If you're like us, you probably get excited about driving an increase in customer revenue and experimenting with your engagement strategies. Today, we’re excited to announce and highlight a key feature in Ansa’s Incentive Engine - expiring balances. Because experimentation shouldn't come at the cost of reward dollar efficiency, or cause pain for your accounting teams.

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Empowering Merchants

Expiring promotional balances offer merchants a powerful way to drive urgency for their customers - meaning more engagement at a better cost to the brand. They allow merchants to run more frequent, flexible marketing campaigns without worrying about overspending or dealing with the accounting headache of having promotional funds that sit as a liability on their balance sheet indefinitely. Expiring balances drive higher engagement by playing into consumer psychology, meaning that reward dollars have a higher impact on driving behavior.

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As of today, all of the campaign types in our Incentive Engine support the ability for promotional funds to expire. Setup is seamless for your marketing teams in our Portal, or you can run campaigns with our APIs. Our API platform also offers rich webhooks for you to build customer-facing experiences, and exportable analytics around the expiring balance events and their ROI.

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For example, your marketing team can now configure Ansa to give your loyal customers 2% cash back on all spend - that lasts for 6 months after earning. Your users then are incentivized to come back again within that 6 month time frame to spend again - and continue to earn more cash back, spinning the flywheel of repeat spend. You can send email, text, or push notifications to users using our webhooks to tell them of upcoming expiration - sending them friendly reminders to use their cashback before it expires!

With Ansa’s Incentive Engine, you can configure one time use promotional codes that give users an expiring balance.

Ansa’s platform also offers rich analytics to allow you to run experiments with different configurations of expiry, which lets you balance customer friendliness and a positive loyalty experience with efficient marketing spend and urgency.

Technical Spotlight

Shipping our expiring balances platform was a defining technical achievement for Ansa, as it presented challenging product and accounting edge cases. When building a closed loop wallet, maintaining a ledger where funds both should and shouldn’t expire requires finesse. If your customers add funds from debit card, credit card, bank rails, or if you are a marketplace and your sellers receive proceeds into a balance, your ledger must cleanly separate funds that expire and those that don’t. This also impacts payouts to a seller business – spent user funds count as revenue and should be paid out. On the flip side, promotional funds provided by the seller that were spent by the user should not be unless expired and “returned” to the seller. Our accounting integrations and financial reports all reflect these differences, including fund expiration. We dealt with the complexity and hours at whiteboards so your teams don't have to.

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Our product allows for different expiry schedules - from hours to months, or custom times after redemption. If a user has multiple sets of funds that have different expirations, a ledger needs to properly track and handle those promotional funds differently.

Our scalable notifications infrastructure emits webhooks for multiple expiration events - so merchants and API users can send notifications to their users to drive more urgency. For example, you can notify your users if their funds are about to expire in 48 hours, and show them in their account when the funds have expired.

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Since launching this feature, we’ve already seen great success in letting our merchants drive urgency for customer spend – increasing the ROI of campaigns up to 40% and empowering merchants to recoup unspent promotional funds for future use.

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Building a complex feature like expiring promotional balances, which impacts both user experience and accounting, in a scalable and compliant way is no small feat. While it may be tempting to build this functionality in-house, leveraging a proven, robust solution allows you to focus on your core product while ensuring accuracy and scalability from day one.

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We’re excited to continue to share features from our Incentive Engine as they go live! To get access to the Ansa platform or learn more about partnership opportunities, reach out to us at hello@ansa.dev.

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