Referral Program Best Practices

Our recommendations for creating a thriving a referral program.

About this guide

This is a summary of our best practices for raising awareness of and encouraging participation in your referral program. If you’ve set up a program and are looking for tips on how to make it shine, you’ve come to the right spot.

📋Key terms

Before we get started, here’s a refresher on the common referral marketing terms we use:

Participant: Any member of your program. Participants may or may not have made referrals before.

Referrer: An existing participant who’s sharing your program with their friends, colleagues or broader network.

Referred participant: A person or company that joins your program after being invited by a referrer. The referred participant may be totally new to your service, or they could be taking the next step in their relationship with your brand.

General best practices

Your referral program will require a combination of Transactional & Marketing Creative. Transactional

Program elements⁠

are the parts of your program that a customer interacts when they are making or tracking referrals and earning rewards.

Marketing creative⁠

elements and

Engagement opportunities⁠

are used to help promote your program and inspire your customers to participate.

When developing these for your program, it's important to keep the following general best practices in mind.

🎨 Maintain brand consistency

Build trust and create a seamless user experience by ensuring all program creative is consistent with your brand.

Leverage your brand logo, fonts, colors, and tone of voice.

📲 Include clear & concise calls-to-action (CTA)

Create a clear and concise call-to action that quickly communicates the value of your new program.

🏆 Highlight the benefits

Rewards are a compelling motivator to encourage program participation. Be sure to mention the rewards your program offers participants.

🙌 Make it personal

Personalize your communications as much as possible.

Take advantage of SaaSquatch’s

merge tags⁠

to populate messages with dynamic variables such as:

Unique Referrer Sharelinks

Referrer Social Share & Message Links

Referral Codes

⁠