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Overview

Data shows that customers acquired via referral are up to 5x more likely to share. These customers were introduced to your referral program, took advantage of the friend offer, and converted into customers. Now it’s time to turn these newly acquired customers into advocates. Encourage these customers to continue the cycle of sharing. There are a few steps to take to drive friends to become advocates:

1. Promote with a confirmation page autopop
2. Promote with a Mail After Purchase email
3. Learn more about how and where to promote your program here
4. Run a retargeting report to find potential customers
5. Send a targeted and trackable promotion to specific segments
6. Select a cadence

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Promote with a Confirmation Page Autopop

Take advantage of the moment of delight when your customer has just purchased and is anticipating their new products — this is when your customer is most likely to share. Asking for a referral right after a customer makes a purchase is extremely effective as this request touches them when they are happy and connected to your brand. They are on a buyer’s high — and you don’t want to lose out on the high-quality shares that come from this promotion source! When you thank a customer for making a purchase, you can promote your referral program as part of the purchase confirmation in one of two ways:

• Pop-up share experience that loads over the purchase confirmation page (best practice)
• Static call-to-action (CTA) on the purchase confirmation page

In general, post-purchase promotions tend to drive 10-20% of program traffic. However, the pop-up share experience outperforms a static call-to-action by 16x and is the recommended approach whenever possible. Please note that your share rate (Shares / Promotion Clicks) may be affected if you have confirmation page CTAs enabled. This is because the confirmation page CTAs appear for every purchase made, so the number of Promotion Clicks (advocates who see the share experience) will be very high. On the other hand, confirmation page CTAs improve your Participation Rate (Advocates / Transactors) because they drive advocacy!

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Promote with a Mail After Purchase Email

Another great way to promote to recent customers is with the Mail After Purchase email. This is an email that is sent to all customers who shop on your site, inviting them to participate in the referral program. This comes directly from the Extole platform, which means no resources are needed from your marketing team or your ESP. You can choose to delay this email by hours or days to align with your transactional emails and/or shipping times. For more information, please visit this article.

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Run a Retargeting Report to Find Potential Customers

We have two Friend Retargeting reports you can use. The first, called Friend Retargeting, provides a list of all friend email addresses that were shared with and whether or not they converted. The second, called Incomplete Journey, allows you to configure the steps someone has reached more granularly. For example, you can ask “Who were the people who registered, but haven’t converted?” or “Who were the people who were referred, but haven’t converted?”. Running either of these reports allows you to target a specific promotion of your referral program to people who have already engaged with the program in one way or another.

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Send a Targeted and Trackable Promotion to Specific Segments

Once you have a segment you’d like to promote the program to, it’s important that you create a unique promo link for each type of promotion you plan to send — whether that’s via email, Facebook, Twitter, etc.. This way, you can measure the performance of each individual program promotion. Simply create a unique promo link for the appropriate promotion, send the promotion to a targeted customer segment list, and come back to the dashboard to monitor its performance. Here’s how:

1. Navigate to your program dashboard
2. Scroll down to the Promotions dashboard and click the “Promote” button
3. Create a unique promo link for each new promotion you plan to run. Having a unique promo link per promotion ensures you can measure the performance of each promotion individually. You’ll then be able to access the promotional data as a unique line in your program data export.
4. Place the unique promo link in your outbound promotion. For example, place a unique link in your marketing email or Facebook retargeting ad.
5. Come back and monitor promotion performance in the Extole dashboard.

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Select a Cadence

Choose a cadence that works for the segment you want to promote to. On that schedule, run a Friend Retargeting Report or Furthest Step Reached Report and send targeted promotions to those segments. Keep in mind high-traffic periods and roll these seasons into your promotional plan. For example, after the holiday shopping season, you may run a Friend Retargeting Report at the start of the new year and promote your referral program to the new customers you’ve acquired over the holiday season.