Offering WooCommerce free gifts can be an effective strategy to drive sales and enhance customer satisfaction.
According to research conducted by Harris Interactive, 90% of consumers say that receiving a free gift with a purchase increases brand loyalty, making them more likely to buy from the same brand again.
With the right plugin, you can easily offer free gifts in your WooCommerce store, putting a smile on your customers' faces while boosting sales and average order value (AOV).
In this blog, we will share how to offer WooCommerce free gifts in your store in 3 different ways:
With FunnelKit, you can build sales funnels that pitch the right products to the right customers at the right time and maximize average order value.
Plus, effortlessly integrate automated email and SMS marketing to engage with your audience, ensuring every opportunity is seized and customers keep coming back for repeat purchases.
Contents
WooCommerce free gifts are promotional items or products offered to customers without any additional cost, serving as an incentive to make a purchase. Typically, customers need to buy other products to qualify for the free gift.
You can strategically offer various complementary products or surplus inventory items as free or complementary gifts to enhance customer satisfaction and drive sales.
For example, you can offer makeup wipes with a cosmetics combo purchase or a digital version of a book alongside its physical counterpart.
In the case of surplus inventory items, you can offer a buy-one-get-one deal where users get another product of the same item or a different item for free.
You can also offer perishable items or products with a limited expiry date as free gifts. However, you must carefully choose them, and their expiration date is clearly communicated to customers.
In the case of digital products such as online courses or subscriptions, you can offer a limited-time trial as a free gift.
A thoughtful pairing enriches the customer's experience and adds more value to their purchase.
Getting a free gift makes customers really happy when they're shopping. It makes them like the store even more and want to keep coming back.
Offering free gifts in WooCommerce can serve several purposes and benefits:
By strategically implementing WooCommerce free gifts, you can drive sales and foster long-term relationships with your customers, ultimately bringing success to your online business.
Let's take a look at some of the best WooCommerce free gift plugins we have compiled after thorough research. Here, you can discover all these plugins' key features and prices.
FunnelKit Cart is a mini cart that enables you to give away free gifts using the WooCommerce mini cart. It automatically adds complementary items when customers spend over a certain amount on products.
FunnelKit Cart is a sliding cart for WooCommerce, enabling customers to access it anywhere on the site to view, update items, apply coupons, and more. This streamlines the shopping process by eliminating the additional, redundant step of visiting the cart page.
With this WooCommerce side cart, you can effortlessly offer upsells right from the cart. This allows users to conveniently add items with a single click, helping them reach the required amount to qualify for a free gift.
Additionally, the slide cart displays a progress bar at the top of the shopping cart, reminding users how much more they need to spend to avail themselves of the free gift.
✅ Here are some notable features of this WooCommerce free gift plugin:
Price: A free version of FunnelKit Cart is available. However, the milestone-based free gift reward feature is only available in the premium version.
You can buy the pro version with the FunnelKit Funnel Builder Plus and the above package, which costs $119.5 for two websites.
FunnelKit Funnel Builder is the best WooCommerce sales funnel builder that helps you boost conversion rates by streamlining the sales process and optimizing user experience.
It also increases the average order value of your store by maximizing engagement at every step of the customer journey with the right and relevant upsells
FunnelKit Funnel Builder is the best WooCommerce sales funnel builder that allows you to offer free gifts on the checkout page as an order bump (pre-purchase upsell).
This plugin is an excellent tool for creating a global sales funnel that offers both pre and post-purchase upsells to boost the average order value of your store.
This way, even when you offer the pre-purchase offer, also known as the order bump, for free, you can recover the cost by selling them a high-value upsell right after the customer's checkout.
With this plugin's Rules feature, you can offer relevant free gifts to customers by implementing conditionals based on different matrices, such as the product category of the cart items, order total, purchase history, etc.
In addition to AOV boosting features, FunnelKit also comes with many prebuilt templates that include landing pages, one/multistep checkout pages, upsell pages, and thank you pages that you can use to beautify your WooCommerce store.
✅ Here are some notable features of this WooCommerce free gift plugin:
Price: A basic version of FunnelKit Funnel Builder is available on WordPress.org. The free gift feature Order Bump is available with the FunnelKit Funnel Builder Plus and the above package. The plus package is priced at $119.5 for two websites.
Advanced Coupon is an excellent choice if you want to offer a free gift that users can claim with a coupon. In addition to free gift coupons, you can also offer BOGO coupons, store credit, url coupons, and much more.
It also comes with an advanced feature in the form of store credit. Store owners can provide store credit to customers that they can use at checkout. Additionally, store owners can offer users store credit instead of money in case of refunds.
✅ Here are some notable features of this WooCommerce free gift plugin:
Price: It’s a freemium plugin. The premium version starts at $119.00 for a single site.
All three plugins we share are extremely useful for different use cases of offering free gifts.
However, our experts recommend that you go for both FunnelKit Cart and FunnelKit Funnel Builder because both premium plugins are included in the FunnelKit Plus package. This way, you'll have both plugins included in one purchase without needing to buy any extras.
When you get both FunnelKit Cart and FunnelKit Funnel Builder, you have the power to utilize the free gift strategy in different ways while earning profit.
Move to the next section to find out how you can use FunnelKit plugins to offer WooCommerce free gifts in different ways.
Before we move on to the main process of how to offer free gifts in WooCommerce, make sure to install and activate both.
Note: As mentioned earlier, The premium version of FunnelKit Cart is available with FunnelKit Funnel Builder Plus and the above package.
You can install the free version from WordPress.org. If you need help activating FunnelKit, check out our installation guide.
From the WordPress dashboard, navigate to FunnelKit ⇒ Cart and enable the “Enable Cart” option to turn on the mini cart.
After that, customize the general settings, such as Icon Visibility, Cart Heading, Hide Cart Icon, Auto Open Side Cart, etc.
Like general settings, you can customize different settings related to Coupon Field, Cart Summary, checkout section, and empty cart.
To enable the Upsells option, go to the Upsells tab and turn on the “Enable Cart Upsells” option.
Now, you can choose the display style for your WooCommerce cart to upsell. You get five different styles to choose from.
🔔 Note: In all the styles, each related product shows up with a product image, price, an add-to-cart button, and a small form where the user can select or update the quantity.
You can choose the style you like best.
With FunnelKit, you can offer milestone-based rewards. There are three types of rewards: free shipping, discount, and free gift.
You have the flexibility to offer all three rewards to encourage users to purchase products or offer only free gifts.
For instance, if you set up:
This way, people are encouraged to buy more products to avail of the free gift.
However, it’s not necessary to offer all three types of rewards; you can just offer a free gift if customers purchase products worth a certain amount.
To do this, move to the Rewards tab and click on the ‘Create Reward’ button.
Choose the type as a free gift.
Now, set the following options:
Make sure to click on ‘Save Changes’ when you’re done.
If you check the front end, you should see the free offer with a message on the top bar asking users to add more products to avail themselves of the discount.
We recommend utilizing all three types of rewards FunnelKit Cart offers to gamify the shopping experience and effectively increase the average order value.
To learn more, watch this video 👇
For this process, we will use FunnelKit Funnel Builder. Make sure you have the funnel builder plus plan.
Now follow the following steps to offer free gifts in WooCommerce based on different conditions automatically:
The first step is to create a store checkout that will replace the default WooCommerce checkout.
Navigate to FunnelKit ⇒ Store Checkout and click on the ‘Create Store Checkout’ button.
After that, select your favorite page builder. Here, we are going with the Elementor page builder.
To select a template, hover on the template you like and click on Preview.
Now, choose whether you want a single-page checkout or a multi-page checkout. We are going with a three-step checkout.
After that, click on “Import This Funnel,” provide a name, and click on ‘Done’ to import this funnel as your default checkout.
This will import a new store checkout with three steps: checkout, one-click upsell, and thank you.
🔔 Note: You can customize the look and content of the checkout page. For this, check these guides
Next, you need to create an order bump step. For this, come back to the store checkout page and click on “Add Order Bump.”
After that, provide a name and click on Add.
Now you will see different order bump skins. To import the one you like, hover over that and click on Import.
Search for the product and add an order bump. You can offer multiple products as order bumps here. After that, click on Add.
🔔Note: You can also offer multiple gifts. In such a case, search for and add all the products you want to offer as a free gift.
Next, customize the order bump content by adding the product description, exclusive text, button text, and image size. You can also add custom images.
🔔Note: You can see the preview on the right side as you edit.
Make sure to click on Save.
To make the free gift process smoother, you need to make sure the free gift automatically gets added to the cart when users are on the checkout page.
For this, move to the Style tab and enable the “Pre-select Order Bump by default” option.
In this section, you can also customize other options, such as the position of the free gift on the checkout page, call to action text, button style, etc.
Again, make sure to click Save.
You must be thinking, we are talking about offering free gifts, but the product has a price, right? Well, we will take care of it in the next section.
Now it’s time for the important part, which is to ensure that the gift we are offering is free. For that, move to the Products tab and set a 100% discount on the order bump product. This will ensure that the customer is not charged anything for this particular product at the checkout.
🔔Note: Now, when anyone tries to checkout on your WooCommerce store, this complimentary gift will be seamlessly added to your cart during checkout; no extra steps are required!
Here is a preview of the free gift on the checkout page:
You can see the order summary in the mini cart where the product is added with zero price.
Offering the same gifts to everyone may not be a good idea as it will not be relevant. At the same time, offering free gifts to everyone placing a very low-dollar order may result in you losing money.
To tackle these issues, FunnelKit Funnel Builder offers you the Rule feature, which allows you to set different rules for free gifts based on:
Now, let’s check how you can set this rule.
To set conditions, move to the Rules tab and click on “Add Rules”.
After that, set rules that will activate the free gift according to your strategy.
✅ Set free gift if users buy from a certain category
This is an excellent strategy to ensure you offer the relevant free gift. For instance, if someone buys food items with no beauty product, offering them lip balm might not be the greatest idea.
On the other hand, offering lip balm to someone buying skincare products is a great idea, right?
To set this, select the Cart Category(s), then the match type “matches any of,” and in the value tab, search and select the category.
✅ Set free gift if users buy products worth a certain amount
Offering free gifts only to people who order over a certain amount gives you a better chance of making a profit.
You can set this rule by clicking on “Add Condition”.
Then, the condition is set, for example, that the cart total is greater or equal to 150. You can use either Cart Total or Cart Subtotal.
Make sure to click on Save Changes.
We shared two rules; you can follow the same steps to create as many rules as you want.
🔔 Note: You can offer various order bumps and set different conditions for them. This way, you can offer different free gifts to customers who meet specific criteria.
After setting up the order bumps, you can customize the upsell page, and thank you page as well.
Make sure to enable the Store Checkout so that everything you have worked for so far goes live.
And that’s it! Now your store should have a beautiful checkout page that offers WooCommerce free gifts to users.
WooCommerce free gift coupons can be particularly useful when offering free gifts to specific groups of people. For example, you may want to provide free gifts only to new users or individuals celebrating their birthdays.
To do this, you can simply create a coupon and share it with them so that only they can redeem the free gift with that coupon.
To offer free gifts with coupons, you need to follow these steps:
🔔 Note: Before proceeding with these steps, please ensure you have completed the first four steps outlined in the second method we shared, as this is a continuation of that process.
From the WordPress dashboard, go to Marketing ⇒ Coupons and click on ‘Add Coupon’.
Here, you can generate a coupon or create a custom coupon. You can also provide a description. However, this is optional.
One thing to keep in mind while creating this coupon is that you don’t need to specify any discount here because we will offer a free gift, not any discount.
On the Usage Restriction tab, you can set the Minimum and Maximum spend. This is optional because you can set the order limit later with the FunnelKit rule.
You can also check the 'individual use only' option. This means users can't use other coupons along with this one, as it may provide a larger discount along with the free gift than you would prefer.
Click on ‘Publish’ to create the coupon.
Go to the Order Bump that you want to offer as a free gift with a coupon.
🔔 Note: Please ensure that the order bump product you are editing has a 100% discount applied to it. Also, the pre-selection setting is activated so the product gets added to the cart when users apply the coupon.
Then, move to the Rules tab. Now apply the rule “Cart Coupons”, match type “matched any of, “and on the Values field, select the coupon you just created.
Make sure to click on ‘Save Changes’.
Here, we will offer a Fragrance Sample to users who purchase products worth 200 or more (as previously set when creating the coupon) and apply the coupon.
Here is a preview of the WooCommerce free gift coupon work:
And there you have it! That's how effortlessly you can implement a WooCommerce free gift coupon strategy.
Well, it’s hard to associate the idea of offering something for free with making profits. But it can be done.
However, offering free gifts can harm your business and result in loss if you don't consider certain things.
Here are some factors to consider:
Strategically offering WooCommerce free gifts while considering the mentioned factors not only adds value to customers but also generates profit simultaneously.
To learn more about how to offer free gifts so you don’t end up losing money, move to the next section.
Here are some of the best practices you can follow to ensure you make a profit despite offering free gifts:
Conduct thorough cost-benefit analyses before finalizing a free gift to ensure it aligns with financial goals and yields favorable returns.
Taking the time to analyze ensures you're making the best choice for your budget and business growth and prevents the possibility of the free gift backfiring and resulting in losses.
Boost your sales by offering free gifts when customers spend a certain amount. Milestone-based rewards will encourage larger purchases and increase your profits.
Make sure to calculate the cost-effectiveness of free gifts to ensure they contribute positively to your profitability without causing losses.
Offer free gifts relevant to your target audience and complement their purchases. This enhances perceived value and encourages repeat business.
Unless you offer useful, relevant gifts, people will be tempted to place large orders to receive a free gift. Besides, offering low-quality gifts may harm your brand reputation.
Automate the free gift process for a smoother experience. Ensure customers receive their free gifts promptly and without manual intervention.
This will streamline the shopping process and delight the customer with a free gift at the same time.
By offering upsells, you can ensure customers end up making a larger purchase which then can cover the price of the free gift and make you profit.
When you offer a mile-stone-based free gift, it’s a great idea to provide upsell product recommendations directly in the shopping cart to help customers discover complementary items and increase their order value.
So far, we have discussed how to get users to buy more by offering a free gift. This strategy is effective, but it will only work for those who land on your website.
To ensure people land on your website, you need to promote the free gift campaign, and emails are the best way to do so.
Automated email marketing is one of the most effective modes of digital marketing today, and when used correctly, it can help you generate 320% more revenue. Especially when you want to offer a free gift with a coupon, you can share the coupon with the target audience via email.
Here are some of the email campaigns you can use to promote WooCommerce free gifts to generate more revenue:
You can run a broadcast campaign that sends emails to all your existing subscribers to promote that you are offering free shipping.
You can easily create your emails with a drag-and-drop visual email and send broadcast emails right from your WordPress dashboard using FunnelKit Automations.
🔔Note: To find more details, read the blog on broadcast email
You can send a special email to customers who previously purchased from your store but have been inactive for a while.
You can write an email asking users to come back and shop again to receive the free gift. Also, make sure the offer is available for a limited period of time to create urgency among the users.
With FunnelKit Automations, you can easily send users that were inactive for a specific period of time.
🔔Note: Read this to find out how to set up a winback campaign.
Surprising people with a free gift on their birthday is a fabulous way to establish strong relationships with your customers.
With FunnelKit Automations, you can easily capture the date of birth of your contacts and send beautifully designed emails to surprise them with a gift.
🔔 Note: To find more details, read the blog on automated birthday email.
With FunnelKit Automations, you can send many other types of transactional and promotional emails in addition to the ones we mentioned above. To find out more about FunnelKit Automations, read the blog on automated emails.
Our experts strongly recommend promoting your free gift offer to multiply the revenue generated.
Here, we have compiled a list of common questions about WooCommerce free products along with answers:
You can provide complimentary gifts using additional plugins such as FunnelKit. With this plugin, you can offer milestone-based free gifts on a sliding cart, provide automated free gifts on the checkout page, and also apply conditions to the checkout page so that only people with specific coupon codes can avail themselves of the free gift.
No, WooCommerce doesn't offer gift cards by default. However, you can integrate this feature into your WooCommerce store with the help of an additional WordPress plugin.
To begin offering free gifts to your customers, you'll first need to install and activate FunnelKit. Once installed, you can extend this feature to all your customers or tailor it to specific groups, such as those who make minimum orders or particular user roles, and so on.
Free gifts attract customers by offering something extra for their purchase, making them feel valued and incentivized to buy.
The advantages of free gift sales promotions include attracting more customers, encouraging larger purchases, fostering brand loyalty, and generating excitement and buzz around your brand.
Offering a free gift is an effective way to promote your online store and increase your sales.
By implementing a smart reward system where users must purchase products worth a certain amount, you continue to make a profit while promoting your products.
When you implement conditional free gifts, you can make the free gift strategy more effective by offering relevant products.
Our experts also recommend that you use the coupon code to offer a free gift this way, you can control who can avail of the free gift and how many times.
Depending on your store’s marketing strategy, feel free to utilize any ways we shared to offer free gifts to boost sales.
So, start leveraging the WooCommerce free gift strategy today!
