We all know that getting your customers or employees to refer your brand, product or organisation is important. Numerous reports tell us how much people value the recommendations of friends and family over almost everything else.
A good referral is the fastest route to new revenue or securing the best people for a job. But creating compelling and successful referral programmes is tough. All too often our refer a friend efforts fail to deliver – fail for you and for your customers or employees.
They simply don’t make us want to refer – they fall at the first hurdle to engage and motivate us to act, are too difficult to benefit from or don’t have compelling enough rewards. They aren’t interesting enough to make us want to forward them either.
For the person creating the programme they are also tough to manage.
Despite all this we persevere because we know if we get it right that the rewards are significant.
But there must be an easier way surely. We thought so and that’s why we’ve applied our experience of game science and mechanics to the problem. And our solution is something we call Radical Referrals. It makes creating great branded refer a friend programmes fast and easy.
Radical Referrals gives you best-practice templates to choose from for generating peer referrals via your website, mobile apps and other digital marketing platforms. Your customers will love them as they seamlessly share referral requests with their friends and family over instant messaging apps, SMS, email and social media.
Their friends receive a personalised message with compelling offers you design in Radical Referrals. These could be vouchers, prize draws or loyalty points which they get by completing key tasks that matter to you like registering as a new customer or buying something. When the friend completes the task the referring customer is instantly rewarded, motivating them to refer again.
If this sounds interesting, take a closer look at the solution.
Here’s a campaign using Radical Referrals that Zizzi, a leading restaurant chain in the UK, ran recently to give you a sense of what we can do.
So that’s the customer or employee end of a successful programme sorted – but refer a friend campaigns should be easy to set up and manage too. So our team thought about that too.
Everything is template based. You use our software platform to select your mechanic, brand it, add your preferred communication channel and then customise the offer or tasks you want taken. You can then define reward tiers and even set ‘stretch goals’ to increase the total number of friends each person is encouraged to refer to unlock additional bonuses.
The solution’s security features also allow you to set limits on referral frequency and total referrals to avoid customers being able to ‘game the system’.
Radical Referrals is available as a standalone service but customers of our audience engagement platform 3radical Voco will find combining the two even more powerful. With Radical Referrals and Voco you can access a wider range of additional game mechanics to motivate more referrals including leaderboards, instant vouchers, reward points and shop, and games like spin to win, scratch cards or present opening.
Finally, we wanted to ensure you had the data you need to optimise your programme. Our interactive reporting means you can track which customers or employees, rewards and channels are generating the most referrals and respond quickly.
We’ve worked hard to make it easy to design and manage a great referral programme. We love Radical Referrals as you’d expect – but the proof is in the referral. So if you like the sound of Radical Referrals why not tell your friends and family too, we’d really appreciate the referral.
