How to Build Loyalty Programs in commercetools?

If you’re running an ecommerce business, you probably heard all about the benefits of loyalty programs. Unfortunately, while costs are growing in every area, the CAC is no exception. That’s why it’s high time to think not only about getting new customers but also about finding a way to keep the existing ones as close as possible.

Although commercetools is a complete solution for ecommerce, adding advanced loyalty and referral functionalities requires a third party. Voucherify is the fastest way to implement a loyalty program into commercetools.

‍Read along to learn:

• Why is connecting Voucherify with commercetools is worth the hassle?
• What can you achieve with the Voucherify loyalty plugin for commercetools?
• How to set up the integration and launch loyalty programs in commercetools?

Why integrate Voucherify into your commercetools store?

While commercetools is the leading composable commerce engine, its extensive feature set may not check all the boxes when it comes to promotions, loyalty, and referrals. Luckily, commercetools offers a robust API Extensions functionality to empower development teams to enhance the shopping experience with external, specialized solutions.

Here's a short overview of why you should enhance your commercetools store with Voucherify:

• ‍More loyalty scenarios: while commercetools provides some promotional capabilities, it lacks key features such as dynamic bundles, referral campaigns, stacking, or gift cards – features that may be required to properly engage loyalty members in the long-run.

• Personalization capabilities: Voucherify offers more advanced customer segmentation, targeting, and near real-time personalization, especially when it comes to custom business attributes, allowing you to build fully custom earning rules (reward actions) and member rewards.‍

• Enhanced loyalty experience: among others, commercetools does not offer a native solution to build branded loyalty dashboards where members can independently check their loyalty status and rewards. ‍

• Limitless campaign handling: commercetools comes with limitations on the number of concurrent campaigns, which may prove problamatic once you grow. What's more commercetools keeps all campaigns within one promotion editor, which may be a problem for multi-region or multi-brand setups.

• Easy campaign management: commercetools' search feature may be cumbersome, lacking  filters for region, currency, store, or channel-specific campaigns. Also, commercetools enforces fixed access permissions for the entire project, lacking the flexibility to set permissions separately for different channels, stores, or countries.

• ‍Reduced IT reliance: The commercetools promotion engine demands more involvement from engineering teams, lacking features such as an out-of-the-box bulk promo code generation available in Voucherify.

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Why use Voucherify loyalty plugin for commercetools?

Before diving into the loyalty program creation, let’s see what you get from using Voucherify loyalty software:

• Custom earning rules (reward actions).
• Advanced personalization on top of custom attributes.
• Loyalty tiers with expiration policies and mapping options.
• Loyalty points as currency & cashback.
• Points expiration.
• And much more.

Voucherify open-source plugin for commercetools opens up an opportunity to set up robust loyalty programs in your commercetools-powered stores. Here is a short overview of key loyalty program building blocks that you can play around with once the plug-in is up and running.

1. Set custom loyalty earning rules

One of the most crucial features of any loyalty programs are earning rules (reward actions). There are four primary ways to earn loyalty points with Voucherify – choose one or more, customize and combine them freely:  

• Placing orders.
• Performing custom events (e.g., leaving a review, completing a profile).
• Entering a specific segment (e.g., joining the birthday or anniversary group).
• Changing tier status by joining, leaving or prolonging a specific loyalty status.

Here are some examples of earning rules you can set with Voucherify:

• Add bonus points for every fifth order.
• Add bonus points for every signup anniversary.
• Add bonus points if a member achieved the next membership level.

Of course, thousands of other combinations are possible – with custom events, there’s hardly any limit to what you can achieve in terms of rewarding member behavior. You can also set limited time windows to each reward activity to make them more urgent and exciting for members.

2. Assign loyalty points your way

Voucherify doesn’t require choosing a single method of point acquisition – you can make your customers acquire loyalty points in dozens of ways. For example, '1 point for each dollar spent' is a popular rule, but you can take it to another level by adding '2 points for each dollar spent above $200'. Encourage customers to purchase more by rewarding them with additional points.

Another example? Send a token of gratitude to all customers who regularly shopped for the past three months – in Voucherify, you can set a rule that doubles all their loyalty points. Of course, you don’t have to double them – depending on your needs, you might add some bonus points for customers who kept the 3-month streak. Make sure your customers won’t store their loyalty points for years – encourage them to spend their points by setting up point expiration dates.

Learn more: What is loyalty points expiration?

3. Reward customers however you like

When creating a loyalty program, one of the critical aspects is rewards – you can’t expect a loyalty program to work well without attractive gratification. Voucherify integration with commercetools lets you reward customers however you like. Discount coupons, physical items, digital rewards (such as a free month of subscription), additional loyalty points, permanent discounts, free shipping, you name it.

Learn more: What are the best loyalty rewards?

4. Introduce loyalty tiers

Even if you want to reward all your customers who shop regularly, you’ll probably notice that some of them are… more loyal than others. So how to make them feel exceptional? By creating a tiered loyalty program. Think of special rewards for those who – for example – spend at least $1000 or for those who shop regularly – no less than once a month. Add a bonus for customers who stick with your brand for three years or longer.

5. Create member-only promotions

Using the power of metadata, you can create one-of-a-kind promotions. Here’s an example: you can set up custom attributes to launch a promotion only for loyalty program participants, who live in Canada, made at least one purchase last week, and have had an account in your store for more than a year.

The versatility of Voucherify lies in all the things it can do besides loyalty programs. Voucherify is a Promotion Engine, which means it can drive various promotional campaigns simultaneously – some of them are unavailable in commercetools by default, some are much more flexible and customizable in Voucherify.

See what other sales promotions you can launch in your commercetools store using Voucherify:

• Referral programs
• Promotion stacking
• Order-specific and product-specific flexible discounts
• Advanced free item promotions
• Dynamic discounts with values changing upon custom formula
• Customizable BOGO promotions
• Gift cards

6. Allow members to track their points and rewards

In Voucherify, you can quickly create customer cockpits – a customer cockpit is a personal space that can display all the information regarding loyalty programs and other promotional campaigns (referral programs, gift cards, discount coupons and so on).

Learn more: What are customer dashboards?

The API-first approach makes it easy to get any information from Voucherify API and send it to the cockpit. Thanks to the API-first architecture, you can build your own frontend solutions to show customers their loyalty progress and allow them to exchange points for rewards on their own – something not available in commercetools by default.

How to launch loyalty programs in commercetools?

Everything you need to integrate Voucherify with commercetools can be found by clicking here – we’ve uploaded all the files necessary to implement the plugin into commercetools to GitHub. Your development team will also find a detailed guide on installing the plugin there.

Connecting Voucherify with commercetools allows you to run loyalty programs within your online shop. From the customer’s perspective, the loyalty program will be invisible – all actions by Voucherify are performed under the hood, so it’s fully white-labeled. Once you publish the loyalty card and assign it to a specific customer, they’ll be able to shop in your store and collect loyalty points to their digital wallet.

How to migrate commercetools promotions to Voucherify?

If you rely on promotions in commercetools and/or your checkout component is tightly coupled with promotions, it's advisable to gradually shift to Voucherify to minimize disruptions and risks, speeding up the time it takes to see value.

Learn more on how to perform the migration from commercetools promotions to Voucherify with minimal disruptions >

Takeaways

Voucherify plugin for commercetools opens up tons of options available for your development team. Instead of building your own loyalty solution, your company can just benefit from what’s already done. Moreover, knowing that Voucherify enables you to run a bunch of other promotional scenarios at the same price makes it not only a time-saving but also a severe money-saving solution, positively impacting ROI and TCO.

Keep in mind that the Voucherify plugin for commercetools is open-source. If you need to make any adjustments, feel free to do so – it’s just the base for whatever your development team has in mind.

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