add or customize the following elements on the announcement site builder:

• Set the heading and adjust the heading size
• Add text and align the text
• Upload an image and provide alt text
• Adjust the image width and position for desktop
• Add a button, style it, and include a button link

Custom

If you customize the announcement using custom HTML or CSS, you can add your customizations to the HTML/CSS Content box. Update the announcement node for all branches included on the flow canvas to match your branding.

Example

This example demonstrates how to display a punch card to show customers their progress toward earning their next free gift or reward.

Use the following code as a starting point to tailor your announcement when using the Custom option.

<h2>You're just five orders away from a free gift!🥳</h2>
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="700" height="100" viewBox="0 0 700 100">

<circle cx="50" cy="50" r="40" fill="#435161" />
<polygon
points="50,27 55,42 70,42 58,52 63,67 50,59 37,67 42,52 30,42 45,42"
fill="white"
/>
<circle cx="150" cy="50" r="40" fill="#909EAE" />
<polygon
points="150,27 155,42 170,42 158,52 163,67 150,59 137,67 142,52 130,42 145,42"
fill="white"
/>
<circle cx="250" cy="50" r="40" fill="#909EAE" />
<polygon
points="250,27 255,42 270,42 258,52 263,67 250,59 237,67 242,52 230,42 245,42"
fill="white"
/>
<circle cx="350" cy="50" r="40" fill="#909EAE" />
<polygon
points="350,27 355,42 370,42 358,52 363,67 350,59 337,67 342,52 330,42 345,42"
fill="white"
/>
<circle cx="450" cy="50" r="40" fill="#909EAE" />
<polygon
points="450,27 455,42 470,42 458,52 463,67 450,59 437,67 442,52 430,42 445,42"
fill="white"
/>
<circle cx="550" cy="50" r="40" fill="#274AB3" />
<rect x="530" y="41" width="40" height="25" fill="white" />
<line x1="550" y1="41" x2="550" y2="66" stroke="#274AB3" stroke-width="2" />
<line x1="530" y1="53" x2="570" y2="53" stroke="#274AB3" stroke-width="2" />
<path d="M550 41 C535 36, 535 31, 545 31" fill="white" />
<path d="M550 41 C565 36, 565 31, 555 31" fill="white" />
</svg>

Customize the code to fit your use case: 

• Update the You're just five orders away from a free gift! line to your preferred verbiage.
• Update the colors of your punch card by adding your preferred color code and replace the default color. For example, you can update fill="#435161” to fill="#964B00”. This will update the color of the first circle icon from dark grey to brown.
• Update any instance of fill="white" to change the color inside the icon.

Optional - Copy and paste the Announcement node

To make it easier for you to implement the same strategies on different branches, you can apply the following actions to the Announcement node:

• Copy this node’s configuration: Copy the node’s setup completely
• Apply this node’s configuration to all nodes of this type: Apply the node configuration to all other announcement nodes in the template
• Paste copied node configuration: Paste the copied node configuration from one announcement node to another on the template

Click on the vertical dot menu to access the actions and easily update the punch card template to best suit your business needs.

Optional - Add or update conditions

By default, the preconfigured announcement template is set to show customers announcements based on their order streak. Customers see an announcement in the customer portal if they’ve completed their first, second, and third consecutive orders.

You can change these conditional branches depending on your business needs. For example, you could keep the three original branches and add additional branches for when a customer reaches their fourth and fifth consecutive orders.

Alternatively, you could delete the preconfigured conditional branches, and add your own. You could set up conditional branches based on the customer’s total spend amount, or if they’ve purchased a specific product.

Adding additional conditional branches to the experience does not automatically ensure an announcement appears for customers who match that condition. Instead, you must drag the announcement node onto the flow canvas and configure the announcement for that conditional branch.

Optional - Build your other Reward experiences

Use the announcement node to communicate announcements, savings, or free gifts with customers. While the announcement lets customers know what to expect, it does not automatically apply the rewards to a customer’s next order. You must configure additional Rewards experiences to match your announcement node.

For example, if customers are notified that they will receive a free gift on their upcoming order when they hit streak order number three, you must create a Reward experience that applies a free gift to a customer’s order after Recharge successfully processes the customer’s third consecutive order.

Review the following articles for instructions on configuring a Rewards experience:

• A/B test a new reward: Test out free gifts or other rewards to see what experiences are the most impactful.
• Issuing credits as a reward: Apply a credit amount to a customer’s account

Step 4 - Save and activate the experience

Save the experience and activate it to go live when ready:

1. Click Save in the top right corner to save the experience.
2. Click Activate Flow when you’re ready to go live with the experience.

Displaying customer portal announcements on other pages

Recharge displays the customer portal announcement to customers immediately when they login to their customer portal. By default, the customer portal announcement is not shown on other pages in the customer portal.

You can use the conditional branch node and custom landing pages/onsite experiences to display different messages to customers that match your customer portal announcement.

For example, with a Cancellation Prevention experience, you can show customers different messages on the cancellation survey page depending on their streak number. Highlight their customer status, upcoming free gifts, or credit balances to reduce the risk of customer churn.

Example of Announcement node in Customer portal	Example of Callout block in Cancellation prevention

When building the onsite experience for each streak, use the different sections to highlight key announcements, including:

• Callout: Highlight important announcements to customers, such as how many orders they have left until they receive an incentive, or reach the next level of customer tiers.
• Custom HTML: Add custom HTML to creatively announce important updates to customers, such as what benefits they’d lose if they cancel their subscription.
• Free gift reminder: Let customers know they have a free gift with their next order, incentivizing them to remain subscribed.
• Credits balance: Let customers know they have a credit balance that can be applied to their next order, incentivizing them to remain subscribed.
• Text and image: Display images, such as a punchcard or a product, to visually remind customers about your brand and what they’d lose by cancelling.

Considerations

Consider the following when building announcements in the customer portal: