9 Powerful ReferralCandy Features for Getting More Referrals and Customers

Since adopting a referral program, about 10% of all Branch Basics’ orders came from referrals. Branch Basics has generated more than a million dollars in referral sales.

We love it when our customers are able to make the most of their referral program to grow their business. But we realized not every merchant is aware of all the different ways of using ReferralCandy.

I would love to show you how you can make the most of ReferralCandy to encourage more people to talk about your brand and get more customers.

Let’s dive in!

1. Create a beautiful referral page to get more advocates

Top brands like Rothy’s, Outdoor Voices, and Rae Wellness have beautiful on-brand referral pages. This entices their customers to join their referral program.

With ReferralCandy, you can create a similar customized referral page on your website. For example, nu-in, a sustainable clothing brand, has a simple and clean referral page on its website:

To do this, go to Edit Referral Program > Widgets and copy the code snippet for Embedded Signup. Then paste the code snippet where you want the signup form to appear on your store. Here’s a help article with a more detailed walkthrough.

You can edit the design of the signup form by going to Edit Referral Program > Emails & Pages > Edit Selected Theme > Content > Join Page > Edit.

If you have web development experience or have a developer on your team, you can use the developer mode to customize the page even further. Here are some examples of customized referral pages created using ReferralCandy:

2. Identify and surprise top referrers

When we looked at our data, we discovered that about 4% of the advocates generated a whopping 50% of all referrals! We call them “super” advocates. These advocates referred four or more friends each. A tiny percentage even referred more than 100 friends.

Almost every brand has its “super” advocates—customers who are so enthusiastic and would tell everyone they know about the brand and its products. You want to hold them close because they generate an outsized amount of word of mouth for you.

You can easily identify these customers in your ReferralCandy dashboard. At the bottom of Stats & Overview, there is a list of your top referrers for the selected time period and the number of friends they have referred.

Once you have identified your “super” advocates, think of ways to thank them or engage them. Remember that they might not be referring their friends for monetary reasons.

If they love your product, perhaps you could send them your new products. Maybe they like the team behind the brand, then you could bring them behind the scenes or send them a thank you card or video. You could even get them involved in your marketing through some form of partnership. Be creative!

3. Have an affiliate program to get more referrals

This is a little secret that many people do not know. You can use ReferralCandy to run an affiliate program!

Referrers tell their friends about your products because they like your products and want to share them with their friends. Affiliates, on the other hand, tell people about your products so that they can make some money in the process.

For example, MiaoMiao, a smart libre reader company, has a profitable affiliate program. Customers are selected to be an affiliate ("ambassador") and earn commission by recommending MiaoMiao's products to others.

Here’s what using ReferralCandy for an affiliate program looks like:

1. Your affiliates sign up for your affiliate program through your ReferralCandy Portal (i.e. your referral page).
2. They will receive a unique affiliate link to use.
3. When they refer others to buy your products through their affiliate link, they will receive a reward (i.e. affiliate commission).

Since affiliates prefer monetary incentives, it is best to set your reward as a cash reward.

We have a help article to help you with setting up an affiliate program using ReferralCandy. And yes, you can use ReferralCandy to run both a referral program and an affiliate program, as MiaoMiao does! If you have more questions, feel free to contact us at support@referralcandy.com.

Fun fact: We are using ReferralCandy to run our affiliate program. :)

4. Have influencers share their referral code

Customers who sign up for your referral program get a referral link to share with their friends. There are several advantages to this:

• When their friends use the link to visit your Shopify/BigCommerce store, the friend offer will be automatically applied.
• This makes tracking referrals for your business easier.
• This reduces referral abuse.

But we are also seeing people sharing their referral codes instead. This makes sense as platforms like Instagram do not allow links in the posts. Sharing a code makes it easier for others to use it (than to type the whole referral link).

If you are using Shopify or BigCommerce, there is a little workaround for your customers to get their unique referral code: opening their referral link in incognito mode. They can then copy and share the code with their friends.

For Shopify and BigCommerce, our system can detect referrals when referred friends use either the referral link or referral code. This allows you to have an accurate measure of your referrals while ensuring your advocates get their rewards accordingly.

5. Put the unique referral link right in your marketing emails

Besides emailing your customers specifically about your referral program, you can also mention it in your regular marketing emails and include your customers' unique referral link right inside. For example, sleep brand Casper reminds its readers about its referral program at the end of its Snooze Letter marketing email.

By featuring your referral program in your marketing emails, you can subtly remind your customers about it without being pushy. And with their unique referral link in these emails, you make it easier for them to grab their unique link and share it with their friends.

If you are using Klaviyo or Mailchimp, you can connect them to your ReferralCandy account and insert your customers' unique referral link in your marketing emails using the property or merge tag respectively.

6. Use retargeting to reach friends who did not buy

In the ideal world, your customers’ friends will click on a referral link and buy your products. But in reality, many will visit your store, look at your products… but not buy.

These people are likely interested in your products because they have used the referral link to visit your store. They are more likely to buy your products than people who have never heard of your brand before.

How do you get them back to your store? Retargeting.

Through Google ads, Facebook ads, and Adroll ads, you can advertise your products to people who have seen your referral offer but did not buy.

By adding the respective pixels or IDs in your ReferralCandy account, you can generate an audience of people who have seen your referral offer, on the respective ad platforms. If you do not want to advertise to customers who have already bought your products, remember to exclude them from the audience.

Generally, you should see higher conversion rates for such retargeting ads because the audience already knows your brand and has visited your store. But do keep an eye on your ad frequency so that you are not annoying them by showing them your ad too often.

7. Grow your subscription business through referrals

More and more ecommerce businesses are selling a subscription to their products. For products like coffee, toiletries, and even underwear, consumers would get a subscription to automatically receive the products at regular intervals. They no longer have to manually re-order the products.

And yes, you can run a referral program for your subscription business too!

We partnered with ReCharge to make this possible for Shopify stores. Your advocates will be able to apply their rewards to their existing subscriptions or to new purchases. If your referral program is exclusively for your subscription products, the rewards can be automatically applied to your advocates too. This makes it super convenient for your customers.

If you are using PayWhirl or Bold for your subscriptions, ReferralCandy also integrates with them.

8. Know your referral performance at a glance

At the end of the day, you want to know if you are getting enough referrals. We know small business owners and marketers have to juggle so many different things at once. You often do not have the time to sit down and slowly analyze your results.

That is why we built a simple dashboard to give you a quick overview of your referral program.

Here are the key metrics on the dashboard:

• Referral sales (revenue from referrals and number of referral orders)
• Referral revenue over time
• Number of customers who joined your referral program
• Number of shares about your referral program
• Number of emails sent and their performance
• Amount of referred traffic to your store

If you are satisfied with what you see, great! If not, here are some ways to get more referrals.

Of course, when you have the time and want to dive into the numbers, you can analyze your referral report, which has more detail, or even download it as a PDF or CSV file.

9. Prevent and manage referral fraud

This is not a way to get more referrals but as you get more referrals, you want to keep an eye on referral fraud and abuse. The more popular your brand is, the more likely you will experience this issue. We have heard this from our customers.

Fortunately, ReferralCandy is built to help you prevent and manage referral fraud. There are automated mechanisms to prevent customers from referring themselves or people who are not eligible.

Most importantly, our systems will automatically detect suspicious transactions and flag them up to you.

You can then investigate the suspicious transactions and either ban the advocate from your referral program, void the referral, or mark it as not a fraud.

What are your favorite ReferralCandy features?

Alright, that was quite a list! It has been insightful to see how our customers are using ReferralCandy in many creative ways to get more referrals and customers.

We've compiled a couple more referral marketing-related articles to help you boost your referral rates: 

• How to Build a Referral Program That Works in 2022 (With 80+ Examples)
• How to Choose the Right Referral Incentives For Your Referral Program (With 20+ Examples!)
• Why We Use Referral Links at ReferralCandy (and the Secret Features You Can Use With It!)
• 70+ Examples of Referral Programs Using ReferralCandy
• 35 Catchy Referral Slogans To Promote Your Referral Program
• The Ultimate Referral Widget Guide to Improve Referrals
• Referral Program Benchmarks: What's A Good Referral Rate?