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Referral Program Best Practices
Referral Program Best Practices
Program elements
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Program elements

Transactional
Program elements
⁠
are the parts of your program that a customer interacts when they are making or tracking referrals and earning rewards. These elements are common to most SaaSquatch programs.
Element
Audience
Why it's important
Best practices
1
Referral widget
Referrer
Embedded in your website, the referral widget is the place where your customers make and keep track of their referrals and rewards.
Host your referral widget on a personalized page in your website or app (e.g. "Welcome, Amanda! Ready to earn rewards?”)
Be sure to include the details of the program and how to participate.
Provide a program explainer that clearly explains how to participate and earn rewards.
Include a Referral Leaderboard to generate a bit of competition among your referrers! You can even consider a special reward for top referrers.
2
Microsite
Referrer
If you're unable to host an in-app widget on your own domain, a microsite serves as a portal for your referrers to make referrals and track their progress.
Be sure to make it look and feel like your brand
Setup a custom domain to host your microsite
Use
conditional content blocks
⁠
to serve custom content to unique customer segments
3
Social sharing and message links
Referrer's social network
Setting up social media message links, with your own copy, gives your referrers a frictionless way to send out their sharelinks. Message links provide pre-populated emails, text messages or social media posts for your customers to share out their referral links.
Be mindful of character limits
Be sure to state the value proposition of your program in the share message
Add merge tags text to pre-populate your customers unique sharelink in the message
4
Program notification emails for referrers
Referrer
Keeping your referrers and referred users up to date will keep both parties invested in their referral journey. Set up emails to deploy after goals have been achieved. This keeps the referrer up to date and encourages them to make more referrals.
Keep your referrer up to date at key points in their referred participant’s journey:
Referral Started
Referral Signed Up
Referral Completed!
5
Program notification emails for referred participants
Referred participant
Email referred users to nudge them along the referral journey and increase their chances of converting to paid customers.
Encourage referred users along their referral journey by:
Reminding them who referred them to your product or service
Emailing them at sign up to remind them they can earn a reward/discount when they make a purchase
Emailing them when they convert to give them their reward and let them know they can earn additional rewards if they start referring
6
Landing page
Referred participant
The referred user landing page is where referred users arrive when they visit a referrer’s sharelink. This is how they sign up or make a purchase.
Use a sign up flow that already has proven success for your business
Reiterate any rewards or discounts referred users will receive when they sign up
Include an explanation of how they will receive this reward
Ensure your landing page is hosted on your company’s main domain and uses consistent corporate branding
Include social proof whenever possible. Testimonials can provide credibility for customers that are unfamiliar with your product or service. Established programs should use testimonials and other program-specific customer feedback.
7
Domains (custom domains for share links, emails and microsites)
Referrer
Referred participant
Whitelabeled domains give all users who interact with your referral program a sense of trust, especially when having to enter in personal information (e.g. name, email)
Example sharelink domain:
refer.yourbrand.com join.yourbrand.com

Example email sender:
refer@yourbrand.com

Important Note: Domains used for microsites can’t be reused for share links. Microsites can't use the same domain on both your live and test tenant.
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