Step by Step Guide to How to Setup your Refer a Friend Program with Gather

A step-by-step guide to setting up your refer a friend campaign with Gather

Welcome to Gather! When you sign up to Gather you will be receive a series of emails designed to assist you with your campaign. Here we summarise the 6 steps to building a successful campaign along with resources to help you.

1. Branding

The first step in building your campaign is to upload your own branding. Please refer to the following article to assist you in uploading your own images to the campaign.

Here's a few tips on branding:

  • Make sure your advocate banner highlights the benefits for the advocate's friend.

For example: "Give your friend a 20% gift and get 20%" should work better than "Get 20% off by referring a friend".

  • It is recommended that the friend's banner is more visual and has one line of text. E.g. "Join your Friend as a Customer". Your advocate's friend will see this banner on a landing page, and also in their social feed.

  • We like using Canva to create the referral banners, because Canva provides many great looking designs you can modify. You can use the standard Facebook cover designs which Canva provides you. Given that, you can use any design package you feel the most comfortable with.

  • For best results include a landscape banner (e.g. 1000px width by 400px height). Usually a banner would contain the main creative for the referral campaign.

2. Rewards

The next step is to create your reward tiers and add codes to your campaign.

About Reward Tiers

  • A new campaign comes pre-built with 1 reward tier. For each reward tier, you can set the number of referrals your Advocate has to make before they are rewarded.

  • Each new campaign comes with 1 pre-built reward tier. You can add more.

  • Having multiple reward tiers means that your Advocate is incentivized to come back and refer more friends, so that they can unlock new (and bigger) rewards associated with higher tiers.

  • For both Advocates & Friends, you can chose how you would like to reward them.

  • You can choose to reward Advocates and Friends with the same rewards, or you can choose to reward them differently.

  • You can choose to upload reward codes (e.g. coupons) or provide a link to your Advocate or their friend to redeem their rewards.

  • When you select a setting, other dependant settings may appear or disappear accordingly. Make sure you are happy with all settings when you save.

Uploading Reward Codes:

  1. Upload a CSV file list of codes. The first row of the CSV file must contain the heading: "code". Please do not include any empty columns or rows in the CSV file. If you have a Shopify store, Use the Shopify recommended Bulk Discount Code app to generate the discount codes and download them as a CSV file.

  2. Make sure the file your uploading ends with a .CSV extension.

  3. Please note you can only upload 1000 codes at a time, so split up your codes following the steps above.

  4. When discount codes are uploaded, they will take a few minutes to appear here. You can refresh the page to, eventually, see the uploaded codes.

  5. Do not re-upload previously uploaded discount codes. The system will reject them.

  6. Gather runs a few checks to verify the file.

  7. If the file fails the check, open the CSV file on your machine, delete all the columns except the column containing the discount codes, save as a new CSV file and re-upload.

  8. If your upload fails and you cannot see your discount codes in the table, contact us by clicking on the Help & Support link on the left hand side of your account.

  9. You will do the same process for each reward tier.

3. Messaging

Now we're going to focus on the default messaging that is sent to your customers (Advocates) and their friends during the referral process.

These are:

  • The email invitation messages sent by your Advocates to their friends. To set these up, follow this guide or this guide (to access the article make sure you are logged into your Gather account first).

  • The social media messages sent by your Advocates to their friends. To set this up, follow this guide.

Gather is Partnered with CloudSponge. Integrating with CloudSponge allows your advocate’s to easily import their contacts whether they are sending the email themselves or through Gather’s email invitation system.

4. Launch

Next we will focus on putting in place all the necessary touch points to complete your Refer a friend Funnel.

To get your campaign ready for launch go through the following steps:

  • Integrate your referral campaign with your communications with customers, like your email marketing or newsletter. To set this up, please follow this guide.

  • Trigger visitors on your site with an overlay pop up to join your referral program. To set this up, please follow this guide.

  • If you are a Shopify customer, you can add a refer a friend call to action to the email receipts your customers receive when their make an order. To do so, please follow this guide.

  • Test your campaign end to end. Start with copying into your browser's address bar the Generic Link; which you can get from the Integrations section. Then follow the referral process as if you are an Advocate. Also, pretend to be a friend of the Advocate who receives an invitation link. Make sure you are happy with the whole referral process end to end.

With these in place, you should be ready to activate your campaign, and launch. Before you do, make sure that you are happy with the preferences in the Preferences section of your account.

5. Set up Automations in your Email Marketing

After launching, you want to continually keep your advocates engaged.

At Gather, we already provide you with solutions like retargeting advocates with a follow up email if they enrol on the referral program.

But you can go further:

  • Send a referral call to action email to your new subscribers (or customers) a few days after they subscribe, incentivising them to become advocates by inviting their friends.

  • Send a summary progress report to your advocates. You can do so with Gather's deep integration with Mailchimp.

  • Send a periodic email to your subscribers (perhaps once every month) outlining the progress of your referral program, perhaps showcasing your top advocates to the rest of the community.

  • Showcase top advocate rewards to the rest of your customer community.

6. Analytics

Finally we will briefly explore how you can use analytics to continually improve your referral campaign.

If you think of your referral program as a funnel, typical steps in the funnel will look like this:

  1. Email call-to-action to subscribers and customers.

  2. Customers or subscribers convert to advocates.

  3. Advocates send invitations.

  4. Friends convert to subscribers or customers.

Usually we see the highest conversion rates in steps 3 and 4. The lowest conversions are in step 2. If you can improve the conversion of your customers to advocates you make big changes in your referral program.

Between your email marketing app and the metrics Gather provides you in the Dashboard section, you can track those key conversions and continuously improve upon them.

If you would like to go further, you can talk to us about how to track every single step in your funnel and improve upon it. Contact me on iz@gathercustomers.com

Remember, in a customer funnel, small tweaks make big differences. This is why it pays to prioritize the continual improvement of your referral program.

This concludes our 6 step series for setting up and launching your referral program.

As always, if you have any questions, you can join the community forum where our team is actively answering any questions there. First head to your Gather account, then click on the Help & Support menu item on the left hand side.

Also, keep checking our resources site here for more useful information, webinars and videos!

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