Altria Tier 4 Requirements & Setup Guide

Altria Tier 4 Requirements & Setup Guide

Introduction

This document outlines the basic overview of the Altria Tier 4 program and all of the requirements needed to proceed with Tier 4.

Requirements for Tier 4

The list below shows the basic breakdown of all the requirements. Any previous tier (1-3) are all required before you can facilitate the requirements for Tier 4. Below is an outline of each requirement grouped by the Tier it is introduced/

TIER 1

Submit Altria Scan Data
You must submit scan data to Altria on a weekly basis. Technically part of Tier 1, however its a requirement to unlock Tier 4

TIER 2

AVT Technology Support
You must support scanning of drivers licenses (AVT) at the register to age verify consumer sales. This is already built-in on the FasTrax side and most people using POS are already using this technology. 

Participation in Loyalty Fund Program
You are required to participate in one or more of the loyalty programs of each product category. This can be done by setting up respective loyalty discounts in the POS either manually or via the Price Promotion API.

TIER 3

Display Loyalty Fund Offers in Loyalty App
You must have a PWA or mobile app and display the Altria Tobacco Operating Companies (ATOC) offers within the app. This can be configured in the "Discounts" section of the POS. More details below on how this works.

Send 3+ Emails to Age Verified Consumers
You are required to send at least 3 emails to age verified consumers as well as track the activity of the campaigns in the activity log. More details will be provided below.

TIER 4

Participate in Personalization+ Program With Digital Communications
Personalization+ is an offer delivery program based on LIDs (Loyalty IDs) and their purchase history submitted through scan data. Offers are awarded to consumers automatically when Altria has an offer available for the LID and the basket aligns with the offer. For example a purchase of Marlboro will fire a promotional discount when Personalization+ returns a Marlboro offer for the specific product being purchased.

Digital Communications are automatically delivered via FasTrax without any additional work. We take care of submitting the activity log and the images in the actual promotions sent out.

Ability to Segment Offers by LID, State, Zip and Purchase History
You need to be able to offer segmented promotions to consumers by various factors. Your Altria representatives will provide clarity on the types of offers you will run, aligning with the best outcome. You are awarded a specific budget of dollars to spend each quarter and you will need to turn this into a specialized offer.

This is all supported by the FasTrax ecosystem through a few options, System Discounts, Loyalty Post-Sale Rewards (Campaigns), Digital Coupons. The two most common are Discounts and Coupons however. More details below will be laid out explaining how this works. See the section Digital Accelerator Funds.

Breakdown of Features and Requirements

In the below section, we will go over the technical details of each of the components starting off at Tier 3+. Any of the other requirements (Below Tier 3) can be found in the KB or discussed with our FTX Support team.

The requirements for Tier 3 are as follows:

Tier 3 - Display Loyalty Fund Offers in Loyalty App

To set up loyalty fund offers in the app, you may essentially modify your existing loyalty-fund discounts and add details to allow it to show on the web. To view how basic discount setup works, please visit this guide here.

Once the core discount is configured and the Require Loyalty flag is enabled, you should see a tab called Online Details. 


The most important fields are as follows:

Online Title (required)
Used to display a friendly name to the user for the promotion. Name this according to your offer

Online Description (required)
Used to display a brief description to the user about the promotion. Details should be brief and informative, supplementing the details in your title.

Online Category (optional)
You can assign an organizational category, which must be configured before going into the discount. You can find this in the top menu of the Discounts/Buydowns section, under Online Discount Categories. If you choose to use this, select an option from the dropdown once its made.

Advertisement ID (required)
This field is used to match the images Altria provides in the activity log. Any asset we show to the user must use the file name of the asset (ie., TF043PMUSAApp22026.png) for the promotion Advertisement ID. Basically copy the file name without the extension to use in this field.

Age Restricted Offers (required for Altria)
This field puts the promotion into the 21+ Offers section of the Deals page. Enable this for any Altria promotion. You can optionally upload non-age-restricted promotions like Pepsi on your deals page, if not being used for an Altria promotion.

Require Click to Card (optional - only applicable for Dynamic Customers (see DAF section below for details))
This field allows the discount to fire at the register only once the deal has been clicked and acknowledged (Click to Card) on the app. This only works currently when the customer type is set to Dynamic. You do not need this for any of the base Loyalty Fund offers.

Online Image (required)
This field is the actual JPG or PNG for the Altria Assets. The size must be 300px wide and 250px tall. When requesting assets from the Altria portal, make sure to download this image size. 

Viewable Metrics for Loyalty Fund

You can also view the current stats of how many views and clicks the discount has had, as well as the number of unique customers who've seen the deal online. This is useful information to see traffic, but also these same numbers should be sent into the activity log as well. The numbers below show as a lifetime figure, and the activity log is a per-month report, so the numbers should match lifetime but not necessarily for the current month.

Tier 3 - Send 3+ Emails to Age Verified Consumers

For this requirement, Altria requires you to send no less than 3 of the 4 offered promotions to customers via email. This means one of the following companies PM/USA, one Helix, USSTC and JMC, etc. 

The promotions themselves should comprise of the advertisements from the AGDC portal. Typically recommended sizes to use 600px width, 600px tall. For basic information about configuring Email Campaigns, please visit the link here.

Once you have the template selected and the advertisement in place, visit the tab Altria Options and make sure you've configured this section.

The most important fields are as follows:

Promotion Period (required)
Used to designate the quarter or promotion period the email is part of. For example you'd create or use a promotion period Q1 2026, from 01/01/2026 - 03/31/2026 to associate the email campaign with for any Q1 2026 promotions being sent.

AGDC Ad ID (required)
This would be the ad ID of the image you've selected from the AGDC asset portal (600x600). Use the image name without the extension as shown in bold: (ie., RV907PMUSAEmailLoyalty12025.png). 

AGDC Product Types (required)
This field is used to designate the categories to send the email to. These categories correlate to the global LNS settings, where you can select a department to associate with each of the respective categories. Every night jobs run in the background to map the customers to whomever has purchased from those departments selected, or they've picked an Altria survey option in the EAIV screen. The customers that are used in the email are then filtered by anyone who's matched other criteria, and also those who have been mapped to these lists. The list will also be only age verified members as well with this option.

This field simply controls the sending to a filtered list based on who's had those interests or has bought from those departments. You can also use the Customer Product Mapping rules with a similar effect to narrow down the list to those who've purchased a specific set of SKUs.

Once you've configured and set up all of these parameters, simply schedule the email to send, and it will trigger when you've selected and then results should appear in the activity log metrics sent to Altria. To make sure you've got the activity log configured correctly, make sure in the LNS Settings page that you've assigned an email address and also an FTP/SFTP connection. Click here for more details.

Once all the Tier 3 requirements are met, the requirements for Tier 4 are as follows:

Tier 4 - Participate in Personalization+ Program With Digital Communications

For Personalization+, the first thing to understand is how this program works. The program involves getting personalized discounts from Altria direct to the consumer. FasTrax facilitates this by using the LID (ID of the consumer) and the RCN (store) the offer is being checked at.

POS Interaction

Each night, FasTrax synchronizes promotions into a Master Offer List system. At the POS, when a loyalty customer is searched, we also query a list of available offers immediately after to Altria. That system then returns a list of valid offers, if the customer is age verified or has been 3+ transaction AVT verified, or has at least 10+ tobacco related transactions. 

Once the POS has an offer list, we evaluate the current basket and process any promotional discounts. The discounts automatically fire and take off the sale. It shows as:
*** Altria Offers*** at the bottom of the receipt, with each of the discounts we've taken off.

That is the basic part of the POS side of the program. The second half of the system is notifications and visibility in the LNS app. The app itself shows offers to any eligible customer on the Deals page. If offers are visible it means that the following is true.
  1. The customer is age verified (EAIV, or 3 AVT Transactions or 10+ Tobacco Transactions)
  2. The customer has an offer available through AGDC at this moment in time

Notifications

Also, FasTrax sends offer notifications to customers. We send these automatically as offers are changed throughout the app. Whenever the system checks the Altria API at the POS, we load any newly found offers into a deliverable list. If the offer is redeemed, we flag it as already processed. Once a redemption takes place and we post this information back to Altria, we get a potential new list of available offers and we load these into the system. All of this happens without any manual effort on the merchant. 

The 3 types of notifications which send out are:
  1. New Offers - We send an offer notification out letting the consumer know there is a new offer available for them
  2. Expiring Offers - When an offer is about to expire (ie., 5 days away), we let them know they have an unredeemed offer they should try to redeem
  3. Missed Offers - When an offer is not claimed in a transaction, we let them know about the opportunity they missed which they can take advantage of the next day
The only pieces the merchant will need to focus on is ensuring the following is configured correctly.
  1. Make sure for each RCN in Altria that you've specified the associated Store # from FasTrax
  2. Make sure every location inside of FasTrax has the RCN number filled out in the field Altria RCN

Personalization+ Reporting

There are reports available for this, under 
Loyalty -> Reports -> Customer Reports -> Personalization Plus

This report can be used to view per-transaction granularity or summarized information by store or by offer.

Tier 4 - Digital Accelerator Funds - Ability to Segment Offers by LID, State, Zip and Purchase History

The last and final component of Tier 4 has to do with being able to offer discounts and promotions to specific sets of customers. We have support for managing segmentation by product, and we offer options to combine that with filtering by state or ZIP codes or store locations.

Managing Product Segmentation

To set up and manage segmentation by product, navigate to:

Loyalty -> Customer -> Customer Product Map Rules

This module allows you to create mappings of customers <-> products they've purchased. This allows you to target a specific list of customers in different categories and re-use the same list across various modules (Discounts, Campaigns, Emails, Digital Coupons). These are used to filter the eligible list of customers down further, on top of any existing filter you've used like gender or city/state/zip codes. 

To create the rule mapping, open a new record and assign a friendly name and description. Then choose your product filters. You can filter by Product, Department, Category, Manufacturer or Brand. Once you've added all your filters, proceed to the other fields.

If you want the rule to process only customers who have purchased in the last X weeks or days, enable the field Enable Frequent Shopping Rule and use the field Within Timeframe to control this by choosing an option from the dropdown. This will still map all customers to the list regardless of their last purchase timestamp, but it will store the last purchase timestamp as well, which allows us to filter down to customers who have a date range matching the selected option. Changing this field does not mean the list needs to regenerate, as the date works off the saved dates in the mapping and simply changes the filter when its applied.



Once the rule is created, the system will begin processing since the beginning of time for your data and it will begin mapping all previous transactions to find customers who map. It is recommended to wait at least a day or so before proceeding to make use of this list in any segmentation filters. This will give the rule ample time to catch up and begin processing recent dates. 

Now that this rule is generated, you can make use of it on any module which supports filtering this.

Digital Accelerator Funds (DAF)

The main goal of the segmentation feature is to offer Altria based discounts to specific segments of customers to re-invest money earned by the retailer and put that money back into the business by method of discounting or offering rewards on products. Altria will give retailers a specific budget to spend and specific types of offers they recommend running and will consult the retailer on these plans to come up with the final offer to be run in stores.

This comprises of a few options, but is not limited to:

Core Scenarios
  1. Running a system discount to give a specialized offer to customers who've bought either related products from the manufacturer, or competitor products
  2. Coupons essentially giving a discount to the transaction, to similar customers who've bought related products and/or competitor products
Other Less Common Scenarios
  1. Post sale rewards (Loyalty Points) given to specific customers
  2. Raffle/Sweepstakes campaign style offers awarded to specific customers

Creating Discount for DAF

There are 2 areas for discounts where you need to customize to segment the products and regions. By default discounts would only apply for customers who have shopped in the assigned stores of the promotion, but you can optionally control the states and ZIP codes in the Customers tab of the discount. Also, there is a field for Manage Customers Dynamically. By turning this on, you can now pick one of your Product Map Rules to segment this discount. 

Once added, the POS should reach out to the back office (ControlCenter) and check if the customer is in the list when their loyalty is loaded in the register. If the customer is valid and matches by state/zip and map rule, they will return back a valid response and the POS will proceed to apply the discounts as long as the other criteria of the discount is met and their basket matches.
Optionally, you can also go to the Online Details tab and select the Require Click to Card option, which allows the customer to see a button to add it to their card, and acknowledge the discount. If the discount is forced to be a click to card and the customer did not acknowledge it, the result the register receives when checking validity will make the discount not fire.


To control the allowance of a discount, you can use the fields Overall Limit and optionally control the customer's individual limits as seen below. If you get $2,500 of an allowance from Altria, and your value of the discount is 0.25c per item, then your limit would be defined as 10,000.  This means that after 10,000 discounts (per qty) have been awarded, you will have hit your limit for the deal of $2,500. The amount would be variable based on the type of offer being ran, so make sure to run the calculation for what your limits need to be before configuring this.



This completes the basic setup of a DAF in the System Discounts module.

Creating Digital Coupon for DAF

We have a module for custom coupons, which allows us to make a coupon which can either be redeemed by simply having the code, or by requiring that the customer adds one into their account before it can be redeemed. Coupons which require a user to load to their account are often referred to as "Click to Card" or "CTC".

To create a custom coupon, navigate to:

Loyalty -> Customer -> Custom Coupons

The basic coupon configuration options can be viewed by clicking the link here.

The options where DAF funds come into play are two specific areas, described below:
  1. Coupon Allowances and Limits
  2. Product Segmentation for Visibility

Coupon Allowances

To set up the allowances, you have similar options as we saw in Discounts, but slightly different.

The fields below are described as follows:

Total # of available coupons
This is the limit of coupons you have in total. If your value of each coupon is 1.00 off, and you have $1,000 to spend from Altria, then you'd set this value to 1,000 to cap the number of coupons that can be added. Leaving this at 0 will disable the limit.

Per Day / Per Week
These fields are used to control how many coupons a customer can load into their account on a daily or weekly basis. Typically we see both of these set to 1, but this can be discussed with your representative on how you want this to distribute. Leaving these at 0 will disable the limit.

Overall
This is the total number of coupons an individual customer can obtain. Set this to a small number. Leaving this at 0 will disable the limit.

Coupon Segmentation

To control the visibility of the coupon, you can use the Product Mapping Rule and combine it with state filtering to make it appear to only those in either of those lists. Those who have the address with a state matching one in this list, or those who have been mapped to the list of product mapping users.

This is the core component of the segmentation, the rest of the coupon details should be set up to match the offer, including expiration settings of what you've discussed with your Altria representative. 

Notifications for DAF

Using the email campaign system, your representative may request that you notify customers about the new offers. Typical best practices would be to make sure that for every type of promotion being ran inside DAF, one or more notifications should go out.

To achieve this, configure email campaigns to either combine multiple offers as best suited for your customer base, or split notifications out by region or even further down. The less work needed, the better. Most people typically send one notification out with every available offer, or they send a notification per state or region with the offers available in those regions.

To learn more on configuring email campaigns, please click here. 

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