Using WooCommerce to Create Personalized Loyalty Experiences
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The loyalty programmes are non-brand specific and award points. Personalised ones create relationships. It's not about the reward size, it's about how the customer feels. When it comes to delivering that, the right configuration and development of WooCommerce can provide a growing business with the tools needed to do so.
Why Generic Loyalty Programmes Stop Working
Loyalty programmes are ubiquitous. For any online store of any size, almost every one has one, and if you don't, it's not going to be a differentiator anymore, it's just the standard. A loyalty experience is not a reward-for-equal-purchase, send-every-threshold-upgrade e-mail, 10% discount on all purchases, reward system. It's a discount mechanism that has additional steps.
This feeling is felt by customers the moment they switch on their TVs. A uniform program that does the same thing with every customer, regardless of the items purchased, frequency of visits, or nature of the store's interactions with the person tells a hidden message: The store doesn't really know its customers. A store that doesn't know its customers will not be able to make them feel valued in any meaningful way.
It's not a technology challenge, but a strategy challenge when it comes to shifting to personalised loyalty. However, it is the technology that enables the strategy to be realised at scale. When coupled with the proper architecture and the proper woocommerce development services to create it appropriately, WooCommerce provides store proprietors with the information framework and adaptability to provide loyalty encounters that appear genuinely individual instead of mechanically uniform.
What Personalised Loyalty Actually Looks Like
Personalised loyalty isn't about calling an e-mail message by its recipient's given name. Ten years back that bar was emptied, and now it's not considered private property. Personalization in a loyalty program is true personalisation if the things a customer gets will match their actual actions and preferences and only they will understand it.
Customers who always purchase items in a specific product category are given preferential treatment for new product category launches by being given access first, before the general announcement. If an average order value for a customer has dropped over a 2-year period despite placing 10 orders over the same timeframe, then the targeted reactivation offer is based on their most common product purchase during their highest spending period. The first time buyer who paid above the average price gets a personal welcome to a tier that recognises he or she didn't buy average, as rewarding the average buyer would be a missed opportunity to build a premium relationship from the beginning.
The common denominator of all of these scenarios is clean, structured customer data coming from WooCommerce and being processed by a system which can take action. If there's no baseline, then personalisation is not only hard, it is impossible. It allows the store to go from loyalty communication broadcasting to scale to what feels like individual conversation in the eyes of the customer.
You don't gain loyalty by the service you provide to your customers. It is based on your knowledge of them and how you demonstrate that knowledge in each and every interaction you have with them.
The Data WooCommerce Already Has
Perhaps the most overlooked benefit of running a WooCommerce store is the amount of valuable customer data you collect on a daily basis. Each order generates a thorough record of items purchased, their prices, when they were purchased, how they were paid for, and where they were delivered. As they're processed over multiple orders, they create a portrait of their purchase frequency, their preferences for specific categories, how much they spend on each order, when they buy and when they don't, and how they respond to promotions. Behavioural signals, such as product views and wishlist additions, provide insights into the interests of a customer, rather than what they have purchased, and can be added to the list of product views.
Most stores lie on this data and don't meaningfully activate it. It is stored in the WooCommerce database, and can be found in the admin panel in order reports, which display totals but not individual customer information or actionable data. The data is there. The approach is no longer. And the missing link in the chain is a properly-built integration that exposes the customer data that the tools built to act on it; a loyalty platform, a CRM, an email automation system, or any mix of the three, can access.
This is technical work, and it requires knowledge of how the data is stored in WooCommerce, as well as how you can get it to integrate seamlessly with other systems. This is where the real value of specialist woocommerce development services will be appreciated, as they're not responsible for generating the data that can be used for personalisation, but rather helping open up the data that is there – and get it to work for the business.
Designing Tiers That Reward the Right Behaviour
Loyalty programs that incent the behavior that the business actually wants to promote, not the behavior that's easiest to track, are effective. The majority of stores will use spend-based tiers, due to the fact that their total order volume is the most significant measure that's readily available. Once you spending surpasses a certain level, you move up to another level, you gain a benefit. Works, but only rewards one dimension of customer behaviour that doesn't fully account for customer value.
With a pure spend-based tier system, a customer who purchases often in small quantities might have a higher lifetime value than another who makes one big purchase a year, but doesn't show up for iTunes updates and other offers. The use of frequency, category diversity, submission to review, referral activity and social sharing are all behaviours that can be factored into store health based tier criteria that will lead to a more full picture of store loyalty.
These more complex tiered structures can be supported with ease in WooCommerce – as long as the logic of the loyalty is designed with flexibility from the beginning. Adding elaborate tier criteria to a simple points plugin that wasn't designed for them creates friction and workarounds. Deliberate development of the loyalty architecture (defining beforehand what behaviours are to be rewarded) creates an architecture that evolves cleanly with the business, not against it.
Moments That Make Loyalty Feel Real
In addition to tier systems and point systems, the key moments that help customers feel the store has been paying attention to or thinking about them are the moments of personalised loyalty. These moments don't need to be fancy, it's often the simple, well-timed and specific moments that are the most effective.
A big little thing that's a week early to the birthday celebration, and that includes a note mentioning the customer's top-selling category is a gesture that means so much more because it has required the store to know something about the individual. A milestone acknowledgement that happens with the 20th order, and that names the milestone and provides something of value in exchange for the milestone, is a relationship moment, not just a good customer service act, thanking the customer for being a loyal customer. When they are invited to a new product offering with an early access message built around the customer's existing interests, they feel like they are being sent an invitation to be part of their customer community instead of an email sent to the masses.
All of these moments can be made possible using WooCommerce as the data source. Each one of these needs to be set up using the proper integration architecture, in order to perform at scale with reliability. And each of them delivers the level of emotional bond to a brand that can't be rivaled even at a great discount. The aim of a loyalty programme is not to have a loyalty programme, but to have a system that makes customers feel, regularly and genuinely, that the store knows and cares about them as a person.
Loyalty as a Growth Strategy, Not a Retention Tactic
But, the last reframe that makes the difference in how most businesses view loyalty is viewing it not as a retention tactic but as a growth engine. Loyal customers spend more and over time, will cost less per transaction to convert when they try again, come back after a longer wait period without having to be re-acquired or be willing to do so and refer at a much higher rate than those who do not feel a particular connection to the store they bought from.
A WooCommerce store that's building a loyalty system is not only decreasing the churn rate; it's also investing in personalized loyalty infrastructure. It's creating a customer base that multiplies in returns, when each one of these customers reaches the next level inside the programme, they are also helping to expand the store's influence and reputation. In contrast, with generic points programmes, there is no such compounding effect. It occurs when loyalty is felt personally, when recognition is felt deserved and when each and every encounter with him or her is experienced as “He doesn't treat me like he does others.”
