How to encourage reviews on WooCommerce by giving away a coupon

Reviews are a tool that has been around for a very long time, though the rise of the internet has made them increasingly popular. What was once simple word-of-mouth has now become a marketing tool in its own right, so much so that even eCommerce leaders such as Amazon are putting their product reviews in the spotlight and doing their best to get more and more.

While they may have once seemed like a nice detail on your sales pages, this is no longer the case: more than 95 per cent of shoppers say they read online reviews before buying a product, and almost the same percentage have avoided stores or products after reading bad reviews.

This means that people actively seek out reviews, and if they are few, negative or absent altogether, it can be a crucial factor in losing potential customers.

Amazon itself constantly reminds its customers via email to leave reviews of the products they purchase, but this is often not enough and this is why they offer discounts. Discount coupons offered in exchange for a review can not only help get more reviews on the site, but also encourage that particular customer to repeat purchases.

In the course of this short article we will see how to create a similar loyalty program in your WooCommerce store through the use of a plugin.

How to send a coupon to customers in exchange for a review

In theory, you could send coupons even with the basic version of WooCommerce. However, the system is so time-consuming, complex and error-prone that it doesn’t make much sense.

In fact, you would have to manually contact the customer (or set up a system to manage emails) to remind them to leave the review, then personally check that they have done so, and then email the coupon code (which is manually created for each customer) again.

Obviously, all this would cost you a lot of time and effort. Fortunately, you don’t need to do this, because you can use the WooCommerce Advanced Reviews plugin, which, among other things, allows you to automatically reward reviews with a discount coupon, choosing the discount type, its usage limits and the events that can trigger its generation.

All this can be set up in a few clicks, in an extremely simple and intuitive way.

Don’t worry: in the following points we will show you step by step how to create such a system. However, if you prefer to watch a tutorial, you can check our YouTube video!

Review for discount tutorial for WooCommerce

After installing and activating the plugin, go to YITH > Advanced Reviews to start with the configurations.

The plugin allows advanced control of website reviews, improving their visual appearance and functions (if you want to read a dedicated article you can find it here), but this time, we’re focusing on the side menu under “Modules” to enable a particular module.

Activate the review for discount module

Once you’ve opened the “Modules” tab, here’s what you’ll see:

As you can see, the plugin offers two advanced modules:

• Review Reminder – A very important feature that allows you to send email communications to your customers to remind them to leave a review.
• Review for Discounts – The feature we will be looking at today, which allows you to offer coupon codes in exchange for customer reviews.

Both of these features aim to increase the number of reviews on your site, and ideally we recommend that you use both. To avoid confusion, we will not be discussing Review Reminder in this article, but you can find more information in the dedicated article.

Then click on the toggle to activate the module and you will see the “Review for discounts” item appear in the plugin’s side menu:

Now let’s move on to the configuration of the module.

Configuring the module

This module has two tabs. The first, General Options, allows you to decide when to send the coupon to the customer:

As you can see, you can choose to send the coupon automatically after the review has been written, or wait until you approve the review, so as to avoid any possible misuse.

The rest of the configuration can be found in the second tab, “Coupons”.

This is where you will find all the coupon codes you are going to create. You can also create multiple coupons based on different events. To start the configuration and see all the options available, click on “Create Coupon”.

When to send the coupon – triggering event

Once you have started creating a discount coupon code, you will find yourself on this page:

Under the first heading you will be able to choose an identifying name for the coupon, so that it can be distinguished from others you create later. Then, below that, you will find three tabs:

• Triggering event – Defines the action that will generate the coupon.
• Coupon settings – Select the discount type and coupon value.
• Usage restrictions – Select the cases in which the coupon can be used.

Don’t worry. We’ll look at each of these tabs in detail, starting with the first one.

The item that opens this tab is the trigger event, which is the action that causes the coupon to be generated. This can be a single review or a specific number of reviews:

Choosing one or the other will change the appearance of this page significantly. If you choose “Single review”, you can specify:

• Trigger products – the products whose reviews will cause a coupon to be generated. If left empty, all products on your site will have this feature.
• Trigger categories – As above, but in this case the categories whose reviews will generate coupons.

If you choose “Multiple reviews” instead, you will see two different options:

You can choose the actual number of reviews after which the voucher will be generated and whether to send a notification to customers when they are close to the review limit to receive the discount. By selecting this option, you will be able to choose the number of reviews at which the notification will be sent.

With that done, let’s go through the types of discounts available in the “Coupon settings” tab.

Types of discounts you can offer

In the second tab of this form, you can choose the discount type:

As you can see, there are three options to choose from:

• Percentage discount, such as 10% off the value.
• Fixed product discount, e.g. 5€ discount on a specific product.
• Fixed cart discount, the same fixed value, still €5 as an example, but applied to the cart.

Immediately below you can specify the amount, either percentage or fixed.

The third option allows you to activate free shipping if you want to offer it as a reward.

Finally, you can specify the number of days this coupon will be valid before it expires.

The importance of the expiry date

It is important to remember to set an expiry date on the coupons you generate for several reasons:

• To create a sense of urgency – using the scarcity principle, showing your customers an expiration date will encourage them to use the coupon code even if they are not really interested in the purchase, as long as they do not miss the opportunity.
• Keep a tool under control – Any tool that has an impact on your sales/revenue should be under your control. You don’t want people using coupon codes years later with completely different products and marketing strategies.

So make sure you set a reasonable expiry date and communicate it to your customers!

Coupon restrictions

The third tab of this form relates to all the usage restrictions (other than the time restriction) that will be applied to your coupon:

Let’s take a look at all the options you can take advantage of:

• Minimum spend – Cart amount below which you cannot use the discount.
• Maximum spend – Cart amount above which you will not be able to use the discount (particularly useful for percentage discounts).
• Individual use only – Enabling this option means that the discount cannot be used in conjunction with any other coupons.
• Exclude sale items – Selecting this option will prevent the coupon from being applied to items with a sale price.
• Products – Products on which the coupon will be applied or which must be in the shopping basket.
• Excluded Products – Products on which the coupon CANNOT be applied.

The last two fields also apply to product categories:

Email configuration

Once you’ve done all this, all that’s left is to customize the emails that will be sent to your customers (both those that contain the coupon code and those that inform them of the number of reviews left to get it).

To do this, go to the “Emails” tab of the plugin menu, where you will find all the messages sent by the plugin:

Click on the pencil that appears on the right when you hover over a particular email to edit it:

Here you can choose the graphic appearance of the layout, its content and its configuration.

Conclusion

Reviews are a very powerful tool, and coupon codes are no less powerful: combine these two features with the WooCommerce Advanced Reviews plugin to give your eCommerce sales an immediate boost!