Video: When should I launch my customer referral program?
Every company should know if their product is referral-worthy or not. In this section we help bust the myth that every business can benefit from a customer referral program.
When Should You Launch a Customer Referral Program from Referral SaaSquatch on Vimeo.
Full Transcription
Hi and welcome to another session on customer referral programs. Today, we want to talk about when are you ready to launch a customer referral program. When should I launch my customer referral program? It’s a question we answer all the time. So, in a previous session, we talked about why, and there are lots of people talking to you about why you would want to launch a customer referral program, but, it is important to remember that there is a time for a customer referral program, and we like to call that “Authenticity”.
Authenticity
The idea is that if you can build a foundation of authenticity, of a real community that really likes your product, your customer referral program is going to take off. However, if you try to build your referral program before you have a product that’s ready to be shared, you’re probably not going to see the results you were hoping for.
Mountain of Champions
We like to think of this as kind of your Mountain of Champions, we want to have that strong rocky foundation, and you want to have people already on top of that talking about how awesome you are. This is kind of a vague concept, but really there’s only three things you need to look for to know that you have this foundation and that you are ready to rocket into getting your customer referral program going.
Three Things
The first thing you want to look for is people using your product. It sounds simple, but you want to make sure that people are already using your product. Some people might call this product market fit, but it doesn’t have to be quite that far down the funnel, but you do want to make sure you have a decent base of people using your product. You then want to find if these people are already saying nice things about you.
Testing Product Market-Fit
Now, in our experience, people are actually pretty willing when they’re having a good time with your product. They’re going to send you an email, they’re going to tweet about it, they’re going to do something. And what you want to do is take a check, look at your twitter feed and see, do you have some champions out there saying you’re awesome? So now, if you have people using your product, and you’ve got people who are actively talking about how they like your product, then the last thing you want to look for is if you have anyone who is already referring your product. This could be as simple as maybe your support team has heard from a customer that they actually signed up because someone else told them, or it could be as wonderful as there’s literally a customer talking on twitter or facebook about how everybody needs to try your product.
Wrapping Up
Even just one is probably enough of a sign to get things started with your customer referral program. If you haven’t built this foundation of authentic enjoyment and appreciation of your product, your customer referral program is going to fall flat because when someone goes to refer a product that they don’t enjoy, you either have to pay them a lot to do that, which is going to cost your business quite a lot, or they’re just never going to do it. We would recommend that you really work on making sure you have this foundation of authenticity before you go ahead and launch your customer referral program. That wraps up our session on “When should I launch my customer referral program?
Looking for more? Check out our next video in this series and learn how to optimize your referral program!