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How to Create a Loyalty Program in WooCommerce

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Do you want to create a loyalty program in WooCommerce?

A loyalty program can keep customers coming back to your online store and keep them away from your competitors. It can also be a great way to reward your best customers and make them feel valued.

In this guide, we will show you how to create a loyalty program for your WooCommerce store.

Creating a loyalty program in WooCommerce

Why Create a Loyalty Program in WooCommerce?

A loyalty program can encourage customers to keep coming back to your online store and get you more sales. It can even boost average spend per customer by giving shoppers a reason to add more items to their basket.

Most loyalty programs give customers points for buying products and services. However, you might also reward customers for taking other positive actions like creating an account, placing their first order, signing up for your email newsletter, or spending over a certain account.

You might even give customers extra points for returning to an abandoned shopping cart and completing their purchases. In this way, a loyalty program can help you recover WooCommerce abandoned cart sales.

With that said, let’s take a look at how to add a loyalty program in WooCommerce.

Setting Up Your WooCommerce Loyalty Program

The easiest way to create a loyalty program is by using Advanced Coupons. It is the best WordPress coupons plugin and lets you create all kinds of coupons, programs, buy one get one free offers, and other rewards.

Advanced Coupons encourages customers to take action by showing how many points they’ll get for each action, including buying a specific product.

The customer will see a message in their shopping cart to let them know how many points they'll earn

First, you’ll need to install and activate both the free Advanced Coupons plugin and the premium Advanced Coupons Loyalty Program addon.

For more information, please see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Note: You can purchase the Advanced Coupons and Loyalty Program plugins together by getting the ‘All-In-One Bundle’.

After that, simply go to Coupons » Loyalty Program in your WordPress admin dashboard and click on the ‘License’ tab.

Adding a license to the Loyalty Program WordPress plugin

You can now enter your license key and the email address you used to purchase Advanced Coupons. You can find this information by logging into your account on the Advanced Coupons website.

After that, go ahead and click on the ‘Settings’ tab. This brings you to a screen where you can build the loyalty program.

The Advanced Coupons loyalty program settings

To start, you’ll want to give customers points when they take certain actions on your online store. This might be leaving a product review, posting a comment, buying a product, or some similar action.

In the ‘Price to points earned ratio,’ you’ll see that customers get 1 point for every $1 spent.

The points earned ratio

If you want your WooCommerce loyalty program to look more impressive, then you can give customers more points. For example, members might earn 2 points or 10 points for every $1 they spend.

‘Points to price redeemed ratio’ is how many points it takes to earn a dollar as part of your loyalty program.

By default, customers earn $1 for every 10 points. That means the customer needs to redeem 10 points to get a $1 discount coupon. You can change these values to anything you want.

You can also change the name of your loyalty scheme by typing into the ‘Points name’ field. In our images, we are using ‘Awesome Points,’ but you can use anything you want. You can even use something that represents your brand like Starbucks does with their ‘Stars’.

Changing the name of your WooCommerce loyalty program

Next, you’ll need to decide how your points are calculated. For example, you may want to give a customer fewer points if they use a coupon code compared to a customer who didn’t use a coupon. In this way, you can give the best rewards to your best customers.

To do this, click on the ‘Points Earning’ tab. Here, you can check the boxes to take any discounts, tax, shipping costs, and any fee amounts into account when awarding points.

Calculating points in a WooCommerce loyalty program

Many online marketplaces and digital stores only reward customers for spending money. However, there may be other actions that benefit you, so it’s a good idea to reward customers for taking these actions.

For example, you might reward visitors for registering with your membership site, posting a product review, or even commenting on a blog post.

Simply scroll to the ‘Point Amounts’ section and then click the switch for any action that will earn the customer points.

Point amounts toggle

After activating these toggles, check whether there are any new settings to configure.

For example, if you enable ‘Registering as a user/customer,’ then you’ll need to type in how many points customers get for performing this action.

Awarding points for registering as a new customer

You can also encourage shoppers to spend more by awarding extra points for orders over a certain amount. This can increase the average order value, similar to cross-selling and upselling products in WooCommerce.

To do this, enable the ‘Spending over a certain amount’ switch and then type a value into the ‘Spending over a threshold’ field.

How to create a threshold for your WooCommerce loyalty program

During busy shopping periods, you may want to give customers an extra reason to buy from your store.

For example, you might award extra points during Black Friday, so customers aren’t tempted to shop with a competitor.

You can give customers extra points during a specific period by enabling the ‘Extra points during a period’ toggle.

Awarding extra loyalty points during a particular timeframe

Then, enter a date and time range into the ‘Extra points to earn during period’ section.

You can also type in how many points customers will earn.

Awarding extra points in a WooCommerce loyalty program

There are some more settings you may want to look at, but this is enough to create a loyalty program in WooCommerce. When you are happy with how the program is set up, scroll to the bottom of the page and click the ‘Save changes’ button.

Your new WooCommerce loyalty program is now live.

Automatically Creating Accounts for Your Customers

Your customers will need to create an account in order to collect loyalty points.

Already, this encourages people to sign up to your online store. However, you can also create an account automatically when a visitor makes their first purchase. This can improve the shopping experience and may get you some extra members.

To automatically create an account for a new customer, go to WooCommerce » Settings. Then, click on the ‘Accounts and Privacy’ tab.

Changing your WooCommerce account settings

To start, you may want to uncheck ‘Allow customers to place orders without an account’ so that customers can’t check out as a guest. This will encourage more people to register with your site, but it may cause more shoppers to give up on a purchase and abandon their shopping carts.

With that being said, it’s a good idea to set up WooCommerce conversion tracking and track visitors to your WordPress website. You can then see whether this change hurts your conversion rates.

Next, check the ‘Allow customers to log into an existing account during checkout’ box.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll want to make it as easy as possible for customers to create an account. With that in mind, we recommend checking all the boxes in the ‘Account creation’ section, as you can see in the following image.

Disallowing the option to checkout as a guest in WooCommerce

Now, WooCommerce will automatically send an email to first-time customers with information on how to access their new account.

Here, you may encounter a problem with WordPress not sending emails properly, which can be a big problem. If customers don’t get their login information, then they won’t be able to access their new account.

With that in mind, you may want to use an SMTP plugin such as WP Mail SMTP to improve your email deliverability rates and make sure customers receive all your emails.

The WooCommerce Loyalty Program in Action

Your loyalty program is up and running! Once a customer has earned loyalty points, they can turn them into coupons by going to My Account » My Reward Points.

The customer can then simply type in how many points they want to use, and your WordPress blog or website will show how much the coupon is worth.

The customer can go ahead and click ‘Redeem’ to create that coupon.

In the following image, the customer has created a $5 coupon by converting 500 of their points. They still have 550 points left to redeem.

The customer can turn their earned points into coupons in their account

We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to create a loyalty program in WooCommerce. You may also want to check out our guide on how to create a WooCommerce popup and the best virtual business phone number apps.

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Editorial Staff

Editorial Staff at WPBeginner is a team of WordPress experts led by Syed Balkhi with over 16 years of experience in WordPress, Web Hosting, eCommerce, SEO, and Marketing. Started in 2009, WPBeginner is now the largest free WordPress resource site in the industry and is often referred to as the Wikipedia for WordPress.

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2 CommentsLeave a Reply

  1. Syed Balkhi says

    Hey WPBeginner readers,
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  2. Jiří Vaněk says

    A loyalty program is a great thing. The ability to convert points into a discount often decides whether or not the customer will definitely return. In the past, this is how I returned to the exact stores where this system worked. Thank you for the instructions on how to operate the same system using Woocommerce.

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