The Importance of Properly Preparing for your Referral Program Launch

When you’ve spent a lot of time and energy convincing your company that you should have a referral program, then you’re going to want that program to be a success. And that’s not just for your personal satisfaction, but also because your future corporate reputation and credibility will likely be linked to the outcome. And, in that regard, it’s crucial that you prepare and plan properly for your launch and the first 90 days afterwards. After all, they say you only get one chance to make a first impression!

In an ideal world you’d want your program to launch soon after signing with your supplier and quickly show visible and material signs of success. That’s not only because the attention, enthusiasm and positivity in the company about the program is likely to be at its highest shortly after signing, particularly from C-Levels who may have authorized the project in a committee, or even signed the paperwork. But also as commitments to provide scarce resources, from tech or marketing, are often predicated on the program being a success. For example, the CTO who refuses to assign valuable tech resources to the project until you can show that the program can drive real value above a certain measure. Which means, if you can’t show early signs of success with your program, you may be fighting an uphill battle from then on to get the resources needed for success over the medium to long term. 

Below, we’ve set out the steps you need to take to ensure your program will start well and continue to drive value over the first 90 days and beyond. Obviously, we’ve written this article from the perspective of using a best-in-class outsourced referral marketing platform but many of the points are also valid for an in-house program. 

Pre-launch Planning

While the first 90 days after launch are key to ensuring the success of your program, the planning and preparation you undertake beforehand are no less important. Here are some of the steps you need to take to properly prepare the ground for launch:

• Identify your Corporate Sponsor: Often called a Senior Stakeholder or Project Owner, and typically with a title starting with C- or VP (but not always), this is basically a person with the power and authority to get stuff done in your company. It’s vital that this person not only helps steer the project through signing but also commits to stay involved with the project over an extended period to ensure its success. Of course, it’s entirely possible to have one Corporate Sponsor for getting the deal signed and another to oversee the implementation and running of the project. But it’s critical, whoever your Corporate Sponsor is, that he or she understands that ongoing assistance will be needed to ensure that the program delivers its full potential.
• Identify a Project Manager: you’ll need someone to plan for implementation and set up and the marketing support. Obviously, this could be more than one person, but crucially it should be someone who reports to your Corporate Sponsor and who can help solve problems and unblock issues.
• Liaise with your Supplier: when your supplier has had lots of experience setting up programs in companies like yours then you should lean on their experience. They will likely already have tasks lists, timelines and other best practices to share with you. And while your supplier may be reluctant to do a lot of work without the certainty of having signed paperwork, it’s not uncommon to sign an agreement with a commencement date a month or so later. That way your supplier’s team can help you plan with the certainty of having a signed agreement, and you can carry out your pre-launch planning knowing that the meter isn’t ticking yet.

• Identify all your stakeholders and get buy in: the different stakeholders that can be involved include:

  • • Marketing
    • Copywriting
    • Tech
    • Product
    • IT
    • Legal
    • Compliance
    • Finance
    • Customer Support
    • Etc.

   
  With each of these departments, you’ll want to convince them not only of the value of referrals to your business but also to allay any fears that they may have about the project. Your supplier should be able to provide you with documents, arguments and evidence to support that. 

  And you’ll need to explain to them not only what you need from them and when, but also for how long they will need to stay engaged. For example, marketing will need to understand that they will not only have to help with the launch but also with ongoing marketing during the lifetime of the program.

  • Prepare a promotion plan: you should liaise with the marketing team to develop an ongoing promotion plan to support not only the launch of the program and its first few months, but to ensure that the program is constantly promoted across all touch points throughout its lifetime. Your supplier should be able to provide you with examples of what kind of promotion should be included in this. At this stage, it’s likely the plan will be detailed for launch and the first few months thereafter but should at least have regular marketing identified for the future, such as a newsletter every X weeks.

  Hear from Katie Brooks, Product Owner at toob, why your referral program should be on brand and on your website:
  

  Katie Brooks: "We know our customers and we know that they want things...

  Katie Brooks: "We know our customers and we know that they want things to be easy to find and accessible.

  Which is why we put our refer friend scheme where we did on our website.

  And also we not only wanted them to get to the page, but to stay on it.

  And we did our research on how other people did their refer a friend schemes and it would [often] send you off to an external page or suddenly all the branding would look completely different.

  And what we loved, was where we could put your embed on our page on our site. So people felt like they were still with toob and on toob's page and they didn't have to leave or go anywhere.

  They're always on our website, a familiar place that they trust. So yeah, not only getting them to the site, but keeping them there because, like you say, people only have limited time. So if they don't think they're in the right place or they don't recognize it, they'll just click off.

  Whereas our campaign, we can really make it feel like us, which is what people were on our site for in the first place."

  
  See the full video here.
   
  • Technical set up: you’ll need to understand where your program is going to live and how that will be set up. Ideally this will be part of your own website and fully on-brand and white label to maintain trust and authenticity throughout the entire referral process But you’ll also need to understand how much help you’ll need from your tech team to get it live and get your Corporate Sponsor to ensure that you get it.

  “We did our research on how other [brands] did their refer a friend schemes and it would [often] send you off to an external page or suddenly all the branding would look completely different. And what we loved, was where we could put [Buyapowa’s] embed on our page on our site. So people felt like they were still with toob and on toob’s page and they didn’t have to leave or go anywhere. They’re always on our website, a familiar place that they trust. [Because] if they don’t think they’re in the right place or they don’t recognize it, they’ll just click off.”
  Katie Brooks, Product Owner – toob

  • Agree the rewards and incentives you’ll offer: you’ll need to understand the rewards and incentives you can offer and ensure that these make sense economically, that there are no legal or regulatory issues and that you have a sign-off from finance for the ongoing costs and procedures set up to order new vouchers or gift cards etc.. 
  • Understand what success looks like: to convince your colleagues and get their buy-in, you’ll need to understand what success looks like for your business, both from the maximum and minimum you can expect from referrals and how long it will take to reach the optimal point. If you’ve had a previous program, then you may have some benchmarks you can use. Your supplier should also be able to help you model this, but if you don’t know what success is, how will you convince your colleagues that the program has been a success? 
  • Identify the day to day management team and escalation procedures: Before launching you’ll want to identify the team that will run the program on a day to day basis. As a minimum you’ll want to ensure that they’re enthusiastic about the project and know what they need to do. Ideally they will report into your Corporate Sponsor or at least have an established escalation procedure if there are blockers.

   

  Manage Expectations

  As mentioned above, your project is most likely to get attention and generate excitement soon after signing, particularly amongst the C-Levels who were convinced to sign the deal, and especially if you made a company-wide announcement. But it’s only natural that that excitement will start to ebb after time, particularly when there’s been no news for a while. Which is why you need to manage expectations as to when the program will launch and by when you’ll start to see meaningful results and communicate that. So if you honestly think it’s going to take about a month to get live and then a month or two of testing to see good results, then communicate that to your stakeholders. 

  Your supplier should be able to help you by listing all the tasks needed to be done and estimating how long they will take with a typical company. On top of that you will need to overlay your knowledge of how long things normally take in your company to get legal or brand sign offs or to get tech work done etc. You should also factor in things like holidays and staff turnover, which can slow things down. But if you’ve done the preparatory work well and you’ve enthused your colleagues and got buy-in, then things should be easier. 

  Launch

  When you’re ready to launch, you’ll need the help of your colleagues to help get awareness of and traffic to your referral program. Because if your customers don’t know you have a referral program or can’t find it when they look for it, then you may as well not have one. So it’s vital that you get the launch message out across as many marketing channels as possible and that the program is easy to find, being linked to from your home page or any other place your customers would expect to find it (help and FAQ pages etc.) and that it has an easy to find and remember URL like yourcompany.com/refer-friends.

  We wrote an exhaustive guide to how to promote your referral program, but some of the ways you can help promote the launch of your program include:

  • Emails and Newsletters to your customers 
  • Texts and app messages to customers
  • A press release 
  • A blog post
  • Organic social posts on all your channels
  • Interaction with influencers
  • A banner or pop-ups (Floating CTAs) on your website
  • Fixed navigation links on your website etc

   
  It’s important not to miss the opportunity to succeed with your launch, given that this is when you’ll have the most attention on the program in the company. So an early success can drive more goodwill and excitement and encourage other stakeholders to commit resources to ensuring the success of the program. 

  You should also not forget the opportunity to enlist some of your best, most committed and most convincing advocates for your referral program: your employees. Briefing and motivating your employees to share with friends and family can be one of the most effective means to ensure your launch gets off to a good start. 

  Post Launch up to the end of 90 days

  Over the course of the next 90 days, you’ll need to review and assess the performance of the program against your plan and look to spot any problems. This means you need access to advanced real time data and analytics that can help you see each part of the referral funnel and allow you to work with your supplier to identify and solve issues. Your supplier should be able to supply benchmarks for you to measure against and suggest fixes. For example, you may try a time limited introductory offer with extra rewards for the first 100 confirmed valid referrals to create an extra incentive and FOMO. 

  In our experience, the number one reason referral programs fail is through a lack of marketing, which is ironic given that most are launched by marketers. So it’s crucial that your marketing team know and understand that they need to help you continually promote the program across all customer touchpoints, not just at launch but throughout the first 90 days and beyond. To a degree some of the marketing can be automated by having permanent navigation links on your website, mobile site and app, as well as in the templates of your newsletters and emails, often with simply a text saying ‘refer a friend’.

  However, as every brand is different, you may need to test and learn before you find the right mix of rewards and incentives for your audience and your marketing team should be prepared to support your ongoing testing. 

  After the end of the first 90 days

  Hopefully by following the steps listed above means you will have seen success from the program, but at the end of 90 days, this is when you should have a holistic review of your program with your supplier in an Executive Business Review, including your Corporate Sponsor. Here you can review the overall results and compare the metrics for each stage of your program against benchmarks and identify actions that can be taken to improve matters. 

  As well as checking whether you have achieved your initial goals, your supplier should be able to challenge you to reach for even higher performance by suggesting improvements and new tactics.

  And finally this is a good moment to review the actions that you were not able to get done at launch. For example, where the CTO was unwilling to assign tech resources until a certain level of referrals can be achieved, you can review with your Corporate Sponsor if you have now met that hurdle and try to free up those resources.

  In summary

  While every brand and corporate is different, the above steps should prove useful in ensuring the success of your referral program. If you’d like to talk through any of this then feel free to reach out.