Gift product strategy and offering WooCommerce gifts to customers is one of the successful ways of digital marketing. By applying this tactic, you can make customers interested in buying from your online store and attract more leads to your ecommerce website.
For years, companies have been giving you products as gifts with purchases. This method name is gift with purchase marketing strategy. Some of these gifts are related to the brand, such as Marlboro cigarettes, which gave away an ashtray for the purchase of a box of cigarettes. While some other gifts are less related to the type of business; Like banks that give a toaster as a gift to open a new account.
Today, online stores continue to use WooCommerce gifts with purchase as a strategy to add more value to their brands and strengthen their competitive advantage.
Of course, attracting customers is not the only reason for applying this strategy, but there are many more benefits that make it necessary to offer gift products in your online store.
Let’s review some of them:
What is a gift with purchase?
Gift with purchase is a marketing tactic used to attract buyers’ attention. Run a gift-with-purchase promotion, can improve your brand awareness and encourage customers to buy because they get more value for the same price.
Free gifts are one or more products of online stores that are awarded to customers if they fulfill certain conditions in their orders. For example, increasing the number of items in the shopping cart or the order amount resulted in adding some products to the customer’s shopping list as a gift. These gifts are usually offered as a list to the customers on the cart page to let them enjoy selecting one of them to add to their cart for free. It is also possible to add gift with purchase automatically to the customer carts.
If you want a gift with purchase sales promotion has a greater effect on increasing the sales of online store products, so it is better to offer them for a limited time. Some online shops also use gift with purchase marketing to advertise new products.
Gift with purchase promotion is a popular way to improve customer loyalty. Several online sites allow customers to add one or more free products to their cart when they place a certain number of orders on their site.
Why do customers love receiving free gifts?
Customers love receiving free gifts because it creates a sense of value and appreciation. Use gift with purchase strategy is often perceived as a bonus or reward, enhancing the overall shopping experience. They trigger positive emotions, making customers feel special and valued by the brand. Additionally, free gifts can reduce the perceived risk of trying new products, as customers feel they are getting more for their money. This emotional connection fosters loyalty and encourages repeat purchases.
What are the psychological effects of free gifts on customers?
Use gift with purchase strategy has several psychological effects on customers. They tap into the principle of reciprocity, making customers feel obligated to return the favor, often through future purchases or brand loyalty. Free gifts also activate the “pleasure centers” in the brain, releasing dopamine and creating a sense of happiness and satisfaction.
This positive association with the brand can lead to increased trust and a stronger emotional connection. Furthermore, free gifts can reduce decision fatigue by simplifying the purchasing process, as customers feel they are gaining extra value without additional effort.
Why using a gift with purchase strategy is important for your ecommerce store?
Offering a gift product with purchase is a sales tactic that is used to attract the attention of buyers. Other promotions, such as offering discounts or free shipping, usually reduce the value of the product. However, gift with purchase is used to add value to your services. It can encourage customers to buy because they get more value for the same price.
Here are some reasons why offering free gifts is a must marketing strategy for your online business:
1. Adding more value to the brand
The purpose of WooCommerce gifts with purchase is to provide more value to the customer. Other promotions, such as discounts, may lower your brand value, while a giveaway can increase it.
This way you don’t lose a significant amount of cash from your profit margin, which might be the case with deep discounts or shipping options.
By taking advantage of the gift product strategy, you can add more value to your brand and make customers think about buying more products from your website. This can be especially important if you have a luxury brand, like most cosmetics companies.
2. Increasing the desire to buy
By offering a gift product along with the purchase, customers feel that there is more value in their purchase. Therefore, the probability of placing an order or buying more products increases. When they know that there is another product waiting for them for the same price, they feel there is more value in their purchase comparing what they paid for.
On one hand, there is no doubt that all customers are trying to make good economic decisions, so, this strategy can create strong purchasing power and desire. On the other hand, the free gifts promotions are usually unique and limited to a period, which increases the desire to purchase in the short term which makes it an excellent marketing strategy, especially on a special date such as Christmas, Thanksgiving, or mother day.
3. Increase sales: How does a gift-with-purchase strategy increase sales?
In most cases, a gift product is offered only if the customer purchases a certain number of items. Therefore, to receive the gift, the customer must purchase a certain amount. This method motivates the customer to increase the number of units purchased to reach that gift. For example, you get a gift for every $75 purchase. If a customer buys $60 of a product, they may purchase another product for $15 to receive the free gift in his/her cart.
It’s an easy way to add more products to customers’ carts (especially cheaper ones).
4. Boost average order value: How does offering gifts influence average order value?
Most gifts are a small or modified version of another product or complementary products. These gifts will make customers try other products of your online store and maybe even become interested in them. Customers are likely to visit your store after testing this gift to buy that product in full size. This causes repeat purchases and ultimately increases customer loyalty.
5. Attracting customer loyalty: Can free gifts improve customer loyalty and retention?
Along with these repeat purchases, customers love the free WooCommerce gift. A valuable gift when shopping shows that you care. You give gifts to your customers because you want them to have the best possible experience when buying your product. Which can result in increasing their loyalty to your brand.
6. Attracting new customers
Promotions and discounts are known as the best tactics for attracting new customers to an online store. With a good offer, you can get new customers and communicate with them. You can do this by selling products with gifts, free shipping, or special discounts for the first purchase.
Promotional offers such as Gift product strategy allow your business to use word of mouth marketing strategy as well.
7. Increase site traffic by offering gift products
If the contacts and users know that your online store is going to hold a discount festival, even if this strategy does not lead to more sales, you can increase the traffic to your site. Why? Because many users will visit your website to see discounts and gift products.
8. Boosting sales of in-stock products: How can free gifts help clear out slow-moving inventory?
Some gift with purchase campaigns like BOGO or Buy x Get y can help you increase the sales of products that remained in stock for a while. It is a great tactic, especially when you need to empty your warehouse very soon or you want to get rid of some products whose expiry dates are coming soon.
9. Improve brand awareness: How can a gift-with-purchase strategy boost brand awareness?
One of the most important advantages of gift-with-purchase campaigns is improving brand awareness. The new e-commerce businesses or online stores with too many competitors can use the gift with purchase marketing to stand out and impressively introduce their brands and products.
New brands also can collaborate with other famous brands and request them to offer their products as free gifts. In this way, the customers of a famous online shop get familiar with the new brands and may visit their sites to directly order products from them.
10. Encourage customers to buy new collections
It is sometimes very difficult for customers to trust online stores to buy new products. In this case, store owners need to run a gift-with-purchase promotion to entice customers to order those products. BOGO deal is known as the best marketing tactic for offering gifts with purchases and boosting sales of new products.
How to create a successful Gift with purchase product strategy in WooCommerce?
If you are the manager of a WooCommerce store website that sells your products online, you must make your website flexible and provide a good experience for your customers and users.
Adding a free gift to the customer’s shopping cart is easily possible through the Free Gifts for WooCommerce plugin. Using this plugin, you can specify different conditions and rules so that gift products are added to your customers’ shopping carts at a certain time or by purchasing a certain amount. The many features of this plugin will help you provide a much better shopping experience for your customers and ultimately increase your income.
How Free Gift for WooCommerce plugin help to run a gift-with-purchase promotion?
The WooCommerce free gifts plugin comes with all the tools and options you need for offering gifts with purchase. Here, we introduced the most useful features allowing you to create and customize gifts with purchase promotions.
Different methods to set free gift promotion strategy
When you decide to use a gift with purchase marketing strategy, the first step is to choose a method. Choosing the best method depends on the objective of your gift with purchase campaign. To help you easily run any campaign based on your marketing strategy, a list of all useful methods is provided in the free gifts for WooCommerce plugin, including:
- Simple: Offer a gift with purchase on every order. Useful for boosting overall sales of your online store.
- Tiered Quantity: Offering gifts based on the quantity level. The more items customers add to their carts, the more gifts will be received.
- Bulk Quantity: The objective is the same as Tiered Quantity: Encouraging customers to order more items to receive more gifts.
- Bulk Pricing: Offer gift with purchase based on the amount of order. You can set different ranges and offer more gifts to the customers who ordered in a higher range. This is useful for boosting sales of expensive products in your online store.
- Cart Subtotal: Use this method to offer GWP to the customers that their order amount exceeded the target.
- Buy x Get x: This method is very popular for encouraging customers to buy a specific product and receive the same product for free. WooCommerce BOGO deal is the most famous gift with purchase marketing strategy you can run with this method.
- Buy x Get y: WooCommerce buy x get y is almost the same as the previous method. The only difference is you can offer a gift which is different from the product that customers ordered.
- Cheapest item in cart: Offering the cheapest item in the cart as free gift with purchase can entice your customers to prefer your online store over other competitors.
Unlimited conditions to customize gift with purchase sales promotion
In the free gifts for WooCommerce plugin, you can add as many conditions as you need to your rule. The various options available in the Condition section when customizing your rule enable you to create flexible gifts with purchase sales promotions.
Almost all conditions that you need to run a gift-with-purchase promotion are covered in this section. Here we introduced you to the most popular one:
- Date & Time: You can limit gift with purchase campaigns to a specific date or time to make your customers feel the urgency and boost your sales in a short while.
- Cart item: You can set this condition to offer gift with purchase to customers that order specific products from your online store.
- Cart item quantity: This condition is useful when your gift with purchase marketing strategy is based on the number of products that customers added to their cart.
- Cart item Subtotal: If the purpose of your gift with purchase marketing is encouraging customers to increase the total amount of their orders, you can set this condition for your rule.
- Purchase history: Purchase history is a great gift marketing strategy for respecting your loyal customers. You can set this condition to appreciate their repeated purchases from your store.
- User role: This is a perfect gift marketing strategy when you want to reward special users of your website. For example, you can set the rule to offer free gifts to sales managers, partners, or any other user role that you have already defined on your WordPress.
- Registered user: It is very popular for WordPress websites to offer GWP to subscribers or registered users. In the condition section, you can easily limit the rule to offer the gift to the logged-in users only.
- And many more.
Example: Create a BOGO deal to run a gift-with-purchase promotion
Let’s use the free gift for WooCommerce plugin to run a buy one get one promotion with the below scenario:
All customers who order wines at the weekends will receive the same one for free.
To offer this gift with purchase, follow the below steps:
- After installation and activation of the plugin, go to WordPress Dashboard > Woo Free Gift > Rules.
- Press Add Rule to open the Rule form.
- Fill in the form as follows:
- Choose Buy x Get x from the Method list.
- Insert 1 in both the Get and Buy fields and mark Auto Add Gift To Cart.
- Press Add Product and choose Product Category from the first field then select In List from the second field and then Wine from the list of categories.
- Add Conditions and choose Date > Days of Week from the Condition list. Then set Saturday and Sunday in the last field.
By pressing Save Changes, your customers will receive the gift on the weekends as shown below:
What are the best practices for using a gift-with-purchase strategy?
The best practices for a gift-with-purchase strategy include ensuring the gift is relevant and valuable to the customer, aligning it with your brand identity, and setting clear terms (e.g., minimum purchase amount).
Timing is also crucial— Use Gift with Purchase Strategy during peak shopping seasons or special occasions to maximize impact. Additionally, communicate the offer clearly through marketing channels like email, social media, and your website to drive engagement and sales.
How to track the effectiveness of free gift Promotions?
To track the effectiveness of free gift promotions, use metrics such as sales conversion rates, average order value, and customer retention rates. Free gifts for WooCommerce has a great reporting tool helping you to monitor campaign performance, including:
Dashboard
To Track the performance of free gift promotions, you can see key metrics like recent orders that used gifts (including order ID, date, status, and applied rules), the top 5 redemption methods (e.g., automatic vs. manual claims), the most effective rules (e.g., “Spend $50, Get a Free Item”), and the most popular gift products in the Dashboard. These useful data give store owners valuable insights to optimize their campaigns and boost conversions.
Rules
By displaying key metrics in the Rules tab such as
- Rule ID,
- Rule Method,
- Count Used (number of times the gift was claimed),
- View Used Gift (details of redeemed free products),
- View Used Order (associated purchase data),
- and View Customer (recipient information).
merchants can analyze which promotions perform best, understand customer redemption patterns, and optimize gift strategies for higher conversions—all accessible through an intuitive dashboard for data-driven decision-making.
Orders
The key metrics report in the Orders tab, enable you to track all free gift promotions on your site in a report table, including
- Order ID (to identify which purchases included gifts),
- Customer email (to analyze customer segments),
- Date (to track promotion timing),
- Status (to monitor redemption rates),
- Rules name/ID (to measure which gift offers perform best),
- and Gifts (to see which free products are most popular).
This data helps you evaluate campaign effectiveness, optimize future promotions, and understand customer preferences—all from a centralized dashboard for easy analysis and decision-making.
Customers
The Free Gifts for WooCommerce plugin also generates comprehensive reports that track customer engagement with your gift promotions, displaying key data such as customer names, email addresses, usernames, gift redemption counts, and direct links to view their order history, applied promotion rules, and received gifts.
It also provides detailed product-level reports that track which free gifts perform best, displaying product IDs, SKUs, names, categories, and how often each gift appears in orders.
Although, gather customer feedback through surveys or reviews to understand their perception of the gift and its impact on their purchasing decision is also important.
How to avoid common mistakes when offering free gifts?
Common mistakes when use gift with purchase strategy include:
- Choosing low-quality or irrelevant gifts,
- Overcomplicating the redemption process,
- And failing to communicate the offer effectively.
To avoid these, ensure the gift aligns with your brand and adds real value for the customer. Keep the redemption process simple and transparent, and promote the offer clearly across all relevant channels. Lastly, set a budget to avoid overspending and ensure the promotion is sustainable.
Conclusion
Gift with purchase marketing has many benefits for your online store. You can run a gift-with-purchase promotion to attract new customers, boost overall sales, or increase sales of specific items in your shop. Although there is no option for offering gifts with purchase sales promotion in WooCommerce, you can use the free gifts for WooCommerce plugin as a great solution for creating new rules and applying flexible conditions.
