Protecting Your Promotions: Using Identity Verification to Secure Your Bottom Line

In today’s digital age, fraud poses a substantial threat for all brands offering high-value promotional offers. Advanced fraudulent activities on promotions, including identity scams, are becoming increasingly common. In fact, promotion fraud represented 1.2% of US retail revenue totaling $89 billion in 2021, according to a survey from Ekata, and it is currently ranked as the fastest-growing ecommerce threat. 

While there are many types of consumer verification methods at your disposal to secure your promotions, one of the most ironclad ways to protect against fraudsters is robust identity verification. 

Let’s explore how you can use SheerID’s customizable identity verification approach to protect your brand from fraud. Depending on your brand’s goals, SheerID can optimize your promotions for fraud protection, adding additional identity checks, or reduce friction in the verification process to optimize for conversions.

Protecting Your Promotions With Identity Verification

Promotions are designed to be special. If you are rewarding a group with a discount—for example, offering 20% off your products and services to students—you want to ensure that only eligible students get that offer. 

An excellent way to start protecting your exclusive offers is to gate them with a verification service. For instance, SheerID enables brands to create offers for specific communities like students, teachers, and the military, and then verifies if consumers are actually community members by checking their data against authoritative data sources, like school registrars.

To get access to a brand’s promotion, consumers are asked to input basic information about themselves, such as their name and birth date, and then SheerID will check if that information matches authoritative data sources. If there is a match, SheerID will allow the consumer to take advantage of the promotion. If there is not a match, the consumer will not be able to access the promotion, and the brand is protected from fraud. 

Gating community offers with SheerID’s authoritative data sources is extremely effective in reducing promotional fraud. For additional protection on gated offers, SheerID can review digital signals on verification requests to check for fraud. With the help of expert third-party fraud protection vendors, SheerID can check factors, such as IP address, to better assess if the verification request is authentic. For example, if a request comes in that says the consumer is a student at Yale, but the IP address is in Belarus, it would be marked as suspicious, and the consumer may be prompted to upload additional proof that they are enrolled at Yale. 

For customers that are extremely fraud-averse and want the ultimate protection from bad actors, SheerID can also enable additional identity verification checks to fully ensure that consumers are who they say they are. To do this, brands can opt to add government ID checks and liveliness face scans, a biometric check, to their offers. This will ensure the consumer has a valid ID that matches the name on their verification submission and their face matches the picture on their ID. 

How Identity Verification Works with Promotions

Using SheerID, it is easy to add multiple identity verification checks to your promotions. Here’s what the verification experience would look like with additional identity checks:

Customizing your Verification Process

Not all brands will want to require their customers to go through an entire ID and biometric check to get access to a promotion. However, if your offer is incredibly valuable—for example, if you have 30% off a $3,000 product for first-responders—additional identity checks are great options to ensure that only eligible consumers redeem your offers. 

One of the main benefits of SheerID is that it enables you to customize your consumer verification process. You can optimize it for conversions so customers have to enter only basic information about themselves, you can opt to further protect your offers with an ID check and limit the number of times someone can verify, or you can make it ironclad with a biometric liveness check. SheerID works with you to understand your unique promotion risks and verification needs to craft a program that is perfect for your brand. 

Learn more about SheerID for Fraud Protection.