Video: How do I Reduce Friction in my Referral Program?
Most customer referral programs are built with too many fields and call to actions that end up confusing the user and reducing engagement. In this section we show you some tactics that help reduce that confusion.
How Do You Reduce Friction In Your Customer Referral Program from Referral SaaSquatch on Vimeo.
Full Transcription
Hi and welcome to another session on customer referral programs, today, we’re going to talk about how, specifically, you can reduce the friction of your customer referral program. One of the main questions we get is – How do I reduce friction in my referral program. So, what I have here, is what unfortunately, a lot of customers find when they try to make a referral. The first thing they find is that they have to register for a third-party service.
Third-Party Services Suck
If you’re using an outside vendor, a large amount of them today still require you to have people register individually with them, that’s an awful experience. If you think about this, a user is happy with your product, they’re thinking “Yeah, I want to make a referral”, they’re hit right in the face with “Hey, give me your contact info”. It doesn’t make any sense to the flow, and it just jars them out. They’re thinking “Why am I registering for this?”. The simple trick is, don’t make them register for your referral program, do anything you can to get around that.
Value of Auto-Filled Text
The next thing that customers unfortunately find is a blank box to share. If I’m going to make a customer referral, sure, I like your product, and sure, I like the reward, but I’m probably still lazy. It’s no offensive thing to you, your product, or your company, but people have jobs, they have families, they have other demands, and when you stop them and make them think “Hmm, if I was a marketer for this company, how would I go about referring this product”, your drop off rate is going to drastically increase, and the friction is going to get much much higher.
Make it easy for your customers
Instead, all it takes is simply prefilling that box with some logical text, whatever it takes, just fill that in, so that your customers are showing up and it doesn’t matter where they’re sharing, if it’s facebook, if it’s twitter, it doesn’t matter, give them a prefilled message that has all the correct info in it, has all the correct links, has the correct coupon codes, whatever is needed and make it easy for them to put that out there.
Customers are lazy
You’re going to make your referral rates go through the roof, because most of your customers aren’t also your marketers, so they don’t know what to say, so help them out.
Stick to the core social networks
The next thing you’ll see, is they have a million choices, maybe they can put it out on facebook, twitter, because those are great potentially, but maybe you also have it so they can pin it, stumbleupon it, put it out on some weird yahoo blog, it doesn’t matter, all sorts of other options, and the reality is, choice overload is a major problem for your customer.
Once again, they’re in there, they’re happy at the moment, they want this to be quick, painless, and they want to be able to get their reward. Go ahead and remove all those networks and add one, two, maybe three networks that your users are using. Don’t think that because you’re adding more, you’re making it easier, this is like multiple form fields on a page, the more choices you give us, the more chances you have to drop off, so put a few networks in there and leave it at that.
Importing email contacts
The next one we see is email, it’s not really acceptable to leave people having to remember their friends email addresses, I don’t even know my wifes phone number, it’s just one of those things that happens today, we don’t memorize things the same way we used to. Go ahead and help them out, give them a nice importer, let them import their Gmail contacts, whatever it might be, let that happen, make it easier for them to get those email contacts in.
Value of email for B2B conversions
One of the biggest secrets to web marketing today is that email is still the highest converting channel for most of us, while it may not be social, sexy, whatever you want to call it, you still want to make it easy because it has a very good chance of actually converting users to your system.
Final Button Optimization
The very last point we’re going to hit in reducing friction of most referral programs, is the final button. Actually making a referral, if you think about this, they could have either simply pressed enter earlier on, but if now they have to click to make this referral, and they’re all of a sudden going to have to authorize a twitter app, a facebook app, whatever it is, that’s just a major point of friction. The numbers show us, that by getting people to authorize an app, you’re going to see drop off, and normally, it’s a substantial amount.
Wrapping Up
Go ahead and pull out that twitter app, that facebook app, all the things you thought were going to give you a ton of information, as they’re only going to give you that ton of information about a lot less of your users, so remove that friction point, so that when they do finally press the send on this, they’re just simply firing this out there and they’re back on to using this tool or on with their life. I hope we answered your question – How do I reduce friction in my referral program. So that wraps up reducing the friction in your referral program.