Offer a WooCommerce membership program to drive holiday sales

The Black Friday and Cyber Monday rush may be over, but the next few weeks in December are still a prime sales opportunity to close out the year strong! A neat way to drive more holiday sales is to offer memberships on your WooCommerce store, especially as an alternative to coupon codes.

Let’s take an approach inspired by The North Face as a great holiday strategy. They offer free shipping for joining, and they can even offer discounts targeted to members, no coupon code needed.

This way, they don’t publish coupons that anyone can use — they get account registration in exchange for giving membership benefits. Creating your own WooCommerce membership program is a great way to continue holiday deals without devaluing your brand via constant discounting.

How will a WooCommerce membership program help you?

You implement this strategy easily with our membership plugin for WooCommerce, Constellation. Offer a free membership to drive more registrations — which in turn helps improve your average repeat purchase rate.

Customers with registered accounts benefit from more personalization and more seamless shopping experiences. Everyone wins!

Membership benefits for customers

Customers who join your free membership program get a better experience with your brand:

• Customers can get personalized recommendations for products they might love, since their purchase history is in one place.
  • 💡 Ready to do some advanced on-site personalization? Check out PersonalizeWP to control content or messages based on customer profiles.
• They can earn rewards on purchases if you want to offer a loyalty program (either with a WooCommerce loyalty plugin, or by using your email marketing tool to send a coupon for every Nth order).
  • Or let us know what we should build here!
• Customers can save payment methods and addresses for easier checkout in the future.
• They can review historical purchases, making it easy to find old orders or see the status of a shipment in one place.

Benefits of offering memberships for your store

As the seller, you get a significant boost from having more registered vs guest customers, too:

• Acquiring new customers is five to 25 times more expensive than selling to an existing customer. Encouraging account creation makes it easier for you to market to customers you’ve already acquired.

Even though you could market to previous customers via SMS or email, accounts let you create loyalty offers, which are powerful motivators for repeat purchases.

• Signed in purchasing is more streamlined (customer details are saved), which improves conversion rates for customers who already have accounts.
• Customer accounts can make it easier to track discount usage, so those “first time customer” coupons you offer aren’t used on every single purchase.
• Signed in shoppers provide more accurate analytics: when you can identify a user across multiple sessions, you can get a more accurate view of shopper behavior on your site.
  • You can also more accurately measure customer LTV, letting you improve marketing offers, and better understand how much you can spend to acquire new customers.
• Signed in shoppers can easily look up details from previous orders, reducing support burden on you to track down order or shipment information.

Sold? Let’s show you how you can drive more registrations, better repeat purchase rates, and a better shopping experience by offering a WooCommerce membership program with Constellation.

Create a free WooCommerce membership program

First, we want to promote our free membership program! We’ll create awareness of the offer for non-members, and set up 2 benefits for members once they join:

1. Create a membership free shipping method. This will only be offered to your members without any order minimum or coupon code as a perk for joining.
2. Create a member discount on all products. This is totally optional, but it can be a good incentive to join. You can even make the member discount active or inactive at different times (to do flash sales or member-only sales). We’ve seen discounts of 5-10% be just as effective as bigger ones, so experiment!

Create signup awareness and promos

Let’s create a header bar and a landing page to promote our free WooCommerce membership. One of the neat things Constellation can do is include non-member blocks. (There’s member blocks, too!) These are “group” or container blocks that let you nest content inside, and that content is only shown to members or non-members, depending on what you choose.

We’ll add a non-member block, and put a group inside of it. The group will be full width, with a background and text color. Finally, we’ll include a paragraph with our offer and links to a landing page.

Here’s a quick walkthrough of how we created this header bar:

Now we need a landing page to show the benefits of our WooCommerce membership program. The North Face uses one with a bold header, and some content outlining every member benefit.

Let’s create something very similar for our example. Block patterns can make this easy for you! You don’t need a huge amount of content to start — just focus on the few main benefits of your membership program, with signup links at the top and bottom of the page.

Now we’re good! My links all point to my account registration form on my site. I’m going to set up a free membership for any time someone registers an account.

Configure a plan for your membership program

By going to Constellation > Plans, you can add a new membership plan for your free program. We’ll grant access upon account registration, and make the membership length unlimited.

At this point, we can also easily set up a purchasing discount to incentivize signup — something as simple as a 5-10% discount can often drive more signups than free shipping alone!

These discounts can also be used for member sales — for example, you could do a pre-holiday flash sale offering 30% off to members to drive signups, instead of a coupon code! (In fact, The North Face got me with this exact tactic on Cyber Monday — I wanted the discount and free shipping.)

Create free shipping for members

Now lets set up the member free shipping offer. Go to the shipping zone(s) you want to offer free shipping for, and add a new shipping method (even if you have a free one already!).

We want to make sure that our member shipping rate has no minimum order amount, so we’ll offer free shipping with an active membership.

We’ll select our new plan under the “allowed plans” for free shipping.

Now XLPR pass members will automatically get free shipping for all orders, regardless of whether they meet any “minimum total” or not!

You can now repeat this for any other shipping zones that should offer member free shipping.

Bonus: update public free shipping rates

If you offer global free shipping rates (like, with an order minimum), your members might see both free shipping rates. In some cases you might want this, such as if your global free shipping rate is faster than the member shipping (encouraging higher order values!).

However, if all free shipping is the same, it could be good to hide it the public rate from members. Go to your global free shipping rates — the ones with a minimum order amount or coupon required — and add your new pass as a “disallowed plan”.

This will hide the rate for your members so they don’t end up seeing both rates.

Double-check your membership flows

Here’s the goal we’re getting to: a member discount, and free shipping for our members.

Let’s see how we did!

• When a non-member purchases items, they pay full price, and will either have to pay for shipping, or see free shipping if they exceed my $75 target.
• When a member purchases, they get a 10% discount, and they are offered my member free shipping for all orders (whether they meet any minimums or not).
  • Bonus: even though my member would be eligible for free shipping with an order over $75, they only see the member rate.

Offer free WooCommerce membership programs for holiday sales

Offering a free membership program in WooCommerce helps your store as well as your customers.

This is an excellent time of year to experiment with offering a membership program, especially since you might already be discounting products or offering free shipping — get something in return for this great offer! Improve your marketing and analytics by driving account registration with your membership offer.

Constellation makes offering a WooCommerce membership program simple and quick to implement, and we offer a 30-day refund policy so you can give it a try to pump up your holiday sales.

Constellation, a membership plugin

• Exceptionally flexible perks & rules for an unlimited number of members
• Offer free or paid programs, including recurring billing or one-time payments
• For purchasing clubs, publishers, online learning, communities, & more

$249

buy plugin

Learn more