Member get Member schemes are a great way to boost your client base. Get them right and you can build your customer base while at the same time rewarding your existing clients. Get it wrong and all it will be is a drain on time and money. Here Suzanne Jiggens-Johnson, Senior Consultant at Stream:20 gives you her Top 20 tips to getting your member get member scheme right first time.
Offers
1. Reward both parties not just the existing customer or the friend. Both need to see benefit in the offer to make it worth their while.
2. The reward to the friend must be as good (if not better) than other acquisition offers in the market. You can’t disadvantage a new customer because they were referred by a friend.
3. Test different offers for both the customer and friend. Often cash (or vouchers) is king but you can instil relevance by relating the reward to your product eg a free upgrade, free month’s subscription etc. Whatever you go for, keep it simple.
4. Placing a time limit on the offer aids tracking, although consider also having an ongoing lower reward ‘always on’ to capture any ad hoc referrals
Targeting
5. Test the best timing to target existing customers. Try to target them when they’re feeling most positive about your product for example when they’ve just made their first purchase.
6. Target your customers that came through the referral scheme themselves – it’s most likely they’ll be possible about the scheme as they’ve benefited from it
7. Include the existing customer’s name in the subject line of the email being sent to the friend – this will help reduce the assumption it’s spam
Customer tools
8. Make it easy for customers to refer & provide them with the tools – offer a microsite where they can enter friends’ details, make sure they can do it via their phone, via social media, SMS etc
9. Ensure each customer has a unique code which can be used to link their friends’ registrations to their account. Make sure customers know this code so they can pass it out to friends and don’t have to rely on friends clicking through certain links.
10. In your MGM campaigns remind customers of the benefits of your product or service and why new customers benefit from buying from you. Not all customers will remember why they use you specifically!
11. Keep referring customers up to date about their friend’s progress. They can help to prompt the friend to ensure they complete their registration or achieve any sales criteria to gain the reward.
12. If possible, set up a microsite that provides this progress information to customers. Give them the tools to encourage their friend such as template emails to overcome any barriers to conversion.
13. Remember you are not able to retain any data about the referred friend, unless you have their consent. Any follow ups should ask the customer to enter their friend’s email address again to avoid any data protection issues.
Tracking & High value
14. If possible track referrals not just conversions – that will allow you to identify key referring customers, even if not all their referrals convert in to customers.
15. Consider rewarding customers for referrals not just conversions.
16. Measure the quality of new customers being referred to you. This allows you to identify customers who are referring the highest value friends.
17. Consider giving high value referrers an additional reward to encourage more referrals of the highest quality
18. Test tying the friend’s reward into more than one purchase – this will encourage repeat purchase and minimise ‘hit and runs’.
Finally…
19. Take a look at Member Get Member schemes outside your own market to see what innovation is going on there and adapt the best ideas for your own customers.
20. Remember to constantly review & optimise your scheme. Don’t just leave it to run itself!
By Suzanne Jiggens-Johnson
Senior Consultant
Stream:20
www.stream20.com
