Referral Ideas

You’ve come to the right place. Extole powers the best referral programs in the country – working with companies such as Lands’ End, Starbucks, and Virgin America, we know how to scale your small acquisition idea into a profitable channel. What are some referral ideas that can get you to that next level?

1. Fix Your Funnel
One of the first metrics we look at after launching a referral program is the Referral Index – this number represents the efficiency of the funnel and how well your advocates are getting their friends to convert. Because this number takes into account all rates from the beginning of the funnel to the end, each rate in your referral funnel is key to efficiency. If one metric is off, it can throw off the success of your entire program. For that reason, our number one priority is to fix your funnel before putting a ton of traffic through it.

2. Promote Everywhere
You guessed it – after fixing your funnel and ensuring all of the metrics hit our minimum benchmarks, the next action item is to push as much traffic through it as possible. Once the funnel isn’t leaking, everything should flow through seamlessly and drive your revenue numbers up. The more traffic you get through the top, the more conversions and revenue will come out the bottom.

3. Segment Your Users
Once you drive optimal traffic through the program, you have learned a lot about your users: what are they referring? Who are they referring? Who generates the most traffic? Who has a massive twitter following? Based on criteria of segmentation, the third stage is to classify your users and target them with different offers and creatives at different times. If you identify super advocates, your best customers, why not send them an email with a new, more robust offer? This allows you to keep the program constantly enticing for your best customers.

Want more ideas? Check out Extole’s 2016 Referral Guide.