Lighting Referral Program Examples: The Success Of BlissLights

BlissLights is the "instant holiday light" that creates unique laser light experiences that's mesmerizing as well as energy-efficient.

Founded in 2006 with the desire to bring happiness into the world through the wonder of light, BlissLights has created a line of laser light projectors that help transform any setting into one of beauty and wonder.

More energy-efficient than traditional rope lights, BlissLights projectors are perfect for Christmas, birthday parties or even romantic evenings.

In fact, their products are so popular amongst their customers that 10 out of every 100 purchases comes from word-of-mouth!

We got hold of Regina, the Online Marketing Coordinator at BlissLights, and asked her about their marketing challenges, some of their favorite marketing apps, and their success using ReferralCandy.

First, some background on the company:

• Approx. 50 employees, with three working in marketing.
• Sells mainly through QVC – a TV, mobile and ecommerce platform, as well as on the BlissLights website.

“What are the top things that you care the most about?”

1. "Showing customers that BlissLights is not just about lights, but an experience."
2. "Getting customers to buy directly from our website instead of third-party retailers."
3. "Shifting our focus to attract more male customers, as their current customer base tends to comprise of females between 55 and 65 years old."

“What are one or two of the business apps or tools that you had used that you are very satisfied with?”

1. Hootsuite – Allows you to monitor your social media accounts in a single location, and lets you schedule posts.
2. Google Analytics – Shows you where to target future audience and how to retarget people who might just stay at one page.
3. ReferralCandy – To monitor your customers' sharing activity.

“Why did you start using ReferralCandy?”

"We were trying to have more customer loyalty and found out about ReferralCandy while we were researching about referral programs.

Most of our customers end up buying from third-party retailers because they usually get a deal when they do so. We want them to buy from our website instead, so in order to create incentives we started using programs such as ReferralCandy.

This allows us to form a loyal following on our social media and on other online communities, so they buy directly from us."

We definitely believe that the number one key point of success is customer loyalty.

We try our best to show them that we really do care about our customers. If it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t have the success that we do have now and we constantly want to reward them.

A lot of them naturally start referring their friends so instead of having them do it for free, why not get a reward for spreading the word around.

"Can you tell me more about how you decided to set up your current incentives?" (20% discount for advocates, 15% off for referred friends)

"Since we know that our advocates want to keep on sharing, we want to make them an extra enticing offer.

Whenever we had a coupon in the past that has been 10% – a number that just has worked. So while we didn’t have different reasons to use a higher percentage, we do give out more attractive coupons during the holiday seasons.

Sometimes we’ll even honor their 20% referral reward with other deals that we have and so that keeps them motivated to want to continue buying from us."

Another reason why we decided to do a referral program was because we know it comes from different ways, not just come from social media.

It comes from people saying other people used it for their parties and other people want to use it, and we knew that’s how it got across.

We had people who called in and said that they referred their neighbour because their neighbour came up to their house to knock on the door and say, "hey, what’s creating this effect… I wanna know."

So that’s why we know our number one way to reach out to people is through word-of-mouth and that’s how ReferralCandy has worked out so well for us.

"How did you get more customers aware and interact with your referral program?"

"We had a contest once, where a customer could win a product if they sign up for ReferralCandy":

"In order for our contest to work, we had three ways where they could enter:

1. Like the post;
2. Like and share the post; or
3. Sign up for our referral program.

Most people ended up doing all three.

They ended up liking, sharing and commenting, because we asked them to comment so we'd know that they'd submitted to the contest.

Plus, for each of those contests, they stood to double their chance to win by liking and sharing."

The more simple we make a contest, the more engagement we get, so it’s definitely something we’re gonna continue doing all throughout the whole year.

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Next: Referral Program Examples – An Epic List of 47 Referral Programs