How to run effective referral programs for eCommerce [Raul Galera]

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Raul Galera, as they will be discussing leveraging this channel as an eCommerce business and how to best benefit from loyalty and word of mouth programmes. Raul is the Chief Advocate at RefferalCandy, an app that allows eCommerce brands to set up and run customer referral programs

Connect with Raul: 

𝑊𝑒𝑏𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑒:  https://www.referralcandy.com/ 

𝑅𝑎𝑢𝑙 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝐼𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raulgalera/ 

 

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐀𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐢:

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢: https://marketiu.com  / https://marketiu.ro   

𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑖 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu   

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𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐼𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑚: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/  

𝐸𝑚𝑎𝑖𝑙 𝑎𝑡 hello@marketiu.ro

 

𝐋𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐝𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦:

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Episode transcript:

 

Andrei Tiu  

Hi there, this is Andrei and you're on The Market Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest today is Raul Galera, the Chief Advocate to ReferralCandy, an app that allows ecommerce brands to set up and run customer referral programmes. Today, we'll discuss leveraging this channel as an ecommerce business and how to best benefit from loyalty and word of mouth programmes as well, during the upcoming shopping season. Without further ado, Raul, it's a pleasure to have you here on the show. How are you? How's the morning going?

 

Raul Galera  

I've got doing well. Thanks for having me.

 

Andrei Tiu  

No worries, it's my pleasure. You look very fresh. How's everything going on your side with the business, with life, with, you know, customers?

 

Raul Galera  

Pretty good. I actually recently just relocated to Mexico City. So this is where I'm speaking from right now. This is my first 48 hours here. I literally just got here like this past weekend. And things are going very well. I mean, in terms of ReferralCandy, as you can, as you can imagine, the ecommerce world has exploded over the past 18 months. So we've experienced a lot of growth. And with that, obviously a lot of new improvements that we've done to our app, to better serve our merchants. So yeah, it's a pretty exciting time for free comments in general. And we're trying to help us make Mitchison as we can.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Great, some great stuff. So, let's start by maybe introducing you a bit more to the audience and help our guys here understand your background and what ReferralCandy does? And how do you engage with the ecommerce players let's say, so that we can dive into discussion in more depth as we go?

 

Raul Galera  

Yeah, absolutely. So about myself, I actually been at ReferralCandy for the past five years now, mostly running the partner programme. So we obviously collaborate with a bunch of other companies in the ecommerce world. Whether it's their ecommerce agencies or other tech companies, or you know, media companies that touch in with marketing or ecommerce in general. I'm in charge of managing those relationships. And ReferralCandy specifically, for those that are listening that are not familiar with us. We are an app that allows e commerce stores to set up and run customer referral programmes. So think about the traditional the world-famous Dropbox referral programme, Uber referral programme in which you, us a customer, get something every time that you refer a friend and kind of like bring new brand new business to the store. So we basically allow brands to set it up and run it on autopilot, just by giving each customer a unique referral link that they can share with their friends. And we're able to track rewards. And it's basically an easy way for merchants to first of all, acquire new customers through a channel that it's completely owned by them, they don't need to depend on a third party platform, and we're talking about leveraging their customer base to acquire new customers. But also it's a way for them to retain those customers that they already have. By giving them an incentive the next time they and every time they refer a friend, they can get a discount on a future purchase. So you're kind of giving them an additional incentive to come back to your store for more. It's overall a good way to acquire new customers and retain your existing ones without having to depend on platforms or other algorithms that might change your entire marketing mix and overnight.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah, it's also a very good way to you know, get people in, like directly involved with your brand not only consuming products from you, but actually having an invested interest in making money with you in a way.

 

Raul Galera  

Yeah, exactly. I mean, when brands typically think of the post purchase a kind of like flow after somebody has left the checkout and acquire the new customer. Something that it keeps seeing, not only as a somebody that works in ecommerce, but as a consumer myself, I see a lot of brands that are just like trying to get you to that second purchase pretty much right away, without realising they literally just made a purchase. You probably need some time until that happens again. So you know, there's a lot of push for promotions to get that second purchase and if you can switch the direction of the conversation after purchase and direct it towards a referral or maybe doesn't have to be a referral but maybe like joining a loyalty programme or leaving a review or like just doing something that's going to engage with a brand other than making a purchase, that's gonna pay off down the line. So it's another way, like you said, another way to kind of retaining people and make sure that you're brand staying top of mind without having to direct people to your product page.

 

Andrei Tiu  

You mentioned something really cool there. And I think this can be an angle for our discussion forward, which is what happens after the purchase happens. So you know, during the podcast, and as marketers as well, we have discussed a lot, and we are still discussing what happens, and how you can bring those people into the community, how you can drive traffic, drive conversions etc. But what's at least equally important is what happens after the first purchase, because mainly with ecommerce, the first purchase, not never, but many times, it's not necessarily profitable for the business. Many, if we talk about consumer goods, the profit lays in the repeat purchase. So how to facilitate that repeat purchase is a question that needs answer, needs, you know, a very good answer. And I think it would be a great framework for our discussion now, to tackle this point of the customer journey. And for you guys tuning in that own online stores, or that are marketers or activate within an ecommerce business, to think in a bit more depth on this topic. Hopefully, we'll be able to inspire you to, you know, take a couple more actions that maybe you are not at the, at the moment, are mainly in preparation for Black Friday, and also Christmas, because it's just around the corner really? Yeah, already, like, it's still a month or a month and a half. But really we should all Prepare from now. So, Raul. What's interesting in the business right now, like, let's talk a bit in the moment, what are you guys up to? How are your clients doing? What are they up to? That will be relevant for our people here.

 

Raul Galera  

Yeah, so I mean, as you mentioned, pretty much everybody is preparing for the busiest time of the year. Although there has been a shift in how these has evolved in the past year and a half. I mentioned this a lot, but I think it's pretty telling in terms of like how Ecommerce has evolved in the past year and a half. I was at a Shopify event in Amsterdam, in February 2020. So literally just weeks away before, everything just gonna change. And the CTO of Shopify was there. And he was showing us a graph up - this is actually his Twitter so maybe is still published there, and maybe people can find it. But he showed us a chart that showed kind of like the peak in sales that Shopify was registering every single year in Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So you could see the entire year just kind of like flat, kind of like the same level of traffic, and then boom, you see that hit, and in around mid November. And  something funny that that happened after that is that - we're in April, as a few months later, after this, he published the same graph and - updated obviously - for after kind of like the the shift between offline and online. A lot of businesses in March and April decided to go online so they could still sell to their customers. And they were registering, at least Shopify was registering Black Friday and Cyber Monday traffic every single day after mid March. And so that what's interesting, is that now I mean, last year was still experiencing growth in that holiday season. So it's kind of like gives you a sense of how big the ecommerce world has gone in just a year and a half. I read a stat that it just in a matter of weeks, ecommerce reached the level of market penetration levels that was expected for 2025 in that happen in April 2020. Right, so well, that means for brands is that there's a lot more competition now, there's a lot more brands that are selling similar products, they're at least going after the same target audience. Consumers have limited budgets. So we need to you know, brands need to compete in a smarter way. And in terms of  how they connect with those customers. As you mentioned earlier, the first purchase might not be profitable. So this is kind of it became a kind of a lot longer term route for a lot of brands right like that first purchase just about getting that customers out the door and then convince them that your products the best and kind of like given different reasons so they can come back to your store. So referrals is one of them. But I always like to nail it down to having a good product. Nothing can replace having a good product and having a good purchase experience. If you don't have those two things in place, a loyalty programme or referral programme. Nothing's free, really gonna change the fact that your customers are not going to be incentivized to buy from you or refer their friends really, because nobody's going to refer a product that they're doing and enjoy. So with that in mind, what our customers are up to these days is Jeff preparing for the holiday season, the busiest time of the year. And one thing in particular that we see is that they are making sure that their post-purchase flows are optimised basically that they have a clear path. For those new customers that are going to acquire, they're probably going to acquire through ads, or maybe these are customers that have been coming through organic search, because they've been kind of researching products that they're thinking of buying during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So they're kind of ready. You need to have a plan for what are you going to do with those customers after they leave your store? And how you're going to get them to come back to your store? So yeah, we see multiple strategies there. Obviously, referral marketing plays a very important role there. But that's what's on everybody's mind right now. It's how we make sure that those customers that we're acquiring for the first time, are not just one, one-off purchases.

 

Andrei Tiu  

And the question here, you know, maybe for somebody that hasn't particularly considered this channel before, and they might consider tapping into it now, like in the near future, they might have a database. So you know, like some customers that have already bought from them. If they want you to implement a referral programme, could they leverage their current database? Or is it best to start, you know, as early as I mean, obviously, as early as possible would be best. But um, you know, like, yeah, what are some constraints when you implement something like this? And what should you have in mind, if you never did something like this before? 

 

Raul Galera  

Yeah, that's actually one of the main things that we recommend our merchants to do. As soon as they start a referral programme, it's not to find your past customers about it. Because the way a referral programme typically gets announced is that I mean, besides you know, social media posts, or maybe some blog posts on your, on your company blog to announce the new referral programme. The main way that brands are acquiring or I would say not acquiring, but they're turning customers into advocates or into ambassadors, is by notifying them after purchase. So either by showing them a pop up, or sending them an email, after purchase, and letting them know about the referral programme, and how they can sign up and how they can refer their friends. So if you have a database of customers that have bought from you, let's say I mean, either from the beginning, or at least in the past, you know, 612 18 months, you should definitely email those customers and let them know about the referral programme. The main reason is that they already know about your product, they, they, they pay for it, they used it, they probably made some referrals, that's another thing that we typically tell our merchants about is the fact that one of the reasons why you might want to consider a referral programme. It's because, you currently don't know how many sales are coming from referrals. And I guarantee you already have sales are coming from referrals. Because, as consumers, we talk about things that we buy, I mean, we recommend restaurants, we recommend Netflix shows we obviously recommend e-commerce stores as well, right. So if you don't have a referral programme in place, or a way of tracking where these people are coming from, you really don't have any numbers, any data that you can work with. And that's kind of like the that's that's the main baseline. So yeah, notifying customers about your referral programme, that's a key notifying new customers about the referral programme as well, either right after the purchase, or maybe after they've received the product so they can kind of, you know, vouch for it better, and they have a better understanding of how it works. That's the key. That's the I would say that's the main channel to make sure that your referral programme works.

 

Andrei Tiu  

So obviously, for you guys doing already ads or stuff like that on Facebook and remarketing and all that jazz, or you know, upselling and cross selling email sequences, that's perfectly fine. Personally, I think that something like this can be integrated flawlessly, within an already existing system, just like an extra thing. And as well, as you mentioned, just for I mean, even if we only consider the tracking facilities that are very much enhanced by something like this, I think would be amazing. And also, it's a great tool to get insight into what your customers actually think. But not only by what they say but what they actually do after they have used your products. And now I'm tempted to go in a bit geeky here, but you know, we are talking numbers we many times zoo on the podcast. So when looking at a referral programme, we usually as marketers, always look at the return on advertising spend the cost per sale, all these metrics that are essential for any store or store owner when it comes to you for the referral programmes, why, typically, referral, this referral commission, or how much do brands typically pay for referrals, from your experience and from your clients?

 

Raul Galera  

Yeah, so it really depends from one merchant to another, I would say that the main rule of thumb that we tell our merchants, when they're first thinking about what kind of rewards they're giving to their customers and their friends, when they're setting up the programme, and remember, a referral programme, there are two parts, you have the advocate that needs to get something to incentivize that, that they actually go out and make that referral. But there's also a very important part, which is the friend, the friend needs to also get some sort of incentive because they're going to buy from the store for the first time. So if you can add some sort of discount, or some sort of promo, or free product, or free shipping, or whatever it is to the friend, that's gonna make incentivize them more to try out the product that they've been recommended from the front. So once you have these two sides here, one thing that we typically tell our merchants to look at is look at your customer behaviour. So are your customers buying from you on a somewhat regular basis, I mean, do you have a subscription business, if you have a subscription business, you should definitely give your customers either a discount, or a free renewal for every friend that they referred. So that way, you're making sure that they're staying with you and, and just by making it automated, you're making sure that your customers, it's kind of like set and forget, right, they refer a friend, the friend makes a purchase, and then they know that next month, they're not going to have to pay for it for their box. That might not be the case for a lot of brands that are not a subscription, but you might have a product that your customers are buying, maybe not every month, but maybe they're buying it a couple of times a year, it might make sense for you to still give them a discount. So there you incentivize them to come back for more, or maybe give them a coupon code, that's going to add a free product to their next purchase, right. So it doesn't have to be a discount, it could be something that adds to their actual shopping cart. And then the third option that we typically look at is customers, or sorry, merchants that sell products that their customers are not going to buy anytime soon. The example that I always give beds, or mattresses, you're not going to buy a mattress more than once a year or more than once every couple of years, right. So if you're selling some, if you're selling maybe accessories, you could go with a coupon route that adds some sort of free products. But typically, if you're selling a product that your customers are not going to buy anytime soon, you can give them cash. And so that way, you know, nobody's gonna say no to free cash, right, and they can spend it on whatever they want. So that usually helps for this kind of setup. Now, when it comes to how much should they be given, you need to consider both sides. That you're, if you're given 10 and 10, that's it's a 20% commission that you're taking off your margins. So you need to look at your margins. And look not only at your margins but also your customer lifetime revenue, how much money is on average these new customer spending on your store over the next few years, right. And also compare it compared to different channels. So traditionally, customers that have been referred by a friend, they typically stick around for longer, and they spend more just because of the nature of how they were acquired, compared to organic traffic compared to ads. So it's really a matter of kind of like looking at your own numbers and see how much you can afford to give compared to how much are you paying for a new customer on Facebook ads, if you're paying $200, it might make sense for you to either match it knowing that the lifetime revenue of that customer is going to be higher, or maybe, or maybe just going to play safe, right and just go with kind of like the kind of the bare minimum, what you can afford, in terms of your margins, something that something else that we typically tell merchants to do. And again, this really depends on how well you know your customers is what's the nature of those recommendations. In a lot of cases, when we talk about referral marketing, we typically talk about people that are referring their friends and family, coworkers, people that are in their really close circle. And so in the majority of these referrals, the main driver of these recommendations is just the fact that you're going to provide something useful to somebody that you care about. So you're not going to necessarily do it for the money, you're going to do it because you're going to solve somebody's needs. So when thinking about what kind of rewards you want to set up, you might want to give more to the friend who's the one that needs to make the first purchase and needs to be incentivized to spend money rather than the advocate who's probably going to make the referral no matter what. So we've actually seen a lot of a lot of merchants that give a much, much higher reward or much higher discount to the friend than the customer that's making the recommendation. So like It's all really about understanding your customers, what incentivizes them, and then kind of applying that to, to your programme.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Okay, very good point. So basically, it's pretty common to have products that are rewarded rather than being, you know, being used as rewards rather than just percentages. Because now on the flip side, so my personal experience with these, or what I'm seeing with our clients, and what they tend to be thinking of first, is having a cash reward. I mean, many times between, we also have a couple of clients that do use sort of, like some sort of cashback rewards. And they tend to, to be between 1.5%, and I think, up to six, or something like that. But they are only for the person that makes the recommendation, not necessarily for the friend. But that is also because they have some others, discount schemes for first time buyers, for example. So yeah, this is for you guys that already maybe run something like this, like, this can be a nice add on, if you already have a first time buying discount, let's say voucher or something like that code, then you can use this one to, or some, you know, we can do something similar, like a referral programme, to facilitate the part that you don't have covered already.

 

Raul Galera  

Yeah, I mean, that’s sort of you describe, it's typically what we see for affiliate programmes. So when our customers want to, I guess the main difference between an affiliate programme and a referral programme is that it's the nature of the advocates that are recommending your store. So in a referral programme, like I said, it's typically existing customers that are referring their friends and family. So people in their close circle, when we talk about affiliates, the person that's making the recommendation might not necessarily know the person that's receiving the recommendation, it's probably somebody that has a blog or somebody that's, you know, it's an influencer on social media. And so, they are just like putting it out there, and people are taking this recommendation and making a purchase. So those are typically we do see those kind of setups on ReferralCandy, mostly for influencers. And yeah, they typically just get the influencer gets some sort of either a percentage of the friends or a percentage of the, of the purchase that they generate, it could be like you said anywhere between one five 10%, typically what we see and, and they may or may not give something to the person that got the recommendation. But because the kind of like the bulk of the rewards typically fall on the seller, right on the ambassador in this case.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Cool. And I know, before we started the live session, and we went live with a podcast you mentioned, it would be worth us discussing some differences between or you know, commonalities between word of mouth, and then referral programmes and potentially even affiliates. So, maybe here you have some examples as well, that you think are relevant for somebody that is considering this type of, you know, marketing channel.

 

Raul Galera  

Yeah, so word of mouth, it's typically, we refer to word of mouth as the organic type of event that happens when somebody recommends something to a friend. So if I, if I go and like, you know, tell my friends that they should go and watch Squid Game, right? I don't know if Squid Game will still be relevant by the time that this episode airing. But right now it really is. So if I tell somebody to go watch that show, that's that's word of mouth, I'm just I have no incentive, no financial incentive on some of my friends to go out and watch it now, but I'm just doing something that I think it's useful, I think they're going to enjoy it. And so I just, I just kind of like let them know about it and tell them and so that's what's behind all these, you know, like viral effects that we're seeing, it's just people talking about it in different venues, whether it's a group chat or social media or in person. And, and that's why I was mentioning earlier that that's kind of hard to track. Because you don't really know if I told my friend in person, you know, having a coffee or if I text somebody and tell them that they should buy X product, there's really no way for the brand to know where the customer is coming from. Right. So typically just it's organic, right? They just land them on the website, they happen to know their website, they landed there and made the purchase. So that's word of mouth. And that's kind of like the beginning of everything. referral marketing. It's, it's a series of marketing strategies, in most of these cases, is a referral programme that you implement to level up that organic word of mouth that you're already having on your store. So you need to have and this is something I tell merchants I guarantee if you've been around for a while. If you have a steady number of or a growing number of orders per month. I guarantee you You already have word of mouth happening in your store, and you just don't know how much what percentage of that new revenue is coming from referrals. Right? So that's the difference between word of mouth and referral marketing referral, marking something you build on top of organic word of mouth. And affiliate marketing. Yeah, what I just mentioned, it's it's slightly different in the sense that we're not talking about people directly referring other people in their network, it's necessarily, it could be bloggers, it could be people that you know, are influencers on Instagram or, or people that had just a platform where they can connect with, with an audience that follows them, who

 

Andrei Tiu  

Cool! Raul, so now looking at your current customers, maybe the ones that are super active, or the segments of customers that you feel are becoming more and more engaged with your product? Specifically, where do you feel it's the biggest buzz like which industries or which types of products tend to look more and more at this type of channel?

 

Raul Galera  

Yeah, so I mean, this is gonna be a cliche answer. But I mean, we've seen referral programmes work on pretty much any industry out there. Especially those I mean, it typically works well, those that have kind of like that, that viral component, right? That's something that you can just mention, maybe a physical component. So clothing, it's an industry that works extremely well. We've also seen that companies in the in the food and beverage industry, especially those that are selling a subscription, actually works really well. And I mentioned subscription, because one, we actually have a, I was looking at it the other day on our website, the majority of our case studies are something that they haven't come on to their subscription business. What's interesting about subscription businesses is that they kind of become part of your life, the fact that you're getting a product delivered to your door every single month or every single week. It's kind of part of your routine. And so it's something that you're more likely to talk about to your friends and family. So. So if we could mention subscriptions as an industry, then yeah, and then that's definitely an industry that the work is fairly well. But those products that have a physical, physical or visual component that you can also share on social media that you can show your friends that typically work really well. But yeah, if I have to mention kind of like the top three, I would say that clothing and apparel, it's probably number one, food and beverages, and then it'll be the second. And then third will probably be kind of gadgets and electronics, we've also seen that that industry thinks to work extremely well.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Okay, very good. And if you were to think about the more non conventional ways of starting before a programme, or you know, some things that you encountered, that you found, oh, wait, these guys are doing something that is not so, you know, often encountered, what would be some of the more out of the box, strategies that you found with your clients or, you know, ways of putting together a referral programme that is like, Whoa, I never seen something like this before.

 

Raul Galera  

Yeah. In terms of rewards, I've seen a few. So actually, in the clothing industry. So there's, there's one brand that I've actually been their customer too, it's called Wulin. And they sell their subscription service for unique T shirts. So every single month, they design a t shirt, this, they send it out to everybody who's subscribed that particular month, and they never produce it again. So you get you get a neat t shirt that you know that you know, if you ever come across somebody wearing that T shirt, you know where it's coming from, right. So it also has a kind of like that, that component of even creating some sort of sense of community around customers. And so what they do for their referral programmes that they offer, I, if I remember correctly, is a free subscription for the customer that makes a recommendation. So if you refer a friend, your next t-shirt, it's on them, so they don't have to pay anything for that. And the friend gets 50% off their first T-shirt. So the I mean that what tells me is that they are so sure that customers are going to love the product, that they're just willing to give, you know, a 50% discount to new customers just to acquire because they know that a large percentage of those new customers are going to stick around and probably make another purchase and then potentially also refer their friends. So that's one that's one that I've seen that works really well. So in the coating industry, thread beast, that's a customer that's been with us for a really long time. They follow kind of a similar approach. So it's also a subscription box with kind of like a set of clothes that they kind of match what you've selected as your as your style. And what they do is that they give us some sort of percentage off to the friend. But the advocate gets an additional box every time they refer a friend. So if you refer three friends, your next month is going to be your box plus three additional boxes full of clothes. So it's, that has created a kind of like a viral component. And actually, if you if you search for thread beast on YouTube, you're gonna see tonnes of videos of people unboxing their, their, the box that they have just received, and adding the referral link in the YouTube video description, just so people can make a purchase through it through that. So that's worked really well in terms of rewards, I think those are pretty innovative, and also pretty, I guess, pretty bold examples that they're just so sure that their customers are going to love the product that here's what they're willing to give pretty hefty discounts. And then in terms of messaging, there's one customer that I think they've, they've nailed it in terms of how to message or how to how to craft a message that's compelling in terms of how to sell referral programme. And it's called barren fig. And they sell kind of productivity tools, right. So mostly notebooks and things that kind of help you organise your, your work and your day. And they have a, they have a page on their website, where they explain what the referral programme is about. And they have a note from the team. Right. And in there, they have a paragraph that I think it's genius in which they say, instead of spending money on advertising, we’re rather given the money to you, right? And so it's more like, you know, why would we spend money on Google or Facebook where we can just give the money to people or lower products, which is, which is your right, and they also talk about how, um, you know, every referral helps them grow their small studio, so you know, adult, they're also kind of like sharing who they are as a company, the fact that they're a small company that are trying to grow their business. And so he creates like a very personal connection with that with the customer. So yeah, in terms of how to craft a really good message, that's always my go to example. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

Nice, nice, nice. I love that approach. And now you mentioning about subscription boxes, I remembered now that I once was ascribed to this service of delivering not unique, but beers that you wouldn't always found in shop finding shops. And in UK, there is a lot of small breweries, so you invariably get a lot of beers that you don't usually get, and are also international and whatever. But I remember that they were having a mechanism sort of similar to this one, when you refer the friends would get I think 30% of it was for them. And then if you referred three friends, you'd get a free box or something like that. But I'm not sure how easy it would be, for example, for somebody that would consider us implementation like that, would it be something that that is easily done and automated through? Let's say, ReferralCandy? Like, can you have something to track when you get to free and then to automatically offer?

 

Raul Galera  

Yeah, so the Yeah, so we have a number of customers that do that. And so actually kind of also addressing the point of refer three friends and get a reward, you can also actually do that on ReferralCandy, you can select what's the minimum number of customers that that an advocate meets to refer in order to be able to qualify for that referral, I mean, for that reward. But that, yeah, that also that the easiest way to do kind of like the free product thing, it's by just creating a coupon code that automatically creates a new product. Sorry, that automatically adds a free product at the checkout. That's one of them. Another one will be just creating a referral, creating a promo code that automatically applies the promo, which in this case, will be a free product, and then sending friends from the referral link to that particular landing page. That's typically how our merchants do it kind of depends also, depending on the E commerce platform that they're on. But yeah, and actually the example that you mentioned about the beer, I mean, that's, that's also a very good example of a product that it's easily you can easily showcase to your friends, right? Like, if you get one of these boxes, probably the most, a typical scenario is going to be that you're going to have some friends over so they can try all the different beers that you bought. And you know, they can like them and everything. And then the conversation will just, you know, organically turning to Oh, where do you get this right, and then kind of a whole referral explanation. Consider?

 

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah, definitely. So what are your plans for the coming months? Do you have any exciting behind the scenes stuff that you have going on? And you feel like sharing or things that you are developing right now that are hot in the industry?

 

Raul Galera  

Yeah, so I mean, we have some we had some major news last week, because we were certified as a Shopify Plus app. So that was something that our team had been working on for a long time. And we finally got it. So we're really excited about that. Especially comes with the Thank you. Yeah, come comes out the best, you know, pretty much best best time possible. As brands are preparing for Black Friday. And yeah, I mean, what's what's on our plate right now, it's just making sure that everything is running smoothly. I had of Black Friday and Cyber Monday or Mike, on my end particular, in my particular case, working with agencies, and their merchants to make sure that those merchants that are setting up a referral programme, make sure that they have everything set up by the time that Black Friday and Cyber Monday arrives. So yeah, that's, that's kind of our situation right now. We have some plans on developing some new features for the coming year. Right now, it's all, you know, kind of like whiteboard discussions. So fortunately, I can, I would love to, I'd we don't really have anything tangible to announce. But yet, we. But as I mentioned earlier, you know, we've had such a, with experiments, such growth in the past year and a half that, you know, we need to obviously address it with new features, and thanks that merchants are requesting.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Super, super. Well, that's a very good problem to have. So very cool. Super. So now, try to wrap up our discussion and joing the essence, what would be 334 points that you'd advise merchants that are looking at implementing a referral programme, that they should be considering, like top three things to consider when you are looking at launching a programme in order for it to be as successful as possible?

 

Raul Galera  

Yeah, so the first one will be to kind of like, figure it out, what's the best timing to announce new customers do the existing use of the referral programme. So it's right after the purchase, while you still have their attention, it's better to postpone it until they actually get the product kind of like you know, figured out what's the mean, you can always test it out, but figured out what's the best timing to do that. Also promote it to your existing audience. So not only past customers, but also social media and newsletter, whatever you have available, make sure that those people are are are informed about the referral programme. The third one will be just to basically decide whether you want to have it as an open referral programme in which anybody can can join and become an advocate and start referring their friends. Or if you want to close it to just extend customers we have we have merchants that go both ways, in my opinion, unless there's a downside of, of not having of not having customers, refer your friends, which is not typically the case, I would, I would recommend to have it open and have some sort of like call to action on your website. So website visitors can sign up for the referral programme and get a referral link and you think about if I land on a website that's selling a product that I'm not interested in, but I can get my friends to discount, and you know, it's it's a win-win situation, because the merchant has a new, a new customer, my friend, you know, found out about a store or product that they weren't aware of, and now they have a discount on something that combined that's gonna be helpful for them. And I met my friend happy, right. So you know, the all three parts are, are happy. So yeah, it's all about, it's all about promotion, as you can imagine, just make sure that there's some continuous communication between the between the merchant and the customers, and that everybody is aware of the existence of the referral programme, especially after they've made that purchase. And they can they can start interacting with a brand in a way that's not necessarily directed towards making another purchase. Right, but just gonna like stay on top of mine.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah, like additional ways to be the relationship not just to asking for money again. 

 

Raul Galera  

Exactly. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool. Awesome. So in terms of you and the business, if we have somebody here that is tuning in, and they find this interesting, how can people best connect with you? Obviously, guys, you'd have all the links to those platforms. And before I can in the description of this episode, either on YouTube or if you are streaming, you have all the info there anyway. But Raul, where should people reach out to you best? And where do you prefer to have conversations? 

 

Raul Galera  

Yeah, so my emails,the best way to reach me so it's raulg@referralcandy.com. Happy to take any questions there. We also, you know, for anybody that wants to get started, we also have a little promotion going on so they can they can get through to the other software their first the first subscription after the 30 day free trial so it's kind of like extending the trail and its own try.referralcandy.com/podcast for anybody that wants to try it out but otherwisel, my email I'm always happy to take any questions and continue the conversation there.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Great stuff super roll it was a great pleasure to have his day. This was the very exciting topic and I think he was very timely guys tuning in thank you for staying all the way to the end. Hopefully, you found some inspiration here and we are actually both of us looking forward to your feedback. So you know if you're watching this on YouTube, leave us in the comments below the video what you found most useful or if you are considering this and if you have any additional questions that we might be able to address. Otherwise, if you are streaming as always for us email let us know if you would like us to focus more on certain micro topics within this broader topic of you know, offering for programmes and affiliate marketing specifically and Roland I will see maybe if you're up for it, we can meet again sometime in the near future and discuss in more detail if there are bits that are interesting to you guys as a community. And yeah, until next time, well thank you again for being on the show. This was a really nice evening for me morning for you.

 

Raul Galera  

Yeah, thank you for having me.

 

Andrei Tiu  

A pleasure and looking forward to hopefully meeting against them maybe someday in person. Meanwhile, a rocket with your promotions this season and wish you the very best of success with your clients and customers. Guys, you to again, you know, rock your marketing for this period because I know May I mean everybody's super busy during this time. So let's have a productive season so that we can chill out over Christmas. And until next time. Until next time, have a good time and looking forward to catching up soon. Cheers!