Referral Marketing - how much do you know about it and have you ever tried it out?
I am willing to give back to this community a lot of my knowledge that I have learnt whilst building EarlyParrot.com.
EarlyParrot.com has been in BETA since September. We have had a lot of feedback from our early adopters, that helped us to shape our product to what it is now. EarlyParrot will be launch end of January 2018 (that is in a week and a half). I would like to give away a free consultation about referral marketing on how you can apply it to your startup to get the results we got. (both if you still haven't launched it or if you just did).
Leave a comment in this thread about your startup + any questions you have about referral marketing.
I currently use LeadDyno to manage an affiliate program. I chose it because for price / value it seemed the best fit for my bootstrapped SaaS business. Do you know of any other 3rd party SaaS affiliate services that are less than $99 / mo?
Hey @Harry. Thanks for pitching in.
For which startup do you use LeadDyno? $99 seems a good price tag for an affiliate program considering it takes care a lot of stuff for you.
But, there is a difference between referral marketing system and affiliate system. Let me just expand on this for your benefit and other who might be reading this post.
An affiliate system keeps track of referrers and pays out % commission per sale. For instance, there is an agreement between two parties that for a sale of $100 a 25% commission is paid. The affiliate partner most probably is not a client and is just a business who keeps referring leads and converting them. An affiliate deal is great since commission is paid only if a sale goes through.
A referral marketing system on the other hand rewards existing customers for spreading the word about the company, service and/or product. It is natural that your clients speak about services they use so why not rewarding them for doing so? Why not giving them that extra incentive to send out an email to their friends and/or sharing on Social media?
Unlike affiliate systems a referral system NEVER gives out hard card for a referral but only incentives / rewards which can be both tangible and intangible good.
Cool! I really want to implement some sort of referral system for https://everydaycheck.com . My biggest issue is really coming up with an incentive that makes sense. Since my app is relatively cheap ($12) applying discounts or extending the trial periods sounds a bit ridiculous. My idea now is more like, if someone brings me X signups or Y paid signups the user gets a year for free. The problem is, then, that since I have a trial period, I cannot validate that any of the referrals have paid before the referrer's trial period is over. Not too concerned, since it's mostly technicalities.
How would you go about it and more importantly, do you recommend any resources on how to implement it? Have you written about your experience? Thanks.
Hey @Joan. Thanks for sharing your startup.
I have all the lessons learnt scattered across different notebooks. I was only focusing on finishing off the product and getting as much feedback as possible whilst doing it. Most of the lessons learnt are actually tips that beta testers shared with us to build EarlyParrot better for them and everyone who will be using it.
Your issue is one of the most common question that we get. To be honest I am not a huge fan of discounts as you devaluing the product / service you are offering. Most often referrers are looking for something exclusive.
So my suggestions (without having tried your product yet) are:
Who did this? Revolut recently launched a crypto buy sell feature. That feature is locked and exclusive only to those who refer 3 friends.
Consultation: Offer a free 1-1 consultation (if this makes sense) with those who need help to organise their habits. Maybe you can give them 30 minutes of your time for free. Again lock this feature those who share your startup.
E-Book / Content / Video course. Give out a video course to those who share your startup on Social Media. This is a very attainable target so make sure this reward scales.
BTW you have an awesome product. I have just signed up! I have a lot going and most of the times I struggle to keep up!
hey Gaetano, thanks for this. Very insightful.
I'll definitely consider the alternative to discounts!
Most welcome. If you would like further advice on what kind of rewards you should give out, follow me here as I will publishing several articles about referral marketing ..
Quoting David Darmanin from Hotjar.com
"We threw in a lot of kind of incentives in there. It just took off. It went crazy, literally. So within a few months we hit around 60,000 emails and growing."
https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/036-david-darmanin-of-hotjar
Those are the results you should expect from referral marketing!