How to Add Coupons and Promotions to Your WooCommerce Store in 2023?

Modern customers are not only about price, they also seek value and personalized experiences. For this reason, in today's digital era, where consumers have plenty of options at their fingertips, promotions have emerged as a vital tool for e-commerce success.

If you are running a WooCommerce store, by strategically implementing coupons and cart promotions, you can effectively tap into customer expectations and incentivize purchase decisions. But how to leverage your brand’s ecommerce engine to offer advanced promotional features?

The short answer is: by implementing an advanced promotion engine like Voucherify. But to give you a broader overview of the topic, in this blog post, you will learn: 

• What is WooCommerce and what features does it offer?
• Why do you need advanced coupons and promotions in your WooCommerce store?
• Why is Voucherify a great solution for updating your promotional WooCommerce game?
• How to enable generating advanced coupons and cart promotions in your WooCommerce store?

On top of that, I will also demonstrate what types of promotions you can carry out at your WooCommerce store by using the Voucherify plugin to inspire you for the future. 

What is WooCommerce and what it has to do with WordPress?

WooCommerce, developed by Automattic, is the most widely used e-commerce plugin for WordPress, meaning it is designed to work specifically with WordPress websites – WooCommerce seamlessly integrates with them, leveraging the websites’ functionalities.

As a popular CMS, WordPress provides a framework for building websites and a user-friendly interface for managing site content. However, WordPress itself does not have built-in e-commerce functionality, and hence, it has to be extended with plugins to add e-commerce features.

Accordingly, when you install and activate the WooCommerce plugin on a WordPress website, it transforms your WordPress site into a full-fledged e-commerce store by adding features such as: 

• Product management
• Shopping cart functionality
• Payment gateways
• Inventory management
• Order processing

Combining the content management capabilities of WordPress with the e-commerce features of WooCommerce provides a robust and versatile infrastructure for building and managing e-commerce sites.

What about WooCommerce promotional and coupon plugins?

Now that your website already has ecommerce qualities that enable online shopping, what about promotions, discounts, and coupons to make your customers happier than ever?

In the WooCommerce Marketplace, you can find a range of promotional plugins that cater to various promotional needs. These plugins offer features such as creating discount coupons, gift cards, running sales and promotions, creating product bundles, and more.

While in-house WooCommerce promotional plugins offer convenience and a range of features, they may have some restrictions when it comes to creating tailored promotions and advanced discount coupons. 

Here are some of the common limitations to consider:

1. Lack of advanced promotion types

Off-the-shelf WooCommerce plugins may not provide advanced promotion types beyond basic percentage or fixed-amount discounts. This means you might not have the flexibility to create more sophisticated promotions like buy X get Y, conditional discounts, limited-time offers, or personalized offers based on customer segments. If your promotional strategy requires these advanced types, an off-the-shelf solution may not meet your needs.

2. Limited rules customization

Many standard WooCommerce plugins have predefined rules and restrictions for promotions. Therefore, you may not have the ability to create complex rules based on specific product combinations, cart conditions, or customer attributes. This limitation restricts your ability to create targeted and personalized promotions tailored to your specific business goals.

3. Lack of omnichannel support

In-house WooCommerce plugins often focus on website-based promotions and may not offer seamless integration and synchronization across multiple channels. If you have a multi-channel presence, such as mobile apps, social media, or brick-and-mortar stores, the lack of omnichannel support can hinder your ability to create consistent and cohesive promotional campaigns across all platforms.

4. Scalability and performance concerns

As your business grows and the number of promotions and customers increases, some off-the-shelf WooCommerce plugins may face scalability and performance issues. These plugins might not be optimized to handle high traffic or large volumes of promotions and transactions, resulting in slower performance, potential system crashes, or limitations on the number of coupons or promotions you can manage effectively.

5. Limited integration and API capabilities

In-house WooCommerce plugins might have limited integration options and APIs, making it challenging to connect and synchronize your promotional data with other systems or third-party applications. This can be a constraint if you require integration with CRM software, email marketing platforms, or analytics tools to measure and analyze the impact of your promotions effectively.

Note: These limitations vary depending on the specific in-house WooCommerce plugin you choose. Some plugins may address some of these limitations to a certain extent, while others may not. Accordingly, it is crucial to thoroughly research and evaluate the features and capabilities of different plugins to ensure they align with your promotional strategy and business requirements.

Why is Voucherify the best option to upgrade your WooCommerce promotion game?

In the competitive e-commerce world, integrating advanced coupons and tailored promotions into your WooCommerce store empowers you to stand out in the market, drive sales, and build stronger customer relationships.

As a headless promotion engine, Voucherify stands out as one of the best options to upgrade your WooCommerce promotion game due to its advanced coupon and promotion features. Why?

1. Flexibility and customization

Voucherify provides a high level of flexibility and customization options compared to many in-house WooCommerce promotional plugins. It allows you to create and manage complex promotional campaigns with dynamic rules, personalized offers, and advanced targeting capabilities. 

You can create coupon codes based on customer roles, purchase history, location, or any other criteria. This targeted approach helps you tailor promotions to specific customer groups, increasing the chances of conversion and customer satisfaction.

2. Scalability and performance

As your business grows, being able to adjust your promotional campaign is key to achieving marketing success. Voucherify is designed to handle high volumes of promotions and transactions efficiently. It provides robust infrastructure and API-driven architecture, ensuring smooth performance even during peak times and allowing for seamless integration with other systems and applications.

3. Omnichannel capabilities

Voucherify goes beyond the limitations of traditional WooCommerce promotional plugins by offering omnichannel capabilities. It allows you to seamlessly integrate and synchronize promotions across multiple channels, including websites, mobile apps, email marketing, social media, and even offline channels. This ensures a consistent and cohesive promotional experience for your customers, regardless of the platform they interact with.

Learn more: Why omnichannel coupon delivery is crtical for campaign success? 

4. Advanced promotion types

Voucherify offers a wide range of creative promotional strategies that may not be available in standard WooCommerce plugins. These include complex discount structures like tiered discounts, conditional promotions, BOGO deals, tiered pricing, and more. Such unique and enticing offers grab customer attention, enhance the shopping experience, and drive higher sales volume.

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5. Developer-friendly experience

Voucherify offers comprehensive documentation, developer tools, and APIs that make it easier for developers to integrate and customize promotional solutions according to specific business requirements. Such a developer-friendly approach provides greater control and flexibility, allowing you to tailor the solution to your unique needs.

6. Fraud prevention

Voucherify’s advanced coupons give you the possibility to prevent coupon abuse and fraudulent activities. You can set usage limits per customer, restrict coupon usage to specific products or categories, or even set expiration dates and particular validation rules that your customer needs to meet in order to qualify for the promotion. By implementing these measures, you can protect your business from coupon misuse and maintain better control over your campaigns.

Learn more: How to prevent coupon fraud?

7. Campaign tracking and analysis

With Voucherify’s promotional campaigns, you can easily monitor the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns by using our dashboard reports. Your team can track coupon usage, identify which promotions generate the most conversions, and gain insights into customer behavior. This data helps you make informed decisions, refine your marketing strategies, and optimize future campaigns for better results.

If you are convinced by Voucherify’s advantages, in the next step, you will learn how to create a coupon campaign with Voucherify and how to connect our platform to your WooCommerce store.

How to add coupons and promotions to your WooCommerce store with Voucherify?

First, you need to download and install Voucherify’s plugin from WordPress. Then, you need to authenticate the connection between Voucherify and your WooCommerce store. For a detailed, step-by-step description of the integration setup, visit our support page. 

Now, let’s see an exemplary setup of your discount campaign Voucherify that can run for your WooCommerce store.

1. Choose the campaign type

We are going to create a discount coupon campaign. Note that Voucherify also supports gift cards, cart promotions, referral campaigns, and loyalty programs out-of-the-box. 

Learn more: How to run a referral program in your WooCommerce store?

2. Configure basic campaign details‍

Provide the name of your campaign, redemption limits, and code settings. 

Using Voucherify, you can take advantage of the Advanced code settings, where you can personalize your discount codes by adding a particular prefix or suffix, exclude various characters, etc. 

Learn more: How to generate unique promo codes? 

Decide whether you are running a time-limited campaign or a long-period campaign that your customers will enjoy on a regular basis. 

3. Choose your reward type and discount value

Now, you decide what type of reward you are going to give out to your customers in the form of a discount code. This step also enables you to decide whether the discount will be applied to the entire cart or only particular items that your customers chose.

4. Set up validation rules

Setting up validation rules is a crucial step in a promotional campaign. This is the moment where you choose the criteria or conditions that your customers have to meet to qualify for a discount code. 

Validation rules can be customized and combined together. For example, a customer can redeem the granted discount code only when they are in a particular customer segment: for example, “new customers” and when their cart value is at least $50. 

5. Launch and monitor your discount coupon campaign

When you check your campaign set-up summary and you are satisfied with the conditions, you can start running it. 

Now, your WooCommerce store will be able to offer customers unique discount codes that they can redeem shopping on your website while your team will be able to thoroughly monitor the success of your campaign with our comprehensive dashboard. 

The front end is fully customized – Voucherify does not impose any structural restrictions. You can build up your own checkout with a designated field for a coupon code. With the plug-in, the input field will be connected with our redemption API, which will send requests to Voucherify. 

6. Enjoy the results of your promotional campaign

This is an exemplary setup of how a promotional campaign created with Voucherify can run within your WooCommerce store. 

Promotion ideas for your WooCommerce store

1. Flash sales as cart-level promotions

One of the most important parts of every type of promotion is timing. Every discount wrapped into a specific time frame creates a sense of urgency. Commonly used short flash sales help retailers to drive more customers into a purchase. What works best for these campaigns are cart-level promotions, and that is why one of the bestsellers for WooCommerce is the plugins with cart-level sales.

Learn more: How to run effective cart promotions?

We recommend going a step further and combining cart-level discounts with advanced customer tracking. Why?

• Flash sales provide multiple variables to customize your campaign and adjust rules to your audience in no time. 
• They supply you with a great amount of delivered data; you can easily test various campaign ideas and find out what works best. 
• As much as possible, they shorten the way from just browsing to purchasing.

With proper software, you can test multiple campaign ideas at the same time and catch significant clues instantly.

2. Recurring discounts

Repetitive campaigns locked in a short time frame are a great way to bring more life to your promotion strategy. For example, you can leverage your weakest days in sales during a month. Attractive discounts help you to drive more traffic and encourage revisits in the long run. 

From the technical point of view, you can set recurring campaigns, active only in particular, repetitive time windows. The flexibility of coupons enables you to reshape campaign parameters (discount, duration) along with changing traffic and current goals.

3. Personalized coupon campaigns

With Voucherify, WooCommerce store owners can target coupons at particular groups of customers, e.g. the most loyal audience. It is great to have exclusive discounts scheduled in such a way that your receivers are 100% aware of how special these offers are. Otherwise, even the most attractive incentives lose much of their marketing power. It is like building tension in a promotion plot.

So, instead of a single popup in the storefront, add a personalized email sent automatically when a customer qualifies for an attractive deal. Build a concise message showing the personal character of a discount and emphasize an expiration date. It may look like there is lots to do, but it's a piece of cake, in fact. Marketing automation on a coupon platform makes personalization and distribution fast and scalable.

4. Abandoned cart offers

The typical abandoned cart offer is to add a coupon with a 5% or 10% discount to the cart after a user abandons it. This incentivizes customers to come back and complete the purchase, as they can now pay less for the things they planned to buy. 

Without knowing their reason for leaving, discounts cannot always work efficiently. Because this knowledge is often hard to reach, think about multi-level abandoned cart offers organized with a promotional platform like Voucherify that will allow you to track your customer data and use it for your future marketing efforts. 

5. Follow-up incentives

Nearly all WooCommerce stores already know the potential power of follow-ups. They are meant to keep customers engaged thanks to their relevant content. However, regardless of channel, they are knocking on the private space of your customers (mailbox, phone, social media profiles). If you want to leverage follow-ups in your marketing strategy, you must deliver real value and give customers a good reason to let you in. In any other case, your messages will cast their lot with poor, repetitive emails which fill SPAM folders every day. 

What can far more effectively activate dormant users is sending messages with personalized incentives limited in time. Incentives such as coupons or gift cards give each follow-up message real, measurable value.

Conclusions

As the e-commerce industry continues to evolve, staying ahead of the competition requires employing effective marketing tactics. Therefore, integrating coupons and promotions into your WooCommerce store can be a game-changer, allowing you to engage customers, boost conversions, and foster long-term relationships.

With the integration of Voucherify, you can easily generate and distribute unique coupon codes, automate personalized promotions, and gain valuable insights through analytics and reporting. Our flexibility, advanced features, and developer-friendly API make it a standout option for optimizing your WooCommerce promotional efforts. 

Remember, adding coupons and promotions is not a one-time endeavor. Only by consistently offering attractive discounts and promotions can you cultivate a loyal customer base and drive sustainable growth for your WooCommerce store in 2023 and beyond.

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