How to Build a Loyalty Program in WooCommerce in 2024?

One thing can be said for sure about ecommerce in 2024: loyalty is king. More than half of American consumers claim that once they’re loyal to a brand, they’re loyal to it for life. Now that’s something to hold on to in your ecommerce strategy, isn’t it?

Customer retention efforts are particularly important if you want to reach the youngest generation of buyers – and you definitely should, as they’re obviously growing in number every year, making up a large bulk of the shopping population. Research shows that 79% of Gen Z members love loyalty programs, and 60% of them believe all brands should offer loyalty programs. At the same time, they're the hardest to keep on your side, so the loyalty scheme you offer cannot be created at random or totally impersonal.

As loyalty is your key to success, you need the right tools to implement a smoothly working loyalty program in your online store that will meet your business goals and help you retain loyal customers.

In this article, you will find answers to these questions:

• Why should you create your own loyalty program?
• What is WooCommerce and how can you use it?
• What are the main benefits of Voucherify for building loyalty programs?
• How to set up a loyalty program with WooCommerce using Voucherify?

3 unquestionable benefits of ecommerce loyalty programs

As I’ve emphasized above, developing a loyalty program is a must for every online shop focused on both customer acquisition and retention. Below, I’ll list the most important reasons why having a well-designed loyalty program is what your business needs in 2024.

1. Boosted customer retention and acquisition

A carefully crafted loyalty program will make your customers stay with your brand and drive sales. Interesting incentives, tempting rewards, and clear rules for tier upgrades will encourage your customers to buy more, and more often. Also, by combining loyalty with referrals, you will make sure that new customers will be encouraged to join you – and stay.

2. Enhanced brand image

A personalized loyalty program makes your customers feel valued and appreciated. If you focus on their individual needs, you will create an emotional connection that is a solid foundation for a long-term relationship with your brand. This way, you’ll increase the customer lifetime value and sales in one shot.

3. Easy communication with customers

A loyalty program can serve as a useful communication platform between you and your customers. You can send them notifications, reminders, news, best deals and offers, and any other communications to make them feel connected and updated – without making them feel overwhelmed or spammed.

What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce by Automattic is a popular open-source ecommerce plugin designed for WordPress. It is one of the most commonly used content management systems for building websites: nearly 4 million online stores have been built using WooCommerce.

WooCommerce can be used for turning a WordPress website into a functional online store. Users can develop and manage a number of ecommerce functionalities, including product listings, payment gateways, tax management, and shipping options.

WooCommerce has a flexible and user-friendly interface. The plugin offers a wide range of customizable templates, extensions, and addons to leverage the various features of the WordPress environment. With all these capabilities, shoppers can easily combine the content management of their website with their specific ecommerce objectives.

Despite the availability of numerous WooCommerce plugins for promotions and loyalty programs, some of them paid, not all of them have enough functionalities to meet all the individual needs of online retailers. For large enterprise ecommerce players, customization is more important than a one-size-fits-all solution.

WooCommerce points and rewards plugins – what do they miss?

Some of the existing WooCommerce loyalty and rewards plugins encounter the following problems:

• Few types of available discounts – the discounts normally cover only basic percentage or fixed-amount price deductions. If you want to create more advanced coupons and promotions as part of your loyalty campaign and rewards programs, you may miss discounts such as BOGO or cashback rewards.
• Issues with advanced campaign creation – in-house WooCommerce plugins offer little room for advanced loyalty program creation. The rewards actions are limited and you cannot customize them. Also, normally, there is no possibility of offer stacking: if you need it, you must specify such discounts separately for each promotion.
• Limited tiers for loyalty programs – sometimes, this may even mean no tiering functionality at all, while the most successful loyalty programs are based on gamified levels that encourage buyers to take part in the program and move up the tiers.
• Limited configuration options – with out-of-the-box plugins, you only get a basic set of campaign configuration options. You may not be able to apply fixed or proportional points calculation, complex earning rules and validation rules based on custom attributes, or important fraud prevention mechanisms.
• Limited possibilities of omnichannel communication – with WooCommerce plugins which offer only website-based promotions and loyalty campaigns, you miss the chance of multi-channel communication that involves also mobile apps, social media, physical shops, and other customer touchpoints.
• Limited third-party integration opportunities – ready-made WooCommerce plugins may show some integration limitations and API restrictions, so you may find it difficult to connect them to your other tools and systems, including CRMs and communication platforms.
• Low scalability of use costs – off-the-shelf plugins are usually not flexible enough to allow cost scaling: you pay a fixed price or subscription fee which cannot be adjusted in scope to your particular and changing needs.
• Too little room for personalization – both in terms of customer needs and business requirements. The white-labelling options are limited to standard widgets in the side panel, and this may not be enough for brands focused on building loyalty.

The constraints listed above do not refer to a single plugin or to all of them – you may find a variety of such problems across these tools, differing depending on the tool. To choose the best solution for you, it’s a good idea to run in-depth research across existing plugins and select the one that offers the most suitable features in your case. You may also try using a promotion engine that deals with all of the problems at once, offering a customizable and composable way to create loyalty campaigns in WooCommerce.

Read on to find out more about integrating your WooCommerce store with Voucherify for building customer loyalty programs.

Why build your WooCommerce loyalty program with Voucherify?

Voucherify is an API-first promotion engine that helps ecommerce brands deliver effective and personalized promotions and loyalty programs. As a fully-customizable and composable solution, it serves the needs that individual loyalty plugins may fail to meet.

Let’s see what features of Voucherify stand out as particularly helpful for building your WooCommerce loyalty strategy.

1. API-based solution

Thanks to its API-driven architecture, Voucherify makes it easier to integrate and optimize your loyalty program for your online store. Apart from being easy to start with, the APIs also accelerate testing and scaling of your campaigns. Consequently, management and maintenance processes are easier as well. Thanks to the out-of-the-box integrations with external systems, your loyalty campaign can be built in days or weeks.

2. Full program customization

As a MACH-based promotion engine, Voucherify gives you a full range of customizable modular features. The tool is flexible and composable, so you can add just the functionalities you need and adjust the loyalty program creation flow to suit the particular needs of your customers and your business. This allows you to build precise loyalty campaign structures of your choice.

3. Whitelabelling

Voucherify is a back-end solution so you have a complete control over the front-end of your loyalty campaign and customer cockpits (digital wallets). You can adapt them to your own branding, visual designs, and color schemes.

4. Developer- and marketer-friendly

The power of Voucherify is twofold: it’s both developer-friendly and marketer-friendly. Developers can make practical use of available documentation and convenient, high-speed API responses, while marketers have access to the smoothly-working, intuitive dashboard that facilitates their workflow to make the WooCommerce loyalty campaign truly theirs.

5. Effective fraud prevention tools

With Voucherify you can feel safe about your loyalty campaigns. With a number of fraud prevention features, you will protect your budget margins effectively and have your program under control.

6. Abundant tracking options

The Voucherify dashboard offers numerous possibilities for tracking your loyalty campaign performance. By monitoring the details of the loyalty program you’ve launched, you will gather valuable data about the campaign.

7. Advanced loyalty program creation

With Voucherify, you have a full range of configuration options when it comes to loyalty program design. At the same time, they very process of creation is simple and fluent. Here are some of the rewards campaign design ideas you can apply:

• Create gamified multitiered programs where users move from tier to tier to obtain more attractive incentives and privileges.
• Create versatile loyalty programs: frequency programs, cashback or pay-with-points schemes, paid memberships, or VIP clubs are only a couple of the ideas you can use for your WooCommerce rewards strategy.
• Personalize naming of your campaign components – give free rein to your imagination and create attractive names for the program itself and customize your currencies by replacing “points” with “stars”, “keys”, “crowns”, or anything that is in line with your brand and appeals to your audience.
• Offer easy signup – to improve customer experience, give your audience a range of ways they can join your rewards program: by email, app, registration form, or landing page. You can also use the auto-join option.
• Offer a variety of financial or nonfinancial rewards to the loyalty program members to give them an attractive range of possibilities and increase their engagement. Make sure the prizes are tailored to their preferences and consider offering experiences apart from material perks.
• Define your rewards program criteria: set up specific earning rules that condition the buyer’s entry into the program and points collecting. Points and rewards can be given not only for purchases but also for other custom events such as profile creation, social media interaction, newsletter subscriptions, referrals, returning to an abandoned cart, or other predefined actions.
• Use geofencing to pair particular campaign events with buyers from selected locations – for instance, based on geolocation, offer a discount to loyalty members who come in the vicinity of your brick-and-mortar shops or free shipping to shoppers from a particular region.
• Use metadata to create custom attributes and group customers into functional segments based on their shopping behaviors or custom events and other characteristics. This makes targeting easier and much more accurate.
• Introduce a sense of urgency into your loyalty program – this can be done through setting strict time restrictions and point expiry deadlines on your campaign to propel buyers to shop with you and remain loyal.

8. Digital wallets

Voucherify enables the creation of digital wallets or customer cockpits, where loyalty members can see all their points, available rewards, and expiration dates. Using the intuitive dashboard, members are able to check which tier they’re in, how many points they need to receive a given perk, and what deals await them in the future. This gives them a sense of control over their membership but it also creates a sense of anticipation, which makes the program look even more tempting.

9. Omnichannel communication

As Voucherify can be integrated with various third-party systems and it offers its own automated distribution manager, you can easily communicate with your buyers by means of different channels. Send loyalty-related updates and promotional news in any way you wish to: via SMS, email, social media, apps, push notifications, or offline.

10. Cost and performance scalability

As Voucherify offers a flexible pricing scheme, you can adjust your loyalty campaign management costs and platform usage to current needs and circumstances. There are five plans available, from free to enterprise, to suit your specific needs and capabilities.

How to set up a loyalty program with WooCommerce using Voucherify?

Here’s a step-by-step guide to show you how to set up a loyalty program with WooCommerce and Voucherify.

If you need more detailed instructions, visit our support page.

1. Integrate WooCommerce with Voucherify

To do this, go to your WooCommerce account and select Voucherify from the available plugins. Add, install, and activate Voucherify.

2. Create the loyalty campaign in Voucherify

Configure the general details of your loyalty program, such as program name, loyalty card patterns, and program activity limits.

3. Define the points expiration and earning rules

Decide how long loyalty points remain valid for members and create rules that determine the earning activities. For example, you may choose that customers join the program once they open an account at your store and that they receive points for every completed purchase over $50. You can also use proportional point multipliers.

4. Create a rewards catalog

Decide what kind of rewards your customers will receive for particular actions and events. Define their form and value in any way, according to the objectives of your campaign. For instance, the rewards can be discount codes, experience vouchers, gift cards, or tangible gifts added to VIP orders.

5. Define tiers for your program

The number of tiers is up to you. You may go for two, like Standard and VIP, or three, such as Bronze, Silver, and Gold, or any other combination that meets your campaign objectives. Adjust the earning rules to particular tiers, decide whether the tiers depend only on points balance or are period-based, and specify rewards for particular tiers.

6. Configure the notification settings

You can schedule notifications sent to the loyalty program members using prebuilt notification channels like SMS or email, or use external communication providers (e.g. Braze, MoEngage, MailChimp, ActiveCampaign). You can use the distribution to send loyalty codes and the user about the assigned points and redeemed rewards.

7. Launch and monitor your loyalty campaign

If you're satisfied with your loyalty campaign setup summary, save it and start it off. At this point, your WooCommerce store is connected to the loyalty program and your customers are able to use and redeem all the incentives related to your WordPress shop. You, meanwhile, are about to start monitoring and analyzing your campaign thoroughly using the Voucherify dashboard.

8. Manage the program with Voucherify and WooCommerce

Activate customer synchronization to share user information between Voucherify and your WooCommerce store. Draw all you need from the combined power of WooCommerce and Voucherify, such as synchronized orders and dynamic discounts.

How do the best players build their loyalty programs with Voucherify and WooCommerce?

Below, you will find details about a loyalty scheme built with Voucherify and WooCommerce for a European beverage brand.

Here are the main rules and characteristics of the loyalty program introduced by the company:

• The very name of the program suggests exclusivity and uniqueness and serves as an enticing invitation to customers.
• The loyalty program is hybrid, which means it combines various forms of incentives and validation rules.
• The loyalty program functions both online and in the brand’s offline stores.
• Customers enter the program for free.
• Customers receive a welcome discount worth 10% for their first order.
• Members earn one point for every one euro spent.
• The collected points expire on a yearly basis: in other words, they are valid until the end of the year in which they have been earned.
• The program is tiered and there are three tiers: from the first purchase, from 1000 points, and from 2000 points.
• Once a particular tier threshold is reached, the tier is granted until the end of the next calendar year.
• Depending on the tier, members receive special promotional offers, vouchers, birthday gifts, contest participation, previews of new products, access to limited editions, and invitations to special tasting events.
• The points balance and status are visible on the website in the customer account.
• The program combines various promotion-oriented features, including discount coupon generation and customer segmentation.

The loyalty program described above takes the best of the WooCommerce and Voucherify integration possibilities: all of these features can be activated by using Voucherify connected with the WooCommerce store. The beverage company uses its own POS system and relies on the Java SDK from Voucherify. It has already issued almost four thousand loyalty cards, with more than 500 million points gathered on them. The tier structure motivates buyers to move up the rewards ladder and spend more both in online and offline stores.

Summary

By integrating WooCommerce and Voucherify, you can create a robust and multilayered loyalty program that will be up-and-running for as long as you need. You can customize it as you please along the way. The outcome that you reach for here is increased customer engagement and loyalty that will boost your sales and ensure reliable revenue streams. 50% of marketers list brand loyalty as one of the top goals of their content marketing strategies – stay ahead of the game and create your WooCommerce loyalty program now.

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