Drive Loyalty and Protect Exclusive Offers with AI-Powered Verification
Offering exclusive discounts to groups like the military, students, or healthcare workers is a tried-and-true way for brands to acquire new customers and earn longtime loyalty. Members of these communities feel recognized and appreciated by these discounts — and 71% report having greater loyalty to brands that offer them exclusive deals.
But in order to be successful, these offers need to be protected. Promotion abuse is now the most common type of consumer fraud, and businesses stand to lose up to 2.2% of their annual revenue to bad actors.
This is why verifying your customers’ eligibility for these exclusive offers is an essential step. In addition to preventing financial losses, verification makes sure that your offer is only available to those who truly deserve it — safeguarding their loyalty, trust in your brand, and your bottom line.
Brands can verify eligibility in a few different ways, but not all are created equal:
- Manual verification: Your in-house team reviews and approves eligibility through manual processes. While you directly manage all of your customer data, this approach takes a lot of time and is vulnerable to human error. Customers may be frustrated by longer wait times or inaccurate responses.
- Affiliate verification: Your brand relies on affiliate providers that typically require customers to create a separate account within their marketplace, including sharing sensitive, personally identifiable information (PII). Those extra steps add even more friction and interrupt the brand experience you’ve so thoughtfully strategized, leading to lower conversions and making customers vulnerable to a security breach. Affiliates also prevent your brand from having exclusive, real-time access to the valuable verification data your customers are sharing in order to access your exclusive offer.
- White-label verification: Your customers complete a verification process within your brand experience, such as a checkout flow or loyalty app. With this process, you deliver a seamless customer experience while ensuring accuracy and maintaining control of your customer data. This is what we provide with the SheerID Open Verification Platform — protecting your customers’ information, their experience, and your bottom line.
Digital, white-lable verification is highly effective, with our platform already preventing more than $4 billion in reward-code theft. But as bad actors adopt emerging technologies and try new methods of abusing discounts, ecommerce fraud never stops evolving. That’s why we continue investing in innovative ways to protect offers.
Using AI to Level Up Offer Protection
To deliver the highest possible level of protection without compromising on customer experience, SheerID provides the most advanced, multi-layered verification. That includes:
- AI-driven fraud detection: SheerID uses sophisticated AI models to detect bots and fake accounts, increasing our capacity to protect exclusive offers at scale while accelerating conversions for eligible customers.
And if a customer needs to provide additional documentation, our platform uses AI to instantly analyze submissions, detect any anomalies, and prevent altered or fraudulent documents from slipping through the system — strengthening our automated document review (ADR) accuracy.
- Risk assessment: The SheerID platform includes an AI-powered proprietary consumer risk scoring model that activates progressive fraud checks and analyzes digital context data — identifying consumers who are on a watchlist, flagging suspicious activity or behavior patterns, and mitigating against suspicious activity.
- Third-party fraud signals: SheerID reviews digital signals across third-party partners that can indicate fraud, such as numerous hits from an offshore IP address or unusual traffic patterns.
These capabilities are powerful, but every brand will have different thresholds of acceptable risk for different offers. SheerID’s approach is adaptive and can be configured to match risk tolerance and tailored to brand needs.
And since these adaptive offer protections are built on sophisticated machine learning models, the system constantly learns and improves. When the model identifies a new pattern of deceptive behavior, it incorporates that information moving forward, enhancing its ability to spot malicious actors or methods of falsifying documents.
Improving Customer Experiences and Offer ROI With Multi-Layer Protection
Advanced offer protection is a win-win for everyone — except fraudsters.
Brands see more conversions, higher campaign ROI, and greater engagement with their most valuable consumer communities. And members of those communities will be able to access their exclusive discounts faster, without cumbersome third-party accounts or manual processes.
For example, after switching from in-house authentication to SheerID’s white-label verification, leading brands see results like:
- 18x higher ROI for military offer compared to other programs at Princess Cruises
- 68% increase in student acquisition at YNAB
- 50%+ more conversions at Unity Technologies
At the same time, those valuable offers are protected from discount abuse and kept exclusive for eligible customers, building trust and loyalty over time.
Partnering with a trusted vendor that provides multi-layered, state-of-the-art verification protects your customers’ data and your offer, without compromising on customer experience. Learn more about offer protection with SheerID and how you can choose the level of protection your brand needs.