What's up, Braze friends!
Like many restaurant brands, we use a welcome reward (in our case as a coffee company, we offer a free drink) to encourage new customers to join our loyalty program. Unfortunately, we also learned that a strong acquisition offer can quickly become a target for fraud.
Our previous onboarding experience did not include enough verification, making it possible for individuals to create multiple accounts and repeatedly claim free products. Beyond the financial impact, the abuse was also beginning to affect franchisee trust in the loyalty program.
When we launched our new loyalty program, we wanted to continue offering a compelling welcome incentive, but only to legitimate new members.
Rather than waiting for a large custom dev project (which we didn't have budget for), we (marketing) built a fraud-prevention canvas using the tools we already had: Braze, Talon.One (our offer management/loyalty platform), our CDP, and an external phone-validation service (Twilio).
How the journey works
When a new customer creates an account, Braze immediately orchestrates several eligibility checks before the reward can be claimed.
The journey checks whether:
-The email address is associated with a known burner domain.
-The phone number has already received a welcome reward.
-The device has previously been connected to a rewarded account.
-The submitted phone number is valid and is not a VOIP number.
Braze Catalogs are used to maintain lists of burner email domains (you can download the list from github), previously rewarded phone numbers, and previously rewarded devices. An API call validates the submitted phone number to Twilio, to make sure it's not a VOIP/easy to create phone number, while Braze Canvas manages the customer journey, verification steps, and real-time messaging:
Eligible customers are prompted to verify their phone number through SMS:
If a customer has already used that phone number to claim, we'll give them a chance to update their number:
The phone number is then ran thru Twilio to make sure it's not an internet based (VOIP) number and legit.
Once verification is complete, Talon.One issues the one-time reward. Customers then receive confirmation through in-app messaging, SMS, and email:
Customers who fail an eligibility check receive intentionally general messaging so that the specific fraud rules are not exposed.
The best part: marketers built it 🤙
Since launching in May of last year, the program has:
-Blocked more than 20,000 fraudulent accounts (and counting daily!)
-Prevented nearly $500,000 in estimated product loss.
-Helped rebuild confidence in the loyalty program among our franchisees.
The biggest lesson for me was that Braze does not have to be limited to messaging. With the right orchestration, data, and connected technology, it can become the operational layer behind a much larger business solution.
