Design a Referral Program

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Explain how to model vouchers as referral rewards.
  
• Describe the process of creating a promotion.
  
• List the email templates available in the Referral Promotion wizard.
  
• Describe the different Refer a Friend widget states.
  

Create a Referral Program

Lucy explores the Referral Marketing app and finds it user-friendly and intuitive. The app has built-in email and widget templates for creating immersive customer experiences.

Before using the templates, Lucy creates a new referral program called Cloud Kicks Referral Program.

Although a referral program is different from a loyalty program, Referral Marketing uses the Loyalty Program object to store referral program details. For this reason, you create a new referral program using the New Loyalty Program configuration screen.

Next, Lucy creates program incentives.

Add Rewards to the Referral Program

With Referral Marketing, Lucy can create vouchers for a discount, a fixed value, or a free product or service as incentives for advocates and friends. She decides on a $20 voucher for both groups and creates the voucher definition.

The program issues this voucher as a unique code that customers apply at checkout. Next, Lucy uses this voucher in the promotion.

Plan a Referral Promotion

Promotions are central to referral programs. You can run multiple promotions in a referral program to target specific audiences.

Lucy creates a new promotion to make the most of the end-of-year excitement. The promotion will run from December through the beginning of next year. During this time, advocates can join the program and refer their friends. And friends can sign up and make their first purchase.

While creating the promotion, Lucy defines a promotion code. This combined with a unique code becomes an advocate’s referral code. When a friend signs up, they use the advocate’s referral code. Because it consists of the promotion code, it’s easy to identify which promotion to apply if multiple promotions are running at the same time. The code also helps link the referrals to the promotion to analyze promotion performance.

After defining the key attributes of the promotion, Lucy gets down to the nitty-gritty aspects of the referral process.

The app has a guided wizard with three steps. First, tailor the email templates and the referral widget based on your company branding. Next, define the rewards and target audience. Last, view a summary and activate the promotion.

Design Emails and Widgets

To maximize the referral program reach, Lucy crafts a comprehensive engagement strategy with emails and a widget.

Customize the Email Templates

At different stages of the referral process, marketers like Lucy can use emails based on templates to communicate and engage with advocates and their friends.

Referral Marketing offers email templates for each stage of the customer journey, including primary templates and reminder templates. Use primary emails to highlight program benefits and prompt users to action. Configure reminder emails to nudge customers after a specific number of days.

Here’s a look at the templates and how to use them.

Lucy personalizes each message to align with the company branding of Cloud Kicks. She adjusts the subject and content of the emails and activates them. Now, it’s time to tailor the widget.

Modify the Widget

For easy participation and a connected user experience, Lucy deploys a widget on the Cloud Kicks experience site. The widget lets customers join the program and then share their referral links through email and social media. The widget is an important touchpoint in a customer’s journey, acting as a reminder to advocate for the brand.

The Refer a Friend widget includes these states.

You learn how the widget states change later in the module.

For each state, you can customize the content, background image, and text formatting. Here’s an example showing the widget template.

Also, you can preview how the widget appears on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.

After activating the widget, Lucy sets up the rewards and target audience for the promotion.

Set Up the Rewards and Audience

Remember the voucher Lucy created earlier? Now it’s time to choose the vouchers that advocates and friends receive.

The vouchers are incentives for customers to engage in the program. However, when a reward is involved, there’s a risk of misuse. To prevent this, Lucy defines a limit for the maximum number of rewards an advocate can receive.

You can set the validity of the reward limit to last the promotion duration or the calendar year. This way, advocates can refer more friends, but advocates are only eligible for the allowed number of rewards. As an added precaution, you can also define the maximum number of times an advocate can refer their friends by email in a day. This limit has a rollover period of 24 hours from their last referral.

Here’s an example configuration for the promotion rewards and audience.

Based on the limits set in this example, an advocate can be rewarded for up to 10 successful referrals, with a limit of three email referrals each day.

At the other end of the spectrum, sometimes even the most attractive rewards aren’t enough to motivate advocates to initiate referrals. To get quality leads, target customers based on their referral potential.

Cloud Kicks uses Data Cloud to gather customer data from different sources such as stores and ecommerce sites, and create a unified view of the customer. Lucy creates a segment in Data Cloud that consists of customers in the age group of 21 to 28, with a high net promoter score (NPS) and more than three purchases in the past six months. In Referral Marketing, she selects this customer segment as the target audience for the Give $20, Get $20 promotion. All members of the segment receive emails about the referral program.

Review the Promotion

After activating the content assets, namely the emails and the widget, and choosing the rewards and audience, Lucy reviews the promotion. The wizard provides a summary of the stages that advocates and their friends go through during the promotion lifecycle.

Lucy uses the summary to visualize the promotion journey from launch to completion. Each stage shows which content asset is used. She reviews all the details and then launches the promotion.

Check out this helpful video that summarizes how you can create a referral program and design its promotions.

In the next unit, look behind the scenes to understand what happens after the promotion is activated.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Design a Referral Program