Build Customer Loyalty with WooCommerce Store Credit

Part of having a successful WooCommerce store is having a loyal and supportive customer base that you can rely on and grow from. But building that strong relationship with your customers takes time—and the right tools.

Store credit gives businesses the ability to run powerful promotions to attract new customers and creates incentives for them to keep coming back. With Advanced Coupons and Uncanny Automator, you can easily incorporate store credit into your existing workflows and create brand new ones—all for free!

Let’s find out how you can build brand loyalty with Advanced Coupons and Automator.

How Store Credit Builds Customer Loyalty

There are tons of ways for businesses to build brand loyalty. Coupons, points programs and membership discounts are just the tip of the iceberg. With so many options, you may be wondering how and when to use store credit as opposed to, say, gift cards. While there are no hard and fast rules on how, when and why to use store credit, there are some tried and true methods that build loyalty.

• Attract New Forever-Customers

Handing out coupons to prospective and loyal customers is a great way to get new and repeat sales—who doesn’t love a good deal! But nothing says, “Shop with us today,” quite like telling your customers that they already have credit to spend in your store. It’s like a signing bonus for your customers—but without the work!

• Keep Your Cash

Store credit is also a great way to conduct returns without losing out on a sale—or having to swallow additional transaction fees. By offering store credit instead of cold cash, you gain another opportunity to wow your customers and win over their loyalty. And customers love receiving store credit as a way to explore more of what your business has to offer.

• A Winning Loyalty Program

Loyalty programs that offer your customers points create clear incentives for repeat purchases. But keeping track of point-to-cash ratios is a chore all on its own. Not to mention the disappointment that customers feel when they learn that their 200,000 point balance only translates to $2.00. With store credit, you can create a loyalty program that will have you and your customers seeing dollar signs—literally!

• Keep the Faith

Trust is a requirement for any relationship—especially a business one. According to American Express, one of the primary reasons that customers lose trust in a business is because they take too long to process refunds and exchanges. Store credit cuts out the middle-man so that you can offer your customers a speedy solution and keep the trust you worked so hard to earn.

• Loyalty is a Two-Way Street

It happens all the time: a customer happily makes a purchase and then, just a day later, the price drops! Or, perhaps, they missed out on a sale altogether because they heard the good word too late. When your customers complain to you about missing out on a sale, you can offer them store credit in the amount of the difference to prove your loyalty to them.

However you choose to use store credit, there’s no doubt that it can help you build a loyal customer base and boost your bottom line. But once you’ve decided to offer store credit, you’ll have to find a tool powerful enough to help you implement and manage it—and we know just the one!

An Introduction to Advanced Coupons

Advanced Coupons is the highest-rated and most popular coupon plugin for WooCommerce. If you’re a WooCommerce store owner already or thinking of opening your very own internet emporium, use Advanced Coupons to create powerful promotions to attract new customers and build brand loyalty.

Powerful core features such as BOGO deals, cart conditions and store credit are all included in the free version of Advanced Coupons so you don’t have to spend a dime to take your WooCommerce store to the next level. Click here to download the free version of Advanced Coupons.

An Introduction to Uncanny Automator

Once you’ve installed and activated the free version of Advanced Coupons, all that’s left for you to do is to integrate store credit into your workflows. By pairing Advanced Coupons with Uncanny Automator, you can create a promotional powerhouse for your WooCommerce store to drive sales and build loyalty.

Uncanny Automator is the #1 WordPress automation plugin. Seamlessly integrate your various WordPress plugins and apps with a series of triggers and actions called recipes. Automate your workflows and save yourself time—and money—all without the use of a single line of code.

Automator offers a free version that is more than powerful enough for you to incorporate your WooCommerce store credits into meaningful workflows that build brand loyalty. And, speaking of credits, when you sign-up with Automator as a free user, you’ll receive 250 app credits so you can try out some powerful app integrations.  When you’re ready, upgrade to Automator Pro for unlimited credits.

Click here to download the free version of Uncanny Automator.

How to Build Loyalty with Advanced Coupons and Automator

Now that you’re all set up with the free versions of Advanced Coupons and Uncanny Automator, it’s time to put your store credit to good use. With the following two recipes, you can start to integrate store credit into your workflows to boost brand loyalty and encourage your customers to keep coming back.

Recipe 1: Store Credit Notifications

It’s not enough to simply tell your customers that you offer store credit. You’ll want to keep them informed on their credit balance, how they can earn more and, most importantly, how they can spend it. In this example, we’ll show you how to inform your customers about your new offering to get them up-to-speed and spending!

Step 1: Create a New Recipe

From your WordPress Admin Sidebar, navigate to Automator > Add New. In the pop-up window that appears, select Logged-in users.

Step 2: Name Your Recipe

With recipes like these, your WooCommerce store is about to take off—and that means you’ll be creating dozens more recipes. We recommend coming up with a naming convention so that you can easily recognize recipes at a glance. One naming convention is to include the integrations used in and the purpose for the recipe. Applying that convention, we’ll name this recipe AdvancedCoupons-WordPress: Notification.

Step 3: Configure Your Trigger

In the Triggers panel, select Advanced Coupons.

From the drop-down list that appears, select A user receives greater than, less than, or equal to a specific amount of store credit.

In the Condition field, select greater or equal to. In the Amount field, input “1” or whatever minimum threshold at which you would like to start notifying your customers about their store credit balance. When you’re finished, click Save. Your trigger should look like this:

Step 4: Configure Your Action

In the Actions panel, click Add action and select WordPress.

From the drop-down list that appears, select Send an email.

Automator will present you with an email editor. In the To field, select User email.

The Body field is where you get to use your creativity and brand your message to get your users excited about store credit. You can use tokens, i.e., data stored within your website and/or recipe, to tell your users exactly how much store credit they have, products and services they can spend it on and further personalize their message.

Once you’re finished writing and designing your email, click Save. Your action should look like this:

Step 5: Configure Your Recipe Then Go Live!

The recipe trigger that we set will cause this recipe to run every time a user receives store credit. But if you want to ensure that it only runs the first time that a user receives credit, you can configure this too. In the upper right-hand corner, in the Recipe panel, click Edit next to Times per user: Unlimited and type “1” in the field that appears then click Save.

Everything is all set. All that’s left for you to do is to toggle your recipe from Draft to Live and watch your customer loyalty go through the roof! Your recipe should look something like this:

Recipe 1: Continued

Now that you know how to notify your customers when they receive store credit for the first time, why not keep them up-to-date on their store credit balance? Create a pair of recipes that automatically notify your customers any time there’s a change to their balance via SMS, with Twilio or send them a direct message with Slack.

If you decide to use Twilio to send direct SMS messages, your first recipe should look this:

The second recipe should look very similar but with a different trigger. Note that both recipes are set to run an unlimited number of times per user so they can keep an eye on their store credit balance.

When you’re ready to upgrade to Automator Pro, you can replace these recipes with one recipe that has multiple triggers to further streamline your workflows. You can even make use of Automator’s Filter and Delay features to create an email drip campaign for users with a persistently high store credit balance!

Recipe 2: Offer Store Credit as a Signing Bonus

With your store credit system up and running, you can start to use it as a way to attract new forever-customers. With Uncanny Automator Pro, WooCommerce Memberships and WooCommerce Subscriptions, you can entice prospective customers to buy or renew membership access to your site by offering them free store credit. Then, create an added sense of urgency around your promotion by only extending the offer to the first 50 customers who sign up!

In this recipe, we’ll show you how to create this offer to grow a loyal subscriber base.

Step 1: Create a New Recipe

From your WordPress Admin Sidebar, navigate to Automator > Add New. In the pop-up window that appears, select Logged-in users.

Step 2: Name Your Recipe

We’re going to use the same naming convention for this recipe as we did with the first—i.e., use the names of the integrations followed by the purpose of the recipe. With that convention, we’ve named this recipe WooCommerce-AdvancedCoupons: Store Credit Promotion.

Step 3: Configure Your Trigger

In the Triggers panel, select WooCommerce.

From the drop-down list that appears, select A user subscribes to a product then select your membership product. When you’re finished, your trigger should look something like this:

If you want to allow your existing members to take advantage of the promotion as well, click Add another trigger, select WooCommerce then A user renews a subscription to a product. With the second trigger, your Triggers panel should look like this:

Step 4: Configure Your Action

In the Actions panel, click Add action then select Advanced Coupons.

From the drop-down list that appears, select Add a specific amount of store credit to the user’s account.

Type the amount of store credit you’d like to offer during the promotion into the Store credit amount field then click Save. Your action should look something like this:

Step 5: Configure Your Recipe Then Go Live!

With your trigger and action all set up, all you have to do is set some parameters for your recipe. As exciting as it is to offer store credit, you don’t want to give away the whole farm! You’ll want to ensure that your users can only take advantage of your promotion once—otherwise, they could rack up an unlimited amount of store credit!

In the Recipe panel in the upper right-hand corner, click Edit next to Times per user: Unlimited and type “1” in the field that appears.

If you want to dial up the excitement around your promotional campaign, limit the number of times that the recipe will run so that only the first 50 users to buy or renew their membership will receive the store credit.

Click Edit next to Total times: Unlimited and type “50” into the field that appears.

Toggle your recipe from Draft to Live and watch your memberships soar! When you’re all finished, your recipe should look something like this:

Turning down a deal like this would be like walking past a $10 bill on the sidewalk!

Continue Automating

We’ve given you just a few ideas of how easy it is to create strong relationships with your customers using store credit. Now that you’re an automating machine, the only limit will be your imagination! Continue creating recipes with Uncanny Automator and your favorite plugins to save yourself time.

How would you like to use store credit in your WooCommerce business? What are some of the automations that you would like to see? Let us know in the comments below.

Happy automating!