Are you looking to launch a successful referral program? Look no further! In this video, we present our comprehensive Referral Program Pre-Launch Checklist, covering 10 crucial steps to kickstart your referral marketing on the right foot.
Read the transcript:
Hi everyone, this is Stacey from Referral Factory and, in this video, I'll cover 10 commonly overlooked details that can make a big difference to your referral program's performance. Paying attention to these key factors before you launch will pave the way for a thriving referral program! Let's get started.
1. Check the Clarity and the Flow of your Campaign Pages
Ensuring an intuitive and user-friendly referral process is key to maximizing participation and minimizing any potential friction points. Here at Referral Factory, we've developed our software with a participant-centric focus, ensuring that both those who refer and those who are referred can effortlessly participate in your program.
Your campaign pages should be visually appealing, clearly communicate the benefits of participation, and provide a clear call to action for each party. You want your referrers to feel excited and motivated to share while making it super easy for their friends to take the desired action.
Here's my advice—before launching your referral program, try involving a friend or colleague who's unfamiliar with your strategy. Ask them to navigate through the campaign pages as if they were participating and encourage them to provide feedback on the overall clarity of the program for both the person referring and the person invited. This outside perspective can help ensure that your copy and calls to action are easily understandable and appealing.
2. Don't Forget to Edit your Campaign Subdomain
One small but important detail that many people miss when setting up their referral program is that you can customize your referral program domain, which is a great opportunity to add that extra touch of brand consistency. By default, your referral program lives on a subdomain of Referral Factory, like "yourbusiness.referralfactory.com". This is visible in the campaign join link and the referral links generated for your referrers. You can change your subdomain from inside the campaign builder on the settings tab. Want to white-label our software? You can host your referral program on your own domain as an add-on. This allows you to maintain complete branding control.
3. Add a Meta Title and Description
Have you ever wondered how a referral link looks when it appears in a preview on a social media or messaging app? That's where the meta title and description come into play. They determine how your referral program is presented to others, and this can significantly impact click-through rates and engagement. You can change your meta title and description in the settings section of the campaign builder. Craft a captivating meta title that grabs attention and a description that highlights the unique benefits of your offering.
4. Customize the Share Message
When planning a referral program many people spend all their time thinking about the best way to reward people for referring but not enough time thinking about how to make it as easy as possible for them to refer. Keep in mind that your referrers are bound to be busy! So, it's important to make the process of referring painless. One of the ways we help you to do just that is by allowing you to add a share message, which will pre-populate alongside the referral link when your referrer uses any of the share buttons. You can add a share message from the campaign builder. By pre-populating the message you ensure a consistent and compelling introduction to your business and you save your referrers valuable time!
5. Tailor the Terms and Conditions to your Referral Program
Having proper referral program terms and conditions is crucial for your business! Not only does it align with legal requirements but it also provides clear guidelines and expectations for both referrers and their friends.
Within Referral Factory, you have the flexibility to customize your terms and conditions according to your business's needs. Go to the settings tab inside the campaign builder. Scroll down until you see Terms and Conditions.
Referral Factory provides a template that you can modify to suit your business requirements. this saves you time and ensures you cover essential aspects.
6. Don't Forget to Select and Customize the Email Notifications for Your Referral Program
Referral Factory offers several email options that can be automatically sent to participants at select moments throughout your referral program these notifications serve as timely reminders and updates ensuring everyone stays engaged and informed.
7. Maximize Efficiency with Automations
One of the best things that referral marketing software can do is save you the time of manually tracking your referrals. But, there's a lot more that you can automate with Referral Factory using one of our many integration options.
For example, if you use one of the popular CRM tools like HubSpot or Salesforce, Referral Factory can automatically send new leads into your sales pipeline alongside the information of the person who referred them so your sales team can take it from there. Another great automation is conversion tracking or being able to automatically mark a referral as qualified or successful.
Before you launch take advantage of Referral Factory's integration options to align your referral program with the rest of your tech stack and enhance your overall productivity.
8. Double Check your Rewards Configuration
Another way that referral marketing software can help you to streamline your referral program is by automatically issuing rewards for successful referrals.
With Referral Factory, you can choose to simply track rewards that you can then issue manually, or you can choose a fully automated option with one of our rewards partners, webhooks, or any rewards software that works with Zapier.
Before you launch, check that your rewards configurations are correct and test that the reward fires at the right time. If you are using a third-party software to issue rewards be sure to check everything on that side too.
9. Test Test Test!
Testing your referral program end-to-end is a crucial step before launching it to the public. By following these steps, you can ensure that everything is functioning smoothly and gain confidence in the user experience.
Here's a breakdown of how best to test your referral program:
First, sign up as the person referring. Go to the promote your campaign tab in your campaign builder and copy the referral campaign join link. Open the link in an incognito browser tab and sign up as the person referring. You'll be redirected to a landing page with your referral link and some social media icons for sharing. Share your referral link with a colleague or yourself.
Next, sign up as the person invited. Two important things here. First, open the referral link in incognito mode to ensure proper functionality. If you see the wrong page when you open the link, it's probably because you've been cached! Second, use a different email address for this step. If needed, you can create a variation of your email using the plus addressing trick.
Next, qualify the referral. Now, this is especially important—if you've set up an integration to trigger a qualification, convert the lead in your system following the defined process. If the automation is set up correctly, this will qualify the referred lead in Referral Factory.
And, check your email notifications. Make sure the received emails match your expectations and consider editing them if necessary.
10. Promotion
Now that you've checked the details and tested that everything works as it
should, you're pretty much ready to launch. However, we find that the best way to run a successful referral program is to make sure that you promote it effectively! We have a heap of pre-built promotional tools that you can use including widgets and pop-ups that you can add directly to your website or web app.
We also have plenty of tips on promotional strategies in our blog, such as adding your referral join link to your employee email signatures so every interaction with your customers is a reminder to refer! The better you get at asking for referrals, the more you'll get.
I really hope that you found this video valuable and I wish you nothing but the utmost success with the launch of your referral program. To continue expanding your knowledge of referral marketing and maximizing the potential of our platform, please subscribe to our channel and check out the detailed guides and resources on our blog. Until next time!
Further Resources
📖 How To Host Your Referral Program On Your Own Domain
📖 What Is A Referral Program Title And Meta Description?
📖 How To Add a Custom Share Message
📖 How To Edit The Terms And Conditions of Your Referral Program
📖 What Email Notifications Are Available?
📖 Automate Your Referral Program
📖 Rewarding With Referral Factory: A Full Guide
📖 How To Test Your Referral Campaign Before You Launch
📢 15 Ways To Get Referrals – By Incentivizing Your Customers