What’s The No.1 Reason Some Referral Programs Flop?
Did you know that the no. 1 reason referral programs fail is due to a lack of marketing? Ironic, when you consider that most programs are put in place by marketers.
But sadly, to be blunt, if your customers don’t know you have a referral program then it may as well not exist.
Even if your customers do know you have a program, if they can’t find it easily or it doesn’t naturally surface at moments when they’re feeling positive about your brand, then you have a sure-fire recipe for failure.
How Top Brands Promote Their Refer-a-Friend Programs
Referral marketing works just like any other form of marketing: via a funnel. You put people in at the top. They go through several of stages of conversion as they share with their friends. Then, as those friends engage, successful referrals complete the process.
But it’s the first stage that’s perhaps the most important. Because, no matter how enticing your rewards and incentives may be – or how excited your customers are about sharing your brand or products with their friends – unless they’re made aware of your program in the first place, you won’t end up with any referrals. That awareness can come about in two ways, activation and discovery, and it’s essential that you cater for both scenarios to ensure success.
Hear from Robin Bresnark, Buyapowa’s Director of Brand, on why you need to push your referral program across all your channels:
The Best Marketing Channels for Referral Programs
"Let's take a look at the 12 most common channels by which brands can promote their programs.
Now before your loving eyes drift all the way to the right of that graphic and you mark everything on the left down as a turkey look at the numbers.
Sure across all ages, email promotion is the channel most likely to give the biggest boost to your refer a friend program, but even the channel on the far left, popups, is going to make someone 180% more likely to refer their friends
That's almost three times as likely. And that's the thing. None of these channels are without merit, in fact they all work, and they're all incredibly powerful because people want to hear about your program
Instead of using this data to pick one channel to promote your program use it to pick a blend of channels which are going to work across your entire audience base in the industry where you operate."
Activation
Some people haven’t heard about your referral program yet but, given the right push, they could go on to become great advocates. You just need to go out, find them and activate them. Buyapowa’s Referral Codebreaker’s research found that most respondents prefer to be told you have a referral program than have to find it themselves, and the average respondent wanted to be reminded about it once every two months.
The research also questioned which promotion methods were most likely to encourage a person to refer and, while email was reportedly the most effective, increasing the likelihood of referral by up to 239%, even the least effective channel, pop ups or floating CTAs, increased the likelihood of referral by 180%. So in short, you shouldn’t be frightened to push your referral program to your customers and you should market it across as many channels as you can. However, there are nuances reported by age, industry and country, and hopefully you’ll find the report very interesting in designing an effective reward strategy that meets the needs of your audience.
“The real question is, WHERE do you make the ask? And my answer is simple: Ask many times, in many places, with different messages, and in-context with whatever action you’re asking the user to take…..Thus, make the referral ask part of the main flows….And add it to the onboarding flow, and at the end of key transactions when the user is otherwise done.”
Andrew Chen, Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
Discovery
Other potential advocates are already ready to start introducing their friends. You just need to make sure that they find your referral program when they go looking for it by having it prominently placed on your home page, in FAQs, help and chatbots and with an easy to remember and find URL like companyname.com/refer.
The guide below (downloadable as a PDF @ 8.3MB) runs through the different strategies to promote your referral program – from a perspective of Activation or Discovery.
If you have a referral scheme and would like to know how to get more from it, or even if you are thinking about setting up your very first scheme and want to get ahead of the curve, we would love to chat with you.