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💬 Optimising any referral program comes down to a major component that ties and drives performance, which is the email strategy for both the referrer and the referred - and also, a strategy to ensure you're actively promoting your program to existing users to uptake and participate.
In this checklist, I share various tests/experiments that I've seen from top brands, and also some areas that I do for initiatives like this.
💬 Enjoy going through these examples and tactical points I go through - more than happy to chat if you have any specific SaaS referral email questions. :)
You want to illuminate what’s on offer to encourage more uptake for existing users to share, and also ensure the offer is clear for those who are receiving the invite.
This is a great example reference from 'Going':
From experience, a major component to help drive uptake of a referral program does come down to what the offer is.
You can have your normal ‘baseline’/’always on’ offer, but it’s worth experimenting and testing out different incentives from time to time, tied to a promotional campaign that you’re wanting to push.
I share more about referral program optimisations for SaaS startups and brands, that you can check out.
You can use referral mechanics outside of your typical ‘two-sided’ program - such as for waitlists or the likes of viral competitions.
This is a fairly large topic in itself, so I’m more focused on sharing some awesome email examples related to pre-launches and competitions here.
There are some core elements which you should be including as part of your emails to existing users/customers.
You want to include:
This email example reference from Ticket Tailor possesses some of the elements above, and they’ve done a great job in terms of UI and branding.
Related to what I mentioned as one of the key elements you should have as part of your referral emails are various social proof elements.
As we know with social proof, you want to incorporate these elements to help build ‘trust signals’.
And whilst we are promoting this type of program to existing customers/users who understand your product, it is a different ‘trust’ and encouragement to them to actively share with others in their network.
So, you need to build trust to show your SaaS referral program is performing/‘successful' - and highlight that real users/customers are sharing with their friends/colleagues (and being rewarded).
In terms of what elements you can share, you can:
You should be doing A/B split test for most single-based campaigns and automation flows - and most ESP’s have this capability in place, so it should be fairly easy to implement.
You should be split-testing across elements such as:
The key reminder here though is to ensure you are actively tracking your experiments via some sort of tracker.
Typically I like to use the likes of Google Sheets or Airtable.
Each ESP has the ability to add dynamic fields to emails (like names, etc), but the next step is checking integrations between referral software and ESPs to have the ability to add dynamic fields and personalisation for referral emails (for both parties).
This is more advanced to execute, and only really makes sense to invest in developing/adding to your program if you have a decent uptake in referrals, and a large customer base (minimum 10,000+ users/customers).
It is great to have though to help motivate and encourage users to share, and see the status of shares they’ve done.
Just like this great example from Busuu:
If you’re wanting to increase opt-ins with users/customers to refer others, you do have to ensure you are adequately promoting it (to help remind that it exists).
And one way to remind users is through adding in a small section as part of other email promotions/campaigns, or even via the likes of event automation sequences.
As an experiment worth trying if you’re wanting to push opt-ins, is just doing a single-focused CTA promotion - just like this example from Postable.
It’s a good tactic to test with top customer segments who are active (and/or via the likes of LTV-based, certain attributes, etc) and see what the participant rate looks like.
