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FAQs

About Buyapowa

How does Buyapowa work?

Buyapowa’s technology cleverly allows you to use rewards to leverage positive word-of-mouth from the people who already know and love your brand (such as customers, employees, partners, affiliates, influencers, etc.). It equips and incentivizes those advocates to tell their friends, family, colleagues, and associates about your brand, encouraging them to take actions that have value for you. These actions include sales, subscriptions, app downloads, joining loyalty programs, signing up for newsletters and much more. The net result? Unbeatable growth at a fraction of the cost of any other marketing channel.

What kind of brands does Buyapowa work with?

Buyapowa’s platform and technology have been designed and developed to meet the needs of enterprise brands around the world, from Europe to the US and Canada to Latin America to Asia Pacific, and beyond.

Our clients often operate across multiple territories, in different languages and currencies, and frequently have complex or considered sales conversion journeys and/or regulated protocols.

They can be found in multiple industries, including mobile telecommunications, ISPs, streaming and subscription services, energy providers, banking, fintech and credit union, insurance carriers, and gaming brands across online gaming (lottery, betting, casino and bingo). Our clients include: T-Mobile, Vodafone, TELUS, Lowi, Adamo, Ziply Fiber, Hyperoptic, British Gas, ENI, Advanzia Bank, Delta Community Credit Union, Members 1st FCU, AXA, The AA, The RAC, Trupanion, Kaizen Gaming, Playtech, and many more.

How is Buyapowa different from other rewards and referral software providers?

We’re the global leader in enterprise advocacy solutions, and we’ve been powering reward based customer acquisition and referral marketing programs around the world since 2011.

Here are just some of the things that make us unique:

Trust and authenticity are key to word-of-mouth recommendations. Unlike other providers, we do not compromise that authenticity by imposing our branding or logos on your program.

Unlike many in-house solutions or third-party providers, Buyapowa’s software doesn’t typically pay out rewards and incentives based on the first or ‘soft’ conversion point, such as making an unqualified purchase or submitting a form. Instead, Buyapowa’s technology usually only pays out when confirmed business rules have been met, such as a cooling-off or cancelation period passing. This protects your margins by avoiding paying out valuable rewards and incentives for transitions that turn out to have little or no value and protects against abuse and self-referral.

Our rewards distribution technology allows for rewards to be automatically sent to people who have met specified conditions. The value of rewards can also be tied to the level of spend or the type of action taken.

Unlike most in-house solutions, Buyapowa provides advanced data & analytics to allow you to track, analyze and understand how your campaigns are performing in real-time, as well as the ability to test and learn what works best with your audiences.

Buyapowa focuses on repeat sharing from advocates and repeat actions from audiences. It does this by identifying the right moment to reward or incentivize an action, by offering a choice of rewards and by using smart psychological techniques and gamification such as tiered rewards, leaderboards and short-duration booster campaigns that encourage action by creating FOMO.

Success requires much more than just software, so we provide a managed service where our global experts deliver ongoing support, analysis and advice.

We do not assert any ownership over or right to use your data. This is in contrast to some providers who will attempt to co-own your customer data in order to market other products and services (including those from your competitors.)

Is Buyapowa a good fit for my business?

We’ve successfully worked with over 350 leading enterprise brands and retailers across B2C, D2C and B2B, in 27 countries and in 21 languages across industries as mobile telecommunications, ISPs, streaming and subscription services, energy providers, banking, fintech and credit union, insurance carriers, and gaming brands across online gaming (lottery, betting, casino and bingo). If you’re an enterprise brand in one of these areas, then we’re likely the best option for you, so please get in touch to learn more.

We’re not the best solution for all brands and retailers and we’d like to be honest with you about that. If you’re an SMB or small startup, you may not have enough customers, employees, partners, etc. to cover the fixed costs of an enterprise platform like Buyapowa and you may be better off looking at an entry-level platform, at least for the time being.

What kind of results can I expect to see?

For referral programs, our clients achieve:

Up to a 7.7x boost in conversion rates
An average 47% boost in lifetime customer value;
An average 53% drop in customer acquisition costs

Some clients acquire as much as 30% of all new customers via their refer-a-friend program.

Additionally, referred-in customers are 4X more likely to buy and 5X more likely to refer than non-referred customers.

Program Types & Strategies

How does the referral process work?

A referral program is a means of increasing customer acquisition for your business by encouraging, and often incentivizing, your existing or past customers to recommend you to their friends, family, colleagues and other contacts. In turn, these people are generally rewarded for taking a desired action, such as transacting for the first time. This is often known as word-of-mouth, refer-a-friend, member-get-member, customer-get-customer or ambassador marketing.

Without a referral program, you’ll rely on this happening organically, and you’ll typically have little ability to track customers who came via word-of-mouth.

Advanced referral programs further amplify customer acquisition by deploying stretch targets, gamification and booster campaigns to encourage all customers to refer more often, and to get especially influential referrers to go the extra mile.

Why shouldn’t we just build our own referral program?

There are a number of reasons why brands should outsource their referral marketing to a best-in-class solution provider like Buyapowa:

Outsourcing enables you to focus your resources and efforts on your core business.
In-house programs are often built for today’s needs and typically fail to anticipate how your needs will change as your business scales or evolves.
Advanced features are expensive to build and maintain. With Buyapowa, you benefit from all our new features and updates at no additional cost.
Very few referral programs which are built in-house offer advanced analytics such as Buyapowa’s, enabling you to test, learn and optimize.
Access to our referral experts means you benefit from their years of experience running and optimizing referral programs worldwide, rather than having to start from scratch.

If you’re still doubtful, we’d advise you to watch the advice from Michael Goodbody, Former VP, Head of Marketing & Comms at Robinhood, who advises CMOs not to build their referral program in-house.

What are Welcome Offers & Rewards

At their most simple, rewards can be used incentivize any behavior from identified individuals. These programs typically reward customers for completing actions—like puchasing or signing up through a welcome offer, attending a webinar, taking a survey, or switching providers. Buyapowa’s global reward catalog spans over 5,000 options, letting your customers choose something that really appeals to them.

What are the different types of referral program?

Referral is a powerful tool that can be utilized by numours business functions from Marketing and Sales, to HR and Call Center Management. Buyapowa solutions include:

Rewards & Security

How can I monitor abuse and avoid gaming?

The quality of referrals and ensuring authenticity are of paramount importance to both us and the success of your referral program. As such, we’ve produced a suite of advanced controls to ensure that you only reward legitimate, new customer referrals. These tools include:

Monitoring, and potentially limiting, the number of referrals a referrer can make over a given period.
Preventing referrals between individuals with similar email addresses.
Hosting the referral experience behind a login/account area.
Instituting a time delay (i.e. a cooling-off period) before rewards are issued, preventing pay-outs for terminated contracts or canceled/returned orders.
Bot detection to prevent automated, script-based referrals.
Trigger-based rewards.
Subjecting rewards and incentives to a minimum spend.
Optionally, imposing a cap on the overall number of referrals any referrer can make.
Blocking disposable email addresses and specific users based on behavior.
Compared with platforms remunerated on a performance or CPA model – where the vendor may be motivated to allow self-referral, fraud or other forms of poor quality referrals – our flat license model ensures the overall quality of the referrals delivered by your program.

What kind of rewards do you offer?

The Buyapowa platform can support just about any reward and incentive over 5,000+ reward types, across 40 countries worldwide, and in 21 different currencies. Whether it’s via, Bank transfer. PayPal payout, Debit card transfer, Prepaid cards, Digital gift cards or Digital subscriptions, Buyapowa can provide you with the right rewards options for your business.

Which rewards work best?

Buyapowa’s technology allows you to offer a choice of rewards to recipients – maximizing the likelihood of engagement and, ultimately, transactions.

Learn exactly which rewards work best for our top industries, all about rewards and incentives and the importance of friend incentives in generating referrals.

Is the reward payout process automated?

Yes. Buyapowa’s reward payout technology allows you to effortlessly distribute a range of rewards based on predefined criteria or triggers. These are typically business rules defined by your back-end or CRM systems and communicated to the Buyapowa platform via our API. A range of low to high touch options are also available.

Pricing & Plans

How much does Buyapowa cost?

Because we provide an enterprise-level, managed platform and we help you build, run and optimize your rewards programs, we typically charge a fixed annual license fee based on the number of brands and territories involved.

A lot of factors influence our pricing and, once we have a better understanding of the size, scope and requirements of the programs you’re looking to launch, we’d be delighted to give you a more specific quote.

Please contact us to learn more.

Does Buyapowa offer a free trial?

Unfortunately, we do not. Companies that provide free trials tend to offer simple cookie-cutter solutions that are easy to set up but have few integration or customization options. While Buyapowa is out of the box, it’s configured for each client’s requirements, so we are unable to offer a free trial.

If you’re interested in building a proof of concept, get in touch to discuss.

Does Buyapowa offer startup pricing?

Unfortunately not, since we incur many of the same costs regardless of the size of the client or the scale of their program.

Does Buyapowa offer performance-based pricing?

We do not typically offer performance-based (or cost per acquisition) pricing. We find that a fixed-price license fee provides better value and more certainty for our clients than performance-based pricing. In part, this is because performance-based pricing tends to incentivize suppliers to focus on maximizing the quantity, rather than the quality, of conversions. It also tends to encourage suppliers to focus all their efforts on the clients that are performing well and delivering lots of conversions, and to neglect clients whose programs require more effort to deliver results. At Buyapowa, we believe that all our clients deserve equal support and attention to ensure that their programs are successful.

If you really have your heart set on including some performance element in the package, then we would suggest you talk to us and we will certainly see what we can do.

Onboarding & Integration

How much work will it take to launch a program?

Depending on your specific requirements, preferences, and resource availability, we can plan for an advanced integration or a more simple light-touch setup.

In either case, the Buyapowa platform is designed to handle all the heavy lifting for you. Our dedicated team of implementation specialists will work with you and your team to develop a plan to take you from the early design and build stage all the way to launch and post-launch.

How long will it take to go live with a program?

Not to brag, but our current record for going live is seven days from signing. That said, every program is different, depending on its size, scope and nature.

In most cases, the key factor is how rapidly you can provide the creative, determine your proposition, achieve internal sign-off, etc. Once we know more about what you want to do, we can give you a more accurate estimate.

What technical resources will I need to provide to get my program live?

Depending on whether you require an advanced or a light-touch integration, this will determine the technical resources you will need to provide to set up and run your program.

The availability of own your tech resources may determine the type of integration you seek to achieve or the timescale over which you wish to achieve it. Some of our clients opt to leave out certain integration options for the initial iteration of their program and look to add them in later.

What integration options are there for the Buyapowa platform?

Buyapowa’s standard integration requires minimal technical integration. Because of this, we have already integrated with numerous common back end platforms.

A standard implementation of a Referral program involves embedding our platform within a blank webpage on your website. If preferred, however, we can host the program ourselves – and this is typically one of the features of a light-touch integration. In these cases, we’ll create, maintain and manage the program in partnership with you to ensure it is both functional and on-brand, providing your customers with a seamless branded experience.

International Support

Does Buyapowa work with international clients?

Buyapowa works with a long list of international brands, and power many multinational reward and referral programs in more than 27 countries and in 21 languages.

Does Buyapowa have an international team?

Absolutely. We have a global team of native-language speakers based around the world, including in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Colombia, Argentina and elsewhere. This enables us to support our clients in their time zones and in their languages.

Which languages does Buyapowa support?

Our software is very flexible and we’re able to accommodate a number of languages out of the box. Additionally, we are able to extend our roster of languages as and when required.

Which currencies does Buyapowa support?

We support any currency. However, please be aware that transactions will take place on your checkout pages, just like any other conversion. Buyapowa does not deal with the sale, nor handle any cash payments, and all your normal payment processing, anti-fraud, stock management or other checkout procedures are unaffected.

Still have questions?

Had a look and still can’t find what you’re looking for? Our team of experts are ready and waiting to share their Buyapowa knowledge with you.