What does a candle, lipstick, hand cream, instant ramen, pug patterned socks, and coffee mug have in common? Good or bad, they’re all gifts. If we unpack the psychology of gift-giving—the whole experience elicits feelings of fondness, making the recipient feel special and appreciated.
As merchants, the same principles of gift-giving apply to our customers. Offering a gift with purchase is a proven strategy to make your customers feel special while increasing your conversion rates.
That’s why we’re so excited to announce our newest offer type: Gift with Purchase (GWP).
Why did we release Gift with Purchase?
It’s simple: we were frustrated by the way GWP was set up on Shopify and wanted to create something reliable we could count on.
As merchants and Shopify alumni, it’s safe to say that our team understands how difficult Shopify’s native GWP setup can be. The “Buy X Get Y” discount type puts the onus on your customers to add the right items to cart, adding friction to their checkout journey and hurting your conversion rates. Worst of all, there’s no way to customize how the promotion would look on your storefront, which left us looking for alternative third-party apps.
While many of these solutions did the job, they were unreliable and prone to crashing. Hear it from Daniel, who last Black Friday had a GWP offer using another app that crashed at 3 AM—making him lose out on sales and blowing up his support inbox. He was left scrambling to fix the issue, and hesitant to run another GWP promotional campaign.
This didn’t feel right, so we decided to do things differently.
Gift with Purchase: done the right way
Introducing Abra’s Gift with Purchase, our newest offer type with the sole purpose of increasing conversion rates and protecting your margins.
Here’s why we stand out:
Reliability
Built by an experienced team of Shopify alumni, this release will give you peace of mind when running your GWP campaigns. Abra’s GWP is built on Shopify Functions, a reliable way to customize Shopify’s backend.
User experience
Say goodbye to discount codes for “Buy X Get Y” GWP. Abra lets you create, customize, and manage GWP offers in one place. Automatically trigger a GWP, add your promotions to private links, and beautify your offer with customized banners on your storefront.
Flexibility
Instead of running one GWP promotion for everyone, run concurrent offers for your different customer segments with Abra’s private links. Best of all, easily fire A/B tests to optimize your campaigns.
The benefits
By using GWP in your next campaign, you can reap some compelling benefits:
Increase your conversion rates and protect your bottom line
Discounts can feel like a race to the bottom. Customers rarely bite at a 5-10% discount and while 30-50% off drives crazy conversions, they squeeze your margins tight and change the perception of your brand.
However, destroying your margins to boost conversion rates is not the only lever to pull, and won’t work as a long term strategy. While your customers might turn down a storewide sale or exclusive discount, it’s harder to turn down the chance to get something for free.
For customers, receiving a gift can feel invaluable and that they’re getting more value out of their purchase. The result? Better conversion rates without the crazy discounting.
Boost your average order value
A GWP offer is a strategic way to upsell your customers and increase average order value through a purchase quota. For instance, you can offer gifts for purchases over $100 to convert customers if you are seeing an AOV stuck at $85. It’s also the perfect opportunity to cross-sell and increase trials across your product catalog.
Become everyone’s favorite brand
Mastering the art of gift-giving can make your customers feel special and loved. Using Abra’s GWP, create campaigns that are targeted to specific user segments. Maybe you want to offer a special tote bag to your newsletter subscribers or a welcome gift to your new signups, the world is your oyster.
Before you know it, you’ll build brand loyalty and retention—turning your casual customers into loyal customers.
Get inspired by the art of possible
Take this as the perfect opportunity to get creative with the types of gifts you include. Here are some gift ideas to get the gears turning:
- Eliminate your deadstock to reactivate dormant customers
- Order exclusive inventory for the campaign to build hype
- Add product compliments to specific orders (ie. an extra coaster to go with a mug purchase)
- Samples with purchase
See Gift with Purchase in action
Our CEO Daniel runs a store called Bull and Cleaver, and for Halloween they are running an offer where you get a free bag of traditional biltong when you spend over $100.
Take a look at the live offer below: View store demo