Reward Strategies: Encourage routine orders by issuing free gifts and credits on milestones
Encourage routine orders by rewarding customers for reaching order milestones with a one-time gift or store credit.
This guide explains how to build a Subscription Experience to issue credits or a one-time gift to customers as a reward at different stages of their customer journey.
- Shopify Checkout Integration
Before you start
- Credits empower you to retain customer value by offering credit for refunds, customer support resolutions, and more. See Credits for more information.
- Recharge created the Issue free gifts and credits on milestones template so that you can quickly implement a Rewards program for your customers. While the template is pre-built, you can completely control the experience and update or remove any included nodes to personalize the customer experience further.
How it works
Use Recharge's prebuilt Issue free gifts and credits on milestones template to reward customers for reaching order milestones with a one-time gift or store credit, incentivizing them to continue engaging with your brand.
As customers near set milestones, they receive notifications reminding them of the upcoming reward, further encouraging additional purchases.
When customers reach the milestone, they receive the reward, helping to foster loyalty plus increase retention and lifetime value. By reminding customers of their rewards, you can prevent churn and boost customer engagement.
Step 1 - Create the experience
Create your Encourage routine orders experience in the Recharge merchant portal:
- Click Retain in the merchant portal and select Rewards from the dropdown.
- Click Create from template and select Issue free gifts and credits on milestones.
- Click Next to access the template.
- On the next page, select when customers should enter the flow:
- After order is processed: Reward customers as soon as Recharge processes a subscription checkout or recurring order for a customer.
- X days before recurring order: Notify customers before their upcoming order about the available rewards, and reduce the chance of churn.
- Click Get started to review the template.
Step 2 - Review the template
Recharge designed this template to streamline the Rewards creation process. This ready-made template is flexible, allowing you to tailor the experience by adjusting or removing the preconfigured nodes.
Trigger node
You can update the Trigger node to set customer conditions and define which customers should enter the experience, or you can keep the existing trigger rules to process the flow on every single order.
Conditional branches
Recharge created this template to maximize customer returns and reward customers for their loyalty. You can add or remove conditional branches to better suit your business needs. Click the three vertical dot menu in the Conditional branch node to delete a specific branch, or add additional branches if you'd like to use a different method of applying credit or incentives to your customers' accounts.
You can also change the conditions if necessary. Click on the three vertical dot menu in the Conditional branch node and click the pencil icon next to the branch name to change the conditions customers must meet to enter a specific branch.
Click Apply to save any changes. See available conditions for additional information.
Credit and incentive nodes
By default, Recharge configured the Encourage routine orders template to trigger based on the customer's subscription journey. The template is based on streak numbers, and issues the following incentives:
- Streak 1: You can configure an incentive in the incentive node, such as a one-time free gift or discount, to reward customers after their first order
- Streak 3: Recharge automatically configured the template with the Credit node to reward customers with a $5.00 store credit after processing their third consecutive order
- Streak 6: Reward customers after their sixth consecutive order with a one-time free gift or discount, by creating your incentive in the incentive node
- Streak 9: Recharge automatically configured the template with the Credit node to reward customers with a $5.00 store credit after processing their ninth consecutive order
Segment node
Use the segment node to add or remove customers from customer segments after they reach the specific point in the experience. See Using the segment node for Reward Strategies for additional details.
For example, you can segment all customers who receive a milestone incentive after their first order to analyze their purchasing behavior as they continue in the subscription experience.
Click on the three vertical dot menu in the Segment node and select Delete to remove the segment node from the flow canvas if you do not want to segment customers.
Notification node
Keep Recharge's prebuilt notifications, or click on the Notification node and change each notification to suit your brand and voice. Consider removing the existing Notification node and adding the Klaviyo node to send your notifications through Klaviyo.
Step 3 - Manage settings
Click Manage settings to rename the experience and add a description. You can set the flow duration and run count limit. See Settings for additional details. These settings cannot be altered after activating the flow.
Step 4 - Save and activate the flow
Save the changes made to the flow template.
Click Activate Flow when you are ready to go live and apply credits to customer accounts.