You can run countless ads. You can tell people about how awesome your products are. You can talk about the features and benefits for hours.
And yet, a single happy customer's recommendation to their friends is still going to be more powerful.
Think back of your last ten purchases. How many times did you pull the trigger because you read a great review, you heard your favorite YouTuber talk about it, or your friend randomly mentioned it over dinner? You may not even be aware of if, but if you're like most of us, you do it all the time.
So do your customers.
In today's episode, Raúl Galera from ReferralCandy shared with us how even a small business can take advantage of this already existing habit, how to incentivize even more of your customers to recommend your product and be rewarded for it, without turning them into sketchy MLM salesmen.
He also revealed what makes a referral program work, why it's not enough to only reward your existing customers, how you can do this on a low budget and what type of reward system will work best in your specific case.
All this and more is waiting for you. Listen in!
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Episode Transcript
Shane Melaugh: Hello and welcome to the Active Growth Podcast. This episode is a further
episode in our series on how to get traffic if you have more time to invest than
money. So this is traffic generation on a bootstrap budget. Now today, we are
talking to Raúl Galera from ReferralCandy. ReferralCandy is referral and affiliate
marketing platform.
Shane Melaugh: One of the reasons I wanted to talk to Raúl is because he's part of this platform
where they help a lot of businesses run referral and affiliate programs. And
therefore, they kind of have an overview. They can see across many different
businesses and many different niches what works and what doesn't. So this was
the main thing I wanted to ask Raúl about, like from this vantage point that they
have, what can they see? What actually works if you create a referral program
or an affiliate program?
Shane Melaugh: As you may know, from me, affiliate marketing, having an affiliate program has
always been a very important traffic source, and especially when I got started,
this was one of the most important kind of pillars of traffic generation for me.
Shane Melaugh: So in today's interview, you'll discover how and if you can use a strategy like this
for your business on, as we said, a bootstrapped project, if you don't have a ton
of money to spend. And you will learn some of the things that make the biggest
difference to whether a referral program works and is highly successful or is not.
And as you will see, some of these are quite unconventional and not what you
would expect.
Shane Melaugh: You can get the show notes that go along with this episode that includes a
transcript of the episode, a download link to the audio file, and links to anything
we mentioned during the episode by going to activegrowth.com/candy. That is
active growth.com/candy.
Shane Melaugh: Now before we get to the main part of the episode, let me just read a couple of
new reviews that have come in on iTunes. We've got a five star review from Don
Clark who says "Tremendous content. Love the teaching style and genuine
giving nature of Shane and Hanne. They are the real deal. I highly recommend
this podcast for anyone wanting to learn how to make money online with an
information product." Thank you very much for this review, Don. Highly
appreciate it.
Shane Melaugh: The second one I want to read is from Phoenix Found. Phoenix Found says that
our podcast is "Practical, constructive and fun to listen to. Lots of excellent tips,
exercises and profoundly sensible advice to get your business started or on
track. I wasted years buying every new shiny object and getting nowhere. And
finally, they have got me on the road to building a real businesses under my
complete control. Can't recommend the podcast enough." Thank you very much
for this comment. This is super encouraging. I love to hear when people take
this advice and actually take action, and it makes a real difference. Thank you
very much.
Shane Melaugh: And of course, if you have a review, if you leave a review, that also helps out. So
that's always highly appreciated. So if you value what we do, it's one of the ways
you can help us out, you know, hop over to iTunes or Apple Podcast, wherever
you listen to the podcast, and leave a review. And with that, I give you Raúl from
ReferralCandy.
Shane Melaugh: So Raúl, thank you very much for joining us on the podcast.
Raúl Galera: Yeah. Thank you for inviting me.
Shane Melaugh: To get started, just to give people a bit of context, give us like the elevator pitch
of the ReferralCandy product. And also tell us a bit about your role at the
company.
Raúl Galera: Absolutely. So basically, ReferralCandy is an app for eCommerce that allows
retailers to run customer referral programs. So think about it as a way of turning
your customers into your marketing team or into sales people. You're leveraging
their contacts and you're allowing them to basically refer you to their friends
and family, and therefore you're increasing your customer loyalty, while the
same time, you're acquiring new customers.
Raúl Galera: And my role at ReferralCandy, so I'm the Partner Manager. So I'm in charge of
managing the relationships that we have with several partners, whether they
are other tech companies or agencies or affiliates type of relationships.
Shane Melaugh: All right, cool. Let's paint a bit of a picture here. So let's say I am selling an online
course. And I want to use referral marketing. What could that look like? Can you
give an example of how I might do that?
Raúl Galera: Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing that you will want to do it's to select the
rewards that you're giving to your customers and their friends. So a typical
referral program will look like something like get $50 for every friend that you
refer, and give your friends a $50 discount, for example. Or give 10, get 10. That
type of messages what you want to get to your customers. So you want to make
it clear for your customers to understand that there's something that they can
get out of this referral, and that there's something that they can give to their
friends.
Raúl Galera: And so once you set this reward system, you will be giving your customers a
unique referral link that they can share with your friends. And so, once the
friend clicks on that link, they'll be taken to a landing page with the promo, with
the offer that you're giving them. And then from there, they'll be taken to your
store, or this case, your online course so they can proceed to complete the
purchase with the discount that has been given by their friends.
Shane Melaugh: Right. So in this case, would it works so that I would basically have my main
sales page where I sell my course at the full price, and then I would create
maybe a hidden URL with the whatever, $10 off or $50 off version. And the
referral link would send people to that landing page.
Raúl Galera: Yeah. Either that or we can give them a discount coupon that they can apply at
checkout. So yeah, so either works. But yeah, those are the option basically. It's
basically a way of giving your customers' friends an incentive to make that first
purchase.
Shane Melaugh: And do you typically do, like with the customers you work with, you typically do
this kind of basically just earn money to refer people? Or do you also do the kind
of thing where, I don't know, get 10% off your next order, or I don't know, some
basically non-monetary rewards? Is that something that you also do?
Raúl Galera: So yeah, obviously, we allow cash rewards. We also help them to run referral
program space on discounts. So, for example, if you're running some sort of
subscription business, you'll want to give discounts on your customers' next
purchase as a way of keeping them engage with your program. But we also
allow them to run what we call custom rewards.
Raúl Galera: So that could be anything that you want. So from a free T-shirt, or a free sample,
or a free product that you're releasing, or some sort of gift cards, for example.
Those are things that you can do. And that's what we call basically a customer
awards. You can basically fill it with whatever type of reward. It doesn't have to
be monetary that you want to offer.
Shane Melaugh: Right. So let's get into some kind of details of how this might work for someone.
Because one of the first thing that interests me here is basically, does this work
for a small business, solopreneur, limited budget, right? Because I think with a
lot of marketing strategies, that's often the question. Okay, I can see that this is
working for a bunch of companies that maybe have a large marketing team, and
god knows what their [crosstalk 00:07:54] budget, but I don't know if I can do
this if it's just me and my online course. What are your thoughts on that?
Raúl Galera: Basically, one of the things that I would point out, just to start with this, that this
is pretty much 100% performance-based marketing. So if you're running a
referral program where you're giving your customers a reward, either that it
could be a discount or a cash reward for spreading the word about your
business, you're paying based on performance. You're paying for every new sale
that you're making. Even if it's at a discounted price, the customer acquisition
cost of that customer is way lower than pretty much any other marketing
channel.
Raúl Galera: Referral marketing itself, it's one of the most cost effective marketing strategies
out there. And so, the only thing that will point out is that, I mean, it doesn't
really matter the nature of your business or the size of your business, because
actually, ReferralCandy is mostly optimized for small and medium businesses. So
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there are enterprise solutions out there. But we like to focus on helping small
and medium businesses to run their word of mouth marketing.
Raúl Galera: But again, it doesn't really matter what's the nature or the size of your business.
It's more about what's your customers' behavior? So if you have a steady
number of orders, a steady number of customers that keep coming back to your
store, you are already getting referral sales because that's something that
happens organically. I mean, think about the last time that someone
recommended something to you, or the last time you just send someone to a
website because they were thinking about buying whatever product was. So it
just happens organically.
Raúl Galera: The only thing is that if you don't have a referral program, there's really nothing
that you can do to keep encouraging your customers to promote you and to
refer you to their friends. So yeah, so it's all about do you have a loyal customer
base? Do you know that you have customers that keep coming back? Do you
see that activity happening in your store? Then you should definitely think
about running some sort of word of mouth marketing campaign on your store.
Shane Melaugh: Yeah, I think you make a very important point there when you said this is
happening, anyway. And I think that it's difficult to measure, of course, but I've
seen various estimates of this, that basically say that most purchase decisions
are made based on some recommendation. Like people rarely just buy
something like out of the blue. They are basically always looking for either a
friend recommended it or someone they see as an authority, right? Maybe they
go check out some reviews on YouTube. And they're like "Okay, this expert says
this is good. So I'm going to buy it." That's basically a recommendation as well.
Shane Melaugh: So almost all purchases happen based on some kind of recommendation. And
another thing that we've talked about previously is just the importance of
having a really good product and giving your customers a really good
experience. And then, a referral program on top of that is basically just kind of a
nudge, right? It's a nudge to encourage what happy customers will do in some
form or another anyway, which is tell other people about it.
Raúl Galera: Exactly. There's a study that says that ... I can't remember the source, but I
mean, it's out there, that says that unhappy customers will talk about your
business more than happy customers. Somehow we tend to warn our friends
and family about a bad experience that we've had more than share a good
experience that we've had, either offline or online purchase.
Raúl Galera: So considering the fact that it's more difficult to get these happy customers to
talk to their friends, you have to do something to have them go out there and
talk to their friends and family about you. And also, one of the things, so this
could be a tip for someone who's thinking about running some sort of word of
marketing campaign on their business, we tend to think that this success for a
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referral program, or an affiliate program, is to give a bigger incentive to your
customer, so they can go out and make that referral.
Raúl Galera: But something that we've seen on some of our best performing referral
programs at ReferralCandy is that some of the most successful ones think about
the customers' friend more than the customer itself. And it's kind of going back
to what I said earlier, is that referrals happen anyway. Recommendations
happening anyway. And one of the things that trigger people to recommend
something to their friends it's the fact that they can do something good for that
friend or that family.
Raúl Galera: Even if you have, and you just mentioned it, it's all about having a good
customer experience. If you have a bad experience at a store, or just dealing
with the business, you're not going to recommend it to your friends and family,
even if you're getting some sort of reward out of it because it would not be
worth it.
Raúl Galera: So sometimes the key to a successful referral program is to give a bigger
incentive to the friend than to the customer because it would just make your
customer look good anyway in front of their audience or their circle. The fact
that it can give a big discount to a friend or a big deal that they can get to
something, sure, it's nice to get something in exchange. But the fact that you
can do something nice for someone that you like, it's a good reward already.
Shane Melaugh: Yeah, that's really interesting point as well. Also, I want to quickly call back to
something you said about people are more likely to warn people against bad
experiences. That's the negativity bias, right? We all have a negativity bias. Just
some kind of a survival thing, right? Where it's very important to warn people of
danger. It's more important to say "Oh, my god, there's a saber tooth tiger up
over there." Like you have to say that. Whereas if it's like "Oh, there's some nice
berries over there." It's like, nobody's going to die if you don't have that, right?
Shane Melaugh: So we all have this negativity bias built in. And yeah, that's a good point, though,
because even if you ... So, first of all, no matter how good your product is,
you're never going to make everyone happy, right? And that's important to keep
in mind. Like, even if the majority of your customers are happy, and some of
them are unhappy, then you might actually be getting the same amount of
negative word of mouth as positive. And that doesn't actually represent how
happy people are with your product.
Shane Melaugh: And so, giving this extra nudge can can balance that out a bit. But yeah, the
other thing is also, I think that's great, right? You don't want to just say "Hey,
you get a reward for sharing this", because I think that's all something, even if
I'm using a good product and there's a referral program, I don't want to be a
sales person with my friends. We've all been burned with that, right? Someone
joins an MLM thing. And they just don't shut up about wanting you to sign up
for it, right? You don't want to be that person.
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Shane Melaugh: And so, if it's like "Hey, I've got this link where you can get 10% off for
something", then you're actually doing something good for the other person
that it feels less like ... It doesn't have that sticky feeling kind of that you might
get from just trying to sell your friends.
Raúl Galera: Exactly. And also, something else that I would double point out. So here's
another tip, if you're ever considering running a referral program. Make it as
simple as possible. And make it easy for your customers and their friends to get
whatever reward you're offering.
Raúl Galera: So we've seen this all the time, these programs that are based on points. So you
have to make a lot of purchases, or you have to refer a lot of friends to get a
small reward. And you end up getting tired of it because you are doing an effort,
you're getting the word out there about a specific product or specific business,
and you are still far from that small reward anyway. So I've seen some referral
programs where you have to like refer five or 10 friends. And each one of them
has to make a purchase of a certain amount. And then, once that happens, you
get $20, $30, something like that.
Raúl Galera: So it's not really worth it. Sometimes it's better to just give small reward, but
make it easy to achieve, than just making a very complicated system. I mean, I'm
sure you remember the Uber referral program. So I'm pretty sure that every
single person who has the Uber app on their phones, they signed up through a
friends link and that was extremely easy. That's one of the case studies that we
always share here at ReferralCandy is that they made it very simple. It was
something like get $10, give $10. So you get $10 in credit for every friend, and
you give your friend $10 in credits. It's simple.
Raúl Galera: And going back to what you said earlier about friends and family not sounding
like a salesperson. That's exactly one of the things that we always remind our
retailers is the fact that when they're turning their customers into their
marketing or their sales team, the best thing about that is that they're not, they
don't sound like a salesperson. These sound like your friend recommended
something to you. So they have that trust factor in front of their friends that a
salesperson would definitely not have.
Shane Melaugh: Yeah. So this is a good example as well. So one of the ways I think about this
kind of thing is to think about cognitive load. So when you say keep it simple,
that's one of the things that I always think about when I'm designing anything
on a website, right? Anything that a user interacts with, I'm always asking myself
what's the cognitive load of this?
Shane Melaugh: So basically, how much brain power does someone have to invest before they
understand what's going on here? And like you said, right? If you have this
complicated program, where it's like you have to register here and do this, do
that and refer this and under these circumstances, you get this. Or it turns into
​
this whole operation. It's like well, do I have an afternoon to figure out what the
hell is going on here? No. Right?
Shane Melaugh: So it has to be something that's really simple that I can understand right away.
And this a low cognitive load may outweigh a complicated program with higher
benefits. And so, a practical way to think about this is can you think about being
in a circle of friends and basically dropping this as a normal statement, because
if you're in a group of friends, and you've got to start talking about "Okay, guys,
here's the thing, right? There's this product, blah, blah, blah, blah. And here's a
link, but you have to register here. And then you have to go there. And then you
have to use this coupon code. And if you do that, then tell me, blah, blah, blah",
right?
Shane Melaugh: You don't have 15 minutes to tell your friends about this thing. But the Uber
example was like "Guys, have you seen this thing? Like you can tap on your app
and someone would come pick you up in their car. It's amazing. Here's the link,
you'll get $10, you can try it out." That's really simple. Like you can insert that in
a conversation with your friends. And it doesn't feel weird, right? So that's one
thing you kind of can test. You know, just like the friendship conversation test,
right? Can I tell my friend about this without sounding super weird? If I can, it's
gotta be made simpler somehow.
Raúl Galera: Yeah, exactly. And I mean, again, there's a lot of examples of successful referral
programs that have helped grow a business. So another example of this will be
Dropbox. I don't know if it's still running. But I feel like we've all taken part of
the Dropbox referral program, where they were giving you storage for every
friend that you refer to Dropbox. So they didn't have to pay anything. They
didn't have to put the credit card details or anything like that. All they had to do
was just to create an account on Dropbox, and you automatically had more
storage.
Raúl Galera: So it's simple. You know, here, you create an account on Dropbox, you get 15
gigabytes, and you give me one gigabyte of free storage. That's it. It's a simple
page, it's very short. You can tell your friend what's in it for them, what's in it for
you. It's very transparent. I think that's what makes it successful.
Shane Melaugh: Yeah, so we've got two really important pieces here already, right? Is that the
first is to make sure that you don't only reward someone, but you also reward
their friends, so that they can feel good about making the recommendation.
And the second is to keep it really simple.
Shane Melaugh: And on this note, I also want to ask about this, because when you set up a
system with monetary rewards, I feel like that introduces a lot of potential
complications, where it's like "Okay, well, we'll pay you money for referring
people. But you've got to register here with your tax information, and you've
got to fill out this W-88 form or whatever, and you've got to give us your PayPal
account or bank details or something." That adds a lot of complications.
Shane Melaugh: What's your take on this? I mean, is there a way around this? Can we do
monetary incentives without being overly complicated? Or what's your
experience? Is it better to do something non-monetary, like the Dropbox
example, right? You already have a Dropbox account by the time you see the
referral program, and you basically don't have to do anything else after that.
Raúl Galera: Yeah. So one of the ways of what we make it simple for retailers to not, like you
said, over-complicate things because that's literally the last thing that a business
wants to deal with. So what we do is that if you're running a referral program on
ReferralCandy, we'll send you an invoice every month that already includes the
rewards that you're paying out to your advocate.
Raúl Galera: So if you have to pay, let's say, $100, so that's like $10 to 10 customers, we'll
include that in your bill. And we'll send it for you automatically. So there's
nothing that you have to do. And we will send the rewards via PayPal, and you
just have to pay the invoice to ReferralCandy. And that's it. Like there's no more
complications for you.
Raúl Galera: Now, in terms of whether you should run a monetary versus non-monetary or
discounts versus cash versus custom reward in a sense, I would say that it's
always a smart decision to tie that with your customers' purchasing behavior. So
I mentioned this earlier, so if you have a business that it's based on recurring
purchases. So if you have a subscription box, for example, it's smart for you to
give a discount on the next purchase, or even make it possible for your
customers to get, let's say, the next month for free, if you refer a number of
friends, if you refer two friends, right? If you refer a friend, you'll get your next
month for free. That's something that it's very powerful. And it doesn't involve
cash, let's say, but its monetary reward because at the end of the day, that's
money that your customers are saving, and you are acquiring a customer at a
cheaper cost than pretty much any other channels.
Raúl Galera: But on the other side, we've had several customers at ReferralCandy where it's
either a one time purchase. So like, let's say a software that you download once
or something that you don't buy often like a mattress. I always give this
example. We've had several online mattress companies on ReferralCandy. And
obviously, what they do is that they give either a cash reward or some sort of
gift card, for example, an Amazon gift card for every customer that they refer.
And the reason for that is that you don't buy a mattress every month, and you
definitely don't buy a mattress every three years. So giving you a discount on
your next purchase wouldn't really make sense.
Raúl Galera: So that will be my recommendation when you're thinking about okay, what can
I give my customers? Just think about something that makes sense for your
customers in terms of their purchasing behavior. And what's something that can
get them a lot of value. Because, again, maybe getting some sort of cash that
you can spend on whatever you want, I mean, it's always good. No one's going
to say no to that.
​
Raúl Galera: But sometimes it's perceived as a higher value if you say "Look, next month is on
us. You refer a friend, you don't have to pay anything next month. That's on us."
I think that sometimes perceived as a higher value.
Shane Melaugh: Yeah. All right, those are interesting points here. You've already given us a
couple of examples of this, but from the referral programs that you've seen with
your customers, are there any other things that kind of stand out to you as the
difference between highly successful referral programs and referral programs
basically go nowhere?
Raúl Galera: Yes, so definitely. One of the things that ... And not only for referral programs,
but for the business in general, something that I've seen quite often in our most
successful retailer. So I did a series of interviews last year to our Top 10 retailers
and it surprised me because, obviously, each one of them was working with ...
All of them had a different product, different industry. So they had pretty much
nothing coming besides the fact that they were running a referral program.
Raúl Galera: But something that they did have in common is that they all had a very active
community online. Obviously, Facebook groups are the most common ones, but
some of them had some sort of forums because they were very specialized on
something, but they all had some sort of online community where customers,
employees and prospects would join to learn more about the product and
discuss the product. And that's something that we saw it as something that it
makes a lot of sense because it's kind of going back to what I said earlier about
turn your customers into your sales people, into your marketing department.
Raúl Galera: I joined some of these Facebook groups to see what was going on there. And
you could see customers acting as customer support agents. So a customer will
go in this group and say "Hey, how do you guys do this?" Or "How can I achieve
this?" And a customer would jump in and say "Hey, this is what I do with my
product. And this is how it works, and blah, blah." So sometimes it creates a
very engaging community. It surprisingly, wasn't filled with referral links. People
weren't trying to convert people into new customers with the referral links. It
was all very natural. Like, people will engage in a conversation that was driven
by value first, and then maybe they'll say "Look, if you're interested, here's my
referral link, you can sign up with it." So it was a very active community. And
again, based on value.
Raúl Galera: But in terms of referral programs, something that we've seen that obviously
works very well is combining not only your customers, but working with
influencers as well. So the good thing about influencers, whether they are
people that have a specialized blog, or an online course, or YouTube channel, or
Instagram presence, whatever it is, is that those people are famous for a reason.
And the reason is because they're an expert on a specific field.
Raúl Galera: And so, if you can get, especially if you're starting up, if you can partner with
another influencer that is also starting up, you don't have to go after the big
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fish, and say "Look, we have this referral program in place. Here's how you can
benefit from it. It's kind of a win-win situation. You can refer this product that
matches with what you talk about or the products that you mentioned." And
you get something in exchange, that's something that it's going to push your
referral program further because your potential customers are going to see
that, an authority it's recommending a product.
Raúl Galera: So those are things that we've seen that successful retailers have in common. So
again, going back to what I said, so having an active community and also
creating that mix between having customers as advocates, but also having
professional advocates in a sense or some sort of influencers join your referral
program giving you that push.
Shane Melaugh: When you reach out to an influencer to do something like this, how do you
handle this? I mean, will you get them on like the same deal as everyone else?
Or do you make some kind of special deal for them? Is it like a sponsorship thing
more?
Raúl Galera: Yeah, so I talked to some of the these retailers that decided to go with
influencer route and it was all very personal at first. So obviously, they will use
the referral program to track how many purchases that we're generating, and to
kinda like as a way of having everything under one roof. But they will always
probably treat them a little different in the sense that will probably give them
some free product so they can showcase them.
Raúl Galera: But what I liked is that they never ran this massive outreach and try reach out to
every single influencer out there. They were carefully selecting their influencers,
some of them select the influencers that were in the same city as them, so they
could meet them in person. You know, meet up for coffee and say "Look, this is
who we are, this is the product that we're trying ..." It's kind of like hiring an
employee in a sense. You want to make sure that the person who is going to talk
to their audience about your product has a shared vision or share values as you
do, as your company does.
Raúl Galera: And also, one of the things that ReferralCandy helps you to do, which is
something our [inaudible 00:29:44] have mentioned as well, is the fact that we
help you to see who are your top referrers. So sometimes retailers have sign up
for ReferralCandy and then they have seen "Oh, wait a second. I have one
customer that it's referring like 10 times more customers than any other
advocate that we have. Why is that?" So that will reach out to this person, say
"Hey, we noticed that you've been very active. And can you tell us more about
what you do? And how can we help you sell more?"
Raúl Galera: You know, it's an easy way for them to identify top performers, and then reach
out to them. So they can say "Well, how can we make this even a bigger win-win
situation for both of us?"
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Shane Melaugh: Yeah, I can confirm a part of this here because in the affiliate programs that we
have for Thrive Themes, we started out with this being just wide open, right?
Just like click here to register. And over time, we basically narrowed this down
more and more. So these days, we still have an affiliate program, it's quite hard
to get in.
Shane Melaugh: So generally, you get in by being invited by us because I've also seen that it's just
so much more valuable to have a more personal relationship with a few
advocates who understand your product, who are in line with your style and
your culture, and so on. Where it's really like you say, it's like a partnership,
right? It's like this person gets it. And this is the right person to do this, instead
of just basically having everyone spam your link all over the place.
Shane Melaugh: Like that ended up costing us quite a bit, like the amount of basically low grade
crappy, spammy promotion, that we had thousands of affiliates at one point
that they did, you know, ended up basically being negative for our business. And
then it was quite a big cost to clean up this affiliate program and so on. So this is
something I can also ... You know, if I started over again with this, we started
this a long time ago. If I started over again, I would from day one, just like you
described, I would basically go and pick out specific people I want to work with.
And I love the idea of looking for people in your city. So yeah, it's much better to
just have a small number of the really good people than just have everyone.
Raúl Galera: Yeah, I mean, you want to make sure that you have the right message out there.
Actually, one of our top retailers, you can't find the referral program on their
website. It's limited to existing customers. So once you make a purchase, that's
when you're invited to join the referral program, but not before because they
just don't want that. They also sell a very specific product that it's not very
mainstream, but I guess that's part of their deal. So they want to make sure that
they have the right people promoting their product out there.
Shane Melaugh: All right, I think those are some great tips. Great advice there. Well, I'm hoping
that the ReferralCandy referral program is an example of a great pro program.
So can you tell us how that will work?
Raúl Galera: Yeah, so that's interestingly, it's an experiment that we launch kind of recently,
actually. We didn't have our own affiliate or referral program before. But yeah, I
mean, it's very simple. We know that there's a lot of blogs and YouTube
channels that are focused on eCommerce and they basically want to monetize
their content because we've actually seen blog authors reach out to us and say
"Hey, I literally just noticed that you guys have an affiliate program and I've
been promoting you guys for a long time, just because I think you guys have a
great tool."
Raúl Galera: So they sign up and now obviously, they include their referral link. And it's an
easy way for them to monetize their content. So we give $10US for every sign
up that you they refer to us. So that sign-up gets a 30 day free trial on
041_Referral_Candy (Completed 12/11/18)
Transcript by Rev.com
Page 12 of 12
ReferralCandy. They can cancel anytime if they don't like it and to see that it
works for them. And if they see that it works for them, then they will start
paying on Day 31. So yeah, I think it's a win-win situation. They get to monetize
their content. And we get people to try out ReferralCandy and see if it's a good
fit for their business.
Shane Melaugh: All right. Good stuff.
Raúl Galera: If there's one takeaway that I will like people to remember is that this is
something that if you want it to work, you have to make sure that you have, I
would say, an active business. You need to have a certain number of customer
interaction for it to really work. It might not be the best fit for an early, early
stage when you're still trying to get your first customers.
Raúl Galera: But once you do, it's just a no-brainer to basically turn your customers into your
marketing team. So that's something that I would kind of like leave us a
takeaway is that make sure that you think about referral marketing as another
marketing channel versus the ones that you probably already have running for
acquiring new customers.
Shane Melaugh: All right. Well, thank you very much, Raúl, for your insights. And, of course, links
to ReferralCandy and everything else talked about are going to be in the show
notes of this episode. Thank you. Raúl. It was a pleasure to have you on.
Raúl Galera: Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.
Shane Melaugh: And that wraps up this episode. For the show notes and the transcript of this
episode, you can go to activegrowth.com/candy, and there you can also leave a
comment or a voice message. So you can simply scroll down on the post and
there's a button you can click or tap on to leave us a question. You can just
record a voice message and every once in a while, we answer those questions
and messages on the show.
Shane Melaugh: And we always appreciate hearing back from you. So whatever feedback you
have, whatever questions you have, or whatever challenges you have in
generating traffic for your business, let us know, and it helps us make better and
more relevant content for you. Thank you for listening. I will catch you in the
next one.
What You'll Discover in this Episode:
- How your small business can use and benefit from a referral program, even if you're a bootstrapping solopreneur.
- The psychology and power of recommendation.
- What makes a referral program successful.
- How to incentivize your customers to turn into your self-proclaimed marketing team.
- An easy "litmus test" to know if people would participate.
- The different types of rewards: should you choose a monetary or a non-monetary reward?
- How exactly it works and how much it would cost to you? Can you do it on a low budget?
- Famous examples of referral programs done right: learn from Uber and Dropbox.
- The next step: why and how to work with influencers?
- Why keeping your customers engaged matters and in what ways you can benefit from it.
Resources:
- Learn more about Referral Candy here. (please note: this is an affiliate link. Using our link won't cost you more.)
- Find the definition of cognitive load here.
- Read a case study on the Uber referral program.
- Learn more about the Dropbox referral program.
Get Your Customers To Spread The Word
Have you experimented with referral programs before? How could you get your customers to spread the word about your business? What reward system would work best in your specific situation?
Let us know in the comments below!
As always, we want your feedback, questions, tips and stories. You can leave them in the comments section or leave us a voice message by hitting the "Start recording" button below:
See you soon with another episode!
I am listening to podcasts on the Overcast App and on there your latest episode is from Dec 9, 2018. Now here on your website I see you have more recent ones, why aren’t these on Overcast?
That is indeed our latest podcast episode. The other posts on the blog are not podcast posts.