Project Management Approach to Launching a Good Referral Program: Steps 1–2

As I mentioned here, I am willing to share a complete guide on how to successfully launch a good referral program. This involves completion of several steps with various goals. The steps include fixing mistakes, promoting your referral program, increasing participation of the referral program, deliverability of your channels, figuring conversion rates of your referral offers.

We will talk about promotion and participation increase in this post.

Part 1: Promoting your referral program

Low View Count← Improve Visibility

Top of the funnel we have visibility of your referral programs, i.e. out of all of your active users, how many have seen your referral program. This is measured by the percentage of your users that generates unique views of your referral program page.

This differs widely amongst startups — the more frequently your users engage with your platform’s website/app, the higher this should be. If your users are engaged with your platform on at least a weekly basis, you should aim for 100% of your active users.

Here is where you should place your referral program to improve this number:

• Admin dashboard/personal cabinet
• Credit replenishment/billing section
• Checkout order confirmation
• Right after sign up, offer them a premium feature

It also works if you place your referral program in multiple places. Avoid — placing it on a separate page, with just a “refer a friend” item on your navigation menu bar and hoping people will see and click it.

If you don’t want to place the whole referral screen on your main admin dashboard, you can at least place a big bold banner that leads traffic to it.

Other ways to promote:

• newsletter outreach
• support chat/onboarding process — closing out your intercom with “btw are you aware we have a referral program? would you be down to check it out?” especially if the ticket had successful outcome
• organize events around it: time bound your referral campaign to one month while launching, offer an outsized reward for the top referral spot. Afterwards say “hey, we received so much interest from the community that we decided to open up our referral program permanently”

Part 2: Increasing participation of your referral program

if you’re getting lots of visibility on your program, but not a lot of participation, here is what you can do:

1. Adding urgency to share (tricky to accomplish, amazing results)
2. Improve your messaging (easy to do, decent results)
3. Make it easier to generate a share (easy to do, decent results)

Adding urgency to share

Fix — master the art of aligning customer’s urgency with yours. First, identify typical flows your users take that are urgent to them.

The best example: they’re out of credits and they need it to complete an action. Usually it goes like “oh no, I’m out of credits -> *clicks on buy points* -> *sees an opportunity to get few points for free for just inviting a few friends* -> goes for it”.

Another great example: they just tried doing something that’s normally reserved for users of a higher subscription tier. For example, they’re using tinder, they want to use the “boost” feature, they hit on that button but they can’t since they’re not tinder gold member. Here you can offer them a limited use of this premium feature in exchange for a few successful referrals. These work really well because you’re building on top of customer’s urgency that is already there, and channeling that towards your referral program

Your messaging is not super clear/confusing

Fix: being explicit about how/when they’ll get the reward is what you should aim for. A/B testing different messaging works BUT don’t overdo it — from what I’ve seen, this is very low efficiency per time spent on it, you’re much better off changing something fundamental like in the previous section. Providing a table like the one below helps, it sort of shows your users something like “look I’m on top of my referral program, we are counting all of the referrals generated, don’t worry… and we are tracking when your friends convert”.

A table like this helps your customer get immediate feedback — “oh great my referral was counted!”. Showing them that their referral is actively tracked increases the probability of multiple shares + bonus if you check for deliverability & ask the to retype the email address.

Make it easier to generate a share

If you don’t have these yet, you must add 2-click share channels: email, sms, WhatsApp, etc. Don’t just leave them with copy to clipboard, but instead offer them a few more items on the line.

So, we have two more steps to go, and after that you’ll be a total pro at launching referral programs! If you don’t want to bother though, you can always approach us! We love helping startups launch user referral programs. Avalanche has helped many Y Combinator companies launch viral referral programs (no-code, visual UI builder, fully integrated inside your platform) so if you’re looking for something that works for great startups, get in touch! Even if you just want free advice, I am happy to chat so just sign up right here: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_aW22u43pSZa516XlvGpVvA