Signage: Developer's Guide

Using Reward Web Signage, sometimes referred to as web widgets, your company can insert personalized content into your web pages. The customer-facing loyalty program website is the most obvious location for widgets, but you can embed them in almost any web page that follows a customer log-in. After a widget is inserted, it functions as a modular unit, like a spot advertisement, a standard design element, or a regularly occurring feature. Unlike other web elements, widgets can grab attention by displaying the customer's name or other customer-specific data pulled from the Loyalty database.

Widgets are commonly deployed to provide dynamically targeted links to current offers, clubs, and other loyalty program content. Widgets can also be used to record information about the customer.

To see more examples of what signage can do for you, take a quick tour of the signage samples in the Reward Backstage area. This area is made available only to Clients and invited guests, and requires a user name and password. After you have logged in, navigate to the Capabilities section for examples of signage.

Developing Signage

Marketers can contribute more directly to corporate websites, especially the page elements and features that serve a marketing purpose, by working with signage, also known as widgets. To make widgets available to marketers, however, IT professionals and web designers must help with the set-up.

Note: Marketers must engage their IT staff and website designers in the implementation of Reward signage. Marketers frequently "wade too deep" as they first start to work with signage. Widgets are very useful building blocks, but they must initially be integrated into a website with the cooperation and expertise of your company's IT professionals and web specialists.

After the basic implementation work is done, all parties experience a substantial improvement in efficiencies: IT expertise is no longer required for every update to a widget, marketers get a powerful tool for leveraging their loyalty program data, and web design staff get a personalization tool that improves the quality of the website. The structured work environment of CRMS brings the different talents together into the same loop. The benefits of using Reward widgets rather than custom-built applications become more compelling over time, with the growth of the Reward customer database.

Crucial Signage Requirement: Insert Current Customer Email Address in the Embed Tag

A basic requirement for implementing a personalized widget is the email address of the customer currently browsing the page. This data serves as the key to the customer's information in the Reward customer database. Different Clients pass the ID of the current user in different ways: using cookies, session variables, and so on.

As soon as you know you are using CRMS to develop signage (a widget) for a particular purpose, you should recruit your IT and Web design staff to set up the method for modifying one line in the client side Embed Tag, "isc_e = <Email Address of Customer>", such that the address of the customer currently browsing the page is inserted into the Embed Tag.

The methods used to insert the current customer data vary greatly from one client to another, so it is impossible for Reward to specify coding that supplies a "one size fits all" solution. However, if your site already includes a secure log-in, or maintains a customer's shopping cart, or captures the customer data required for electronic billing, it already relies on the use of this data, and your IT staff and web design staff have already developed some method for harvesting the customer address.