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How to offer discounts to customers in return for reviews using the Customer Reviews for WooCommerce plugin

How to incentivise customers to leave reviews in WooCommerce by offering them a discount with CusRev
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Table of Contents

Do you struggle to get customers to review your products? Are you finding that even with automated review invitations being sent out by the “Customer Reviews for WooCommerce” plugin to your customers, that they still don’t leave reviews? Or are you getting a decent amount of reviews and just want to increase that number? It can be a challenge, but it is possible to increase your customer review conversions by offering a discount incentive using the “Customer Reviews for WooCommerce” plugin.

In this article, we’ll cover how to incentivise your customers to leave reviews on your WooCommerce store by offering them a discount off future orders.

Prefer to learn in video form? Check out my video guide:

Don’t have “Customer Reviews for WooCommerce” plugin installed? Check out our blog post: How to get more customer reviews for your WooCommerce store, automatically.

Access the Review for Discount settings

To get started, head into your WordPress dashboard, go to Reviews and click “Settings“.

To configure discount incentives, click the “Review for Discount” option from those at the top of the settings screen.

Offer discounts in return for reviews

The first settings option is enable review for discount. Ticking this box will enable the functionality for customers to be sent a discount coupon after they leave a review. Do not turn this function on until you have completed configuration and testing. We’ll come back to this setting at completion.

The second settings option is coupon to use. This is where you will determine whether to:

  1. Use an existing coupon configured in WooCommerce; or,
  2. Generate a unique coupon for each customer after they leave a review.

I recommend the second option “generate a unique coupon” because this will ensure the coupon will work for the customer by avoiding any usage restrictions on existing coupons. Going this route also prevents coupons from being leaked and used by lots of different people who haven’t actually left you a review.

The next option is BCC address. This option lets you specify an email address so that you receive a copy of all the coupons that get sent out. This is really useful for testing to make sure everything is working correctly.

Next down is the Reply-To address. This is the email address that will be used when a customer replies to the coupon email.

Generate individual coupons for each customer

Our next section is Generation of individual coupons. This will vary depending on what you selected in the coupon to use option above. If you selected existing coupon, then this will show the existing coupon information instead.

The rules related to generation of individual coupons are very much the same as what you will see in the standard WooCommerce coupon functionality.

Firstly, the discount type allows you to specify a percentage or fixed amount discount. If you have other plugins installed in your store that add additional types of fees, then they will be listed here too. The default discount type options that appear with WooCommerce are the percentage discount, fixed cart discount and fixed product discount.

Second, the coupon amount will be the value of the discount type.

For example, let’s say you wanted to create a 5% off coupon. With the “percentage discount” type selected, simply enter 5 in the coupon amount field. If you changed the discount type to “fixed cart discount” then the coupon would allow for $5 off to be applied at the shopping cart. Lastly, if you selected “fixed product discount”, the coupon would provide for $5 off a specified product.

The next setting is allow free shipping. If you tick this box, this will enable free shipping for your customers when they use their coupon.

Validity allow you to specify how many days the coupon will be valid for once generated. I recommend 90 days as a good time frame.

Minimum spend lets you specify a minimum purchase amount that customers must have in their cart in order to use the coupon. This can help increase your minimum order values, however, customers might not appreciate this if you set it too high. Make sure you think about this strategically. I would suggest 50 (that is, $50) as a good minimum.

Maximum spend is the maximum purchase amount the coupon can apply to. I recommend to leave this blank (no maximum).

Individual use only means that this coupon cannot be used with any other coupons. Check this to ensure your customers can’t double up with other coupon offers, if you want to prevent that.

Check the exclude sale items box to restrict usage if you want to exclude sale items. This option will prevent the coupon from being used on items that are already on sale in your store.

The products and exclude products settings are variable depending on what type of discount you’re offering. If you’ve selected either a percentage or a fixed cart amount discount, these two discount types will either require the products must be in, or must not be in the cart for the coupon discount to apply. If a product fixed amount discount has been selected, then these are the products that the discount coupon either will apply to or won’t apply to.

For example, with the percentage discount type selected, if a product is entered in the products field, then that product must be in the customer cart for the percentage discount to apply. If a product is entered in the exclude products field then that product must not be in the customer cart for the discount to apply.

Conversely, with the fixed product discount type selected, the fixed product the coupon applies to must be entered in the products field. In the same way, if a fixed product discount is entered in the exclude products field, then the discount will not apply to the product.

Product categories and exclude categories work much in the same way. To restrict your coupon to specific product categories, enter the product categories in the field. To exclude specific categories from the coupon, enter those in the exclude categories field.

Usage limit restricts how many times the coupon may be used before it is void in your system. The default is zero which means unlimited usage. I recommend if you are generating coupons for each customer, then you should limit them to 1, so that the customer gets one discount for leaving a review.

So that’s how to set it up if you wish to generate unique coupons for each customer after they leave a review, but what about if you want to use an existing coupon?

Send customers an existing coupon after they leave a review

Scroll up to return to the “Review for Discount” section and the coupon to use setting. Select “Existing Coupon“.

Now in place of the “Generation of Individual Coupons” section, we have the “Existing Coupon to Use” section.

Simply type in the existing coupon field to search for the coupon you want to select. This coupon will be sent to any customers who leave reviews.

This way is a lot simpler, however, your coupons are open to abuse as the coupon will be available for unlimited usage. You could restrict to one use per customer, but, you then run into the problem where the system will not allow a customer to use the coupon again in the event that they come back, buy again (which hopefully they will since you’re giving them a discount), and are sent the same coupon again.

So, I find this is a bit more open to abuse, however, you can do some really cool things with it. For example, you could use Advanced Coupons Plugin for WooCommerce, to run a loyalty program where you could offer customers bonus points for leaving reviews, rather than a discount amount. However, that is for another blog post!

Configure the discount coupon email template

All right, so you’ve chosen what kind of coupon you are going to use and set it all up. Let’s set up the email that will go out to customers after they leave a review.

Scroll down to the bottom of the screen to the “Email Template” section. This email is the one that is going to be sent out to customers after they’ve left a review, so they will not see this email until they’ve submitted a review for you after being sent a reminder by “Customer Reviews for WooCommerce“.

Email subject lets you specify the subject line. The default includes the site title at the start. I personally prefer to move this to the end and have the discount mentioned at the start. This makes the discount more visible if you have a long site title.

Another good option is to personalise the subject line a little bit more. Below the email three email content fields (Subject, Heading and Body), there are a number of variables available.

You could use the customer first name variable, for example, to say something like “Here’s your discount, Tom”. To do so, simply copy and paste the {customer_first_name} variable into the email subject.

Email heading is the field that displays at the top of the email in bold. The default is “Thank you for leaving a review”. Again you can personalise this using the variables.

Email body is the field that contains the bulk of the email. Customise this as you wish to add images or use additional variables. I recommend adding instructions on how to use the coupon code as well as a link to your store. Ensure to highlight any terms and conditions related to the use of the coupon in this email as well.

For example, if your coupons are only valid for 90 days as in the example above, include some text to say “valid for 90 days”.

If you have applied product restrictions ensure these are highlighted as well. You want your customers to be clear on what they need to do and to make it as easy as possible for them to use the discount code.

Email color 1 and Email color 2 are the “Customer Reviews for WooCommerce” default colours. To change them, simply click “Select Colour”. Make sure to test the email to see how your colours look though. The last thing you want to do is send an email that is hard to look at or read!

To send a test email, enter your email address in the Send Test field below the email colours and click the blue send test button.

Once you’re satisfied with appearance and function, it’s time to save your changes. You may recall that we chose not to enable the review for discount at the start, so let’s do that now. Scroll up to the “Review for Discount” section and check “Enable generation of discount coupons for customers who provide reviews“.

Scroll all the way to the bottom of the “Review for Discount” settings page and click “Save Changes”.

The “Review for Discount” settings page will reload and we can see that our settings have been saved, we now have our discount set up to send a coupon to customers who leave reviews.

Update your review reminder email template to offer customers the discount

Having configured the discount incentive functionality, we want to tell customers about it!

The most important place to do this is in the review invitation email. How do we do that? Click the “Review Reminder” option at the top of the settings screen to go to the main CusRev settings.

From the reviews settings screen, scroll to the “Email Template” section to find a yellow prompt informing us that “Discounts for customers who provide reviews are enabled. Don’t forget to mention it in this email to increase the number of reviews”. Add some text to your email highlighting your discount offer as appropriate. For example, I’ve added “and we’ll give you a 5% discount off your next order!” in the example below. You may also want to add the discount to the subject title for example, “& Get 5% Off!”

Really we just want to emphasise that customers can get a discount if they leave a review.

Once we’re done, scroll down to the bottom of the page to send a test. Enter your email address and click “Send Test“.

Finally, click “Save changes” and that’s it!

That’s it

We’re now incentivizing our customers to leave a review by offering them a discount. With any luck, that’s going to increase your conversion rates and you will start to see more reviews coming through. Awesome, and easy!

Are you using Customer Reviews for WooCommerce to offer your customers an incentive for their feedback? Let me know how in the comments below!

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