Video: How do I Increase the Frequency of my Referral Program?
Another problem referral programs have is not putting the program in front of their users at the right times. In this section we go over some tactics to increase the frequency that a user will see the program and answer the question – how do I increase the frequency of my referral program?
How Do You Increase The Frequency Of Your Customer Referral Program from SaaSquatch on Vimeo.
Full Transcription
Hi and welcome to another session on customer referral programs. Today, we’re going to talk about how to optimize your customer referral program through frequency. It’s a question we answer all the time – How do I increase the frequency of my referral program? Well, when we think about increasing frequency, a lot of us get really scared that we’re going to spam our users, and that’s the last thing any of us want to do.
How to Increase Participation Rates
It’s important to understand that increasing the frequency of your message, the frequency of the calls to action to participate in your customer referral program, that we’re not going to do it in a way that annoys the customer, we’re going to do it in a way that helps them find it and helps them complete the action when it makes sense for them.
Hiding the Program
One of the things we see that happens a lot in customer referral programs today is they get buried deep in the navigational hierarchy, in order to find the customer referral program, you’re going to have to go in to my account, settings, discounts, referral program where you’re so far down the rabbit hole that the frequency is tiny to start with.
Show off your Referral Program
One of the things we recommend doing is bringing your customer referral program way up, if you can get to something like this, where your customer referral program, in this case it’s a swag program where you can win a mug, can be splashed right on your homepage, your dashboard, whatever can work, but as high as possible, customers are going to see this at least every time they log in and potentially every page they load.
Increasing Program Visibility
That first step of just moving it from the bottom, the dungeons if you will, to the lobby. That’s one of the easy ways we can increase frequency, but the other thing to think about is that there’s just other places to talk about it, maybe it’s as simple as putting the referral program in your footer. It’s a great place, at some point someone is going to be looking for contact information, privacy policy, whatever it is, why not remind them about the referral program at the same time, if it’s going to be an effective growth option, we don’t want to miss out any opportunities while it’s there.
Importance of the Happy Moment
One of the other things people often forget about their customer referral program is that we don’t have to talk about it only in static locations. You might have customers who achieved what we call a “happy moment”, they’ve just experienced sort of the total value of your system. If this is a sales tool, if we imagine that a salesperson has just completed a big sale, they’re probably pretty happy, and this is a great time to ask them for a referral.
How Farmville Uses Social Referral Mechanics
Instead of just thinking how do I hide this deep in the dungeons for people who are looking, and instead of thinking how do I put this in a static location that’s going to be highly visible, also think about when are people most likely to make a customer referral, and if you can take those happy moments and pair them up with prompting them to make a referral, and this is what social gaming has done a lot of by the way, if you ever played a game like Farmville, you notice that whenever you advance a level or you milk a sheep or whatever you do, it asks you to tell your friends, this is the same idea just applied to your app and your referral program, and hopefully it’ll be a little more enjoyable for everyone than farmville was.
Wrapping Up
The basic idea of how do we get in front of that customer more times in new ways, is really all there is behind increasing that frequency to optimize your customer referral program.