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Considerations for Referral Marketing Implementation
When you plan your brand’s Referral Marketing implementation strategy, you must account for certain key considerations.
Required Editions
| Available in: Lightning Experience |
| Available in: Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions with Referral Marketing |
Person Account
Referral Marketing uses both contacts and person accounts to store information about advocates and their referred friends. Before you implement Referral Marketing in your company's org, we recommend you to set up Person Accounts.
If you have a limitation on setting up person accounts in your org, you can still implement Referral Marketing. The process of enrolling advocates and tracking referral activities differs from the standard procedure. For more details, refer to these sections:
Active Advocate Count
With the Referral Marketing license, your brand can have 100,000 active advocates. An active advocate represents a customer’s active engagement with an active referral promotion. The active advocate count denotes the number of customers that the brand is actively engaging through their referral promotions.
Salesforce considers an advocate as active only when:
- The promotion that the advocate is a part of is active
- The Loyalty Program Member Promotion record that associates an advocate with a promotion is active.
If a customer is an active advocate of two active referral promotions, then the active advocate count of the customer is two. If a customer is engaged in multiple promotions, then each promotion engagement is counted as one active advocate.
| Business Scenario | Active Advocate Count |
|---|---|
| A brand has three promotions, two are active and one is inactive. Among the two active promotions, one has 27,000 active advocates and the other has 13,000 active advocates. The inactive promotion has 6,000 active advocates. | 40,000 (27,000 plus 13,000) |
| A brand has two active promotions. In one promotion, there are 65,250 active advocates and 500 inactive advocates. The second promotion has 17,000 active advocates and 720 inactive advocates. | 82,250 (65,250 plus 17,000) |
| A brand starts off with two active promotions. The two promotions have 1,500 and 1,000 active advocates. 200 customers join each promotion as advocates. | 2,500 (1,500 plus 1,000) |
| A brand has one active promotion and adds 500 customers to the promotion as active advocates when the promotion is launched. After the launch, another 200 customers join as active advocates. | 700 (500 plus 200) |
| A customer joins five promotions, out of which two promotions are now inactive. | 3 (5 minus 2) |
| A brand has 60,000 advocates who are part of active promotions but 15,000 of these advocates don’t have active Loyalty Program Member Promotion records. | 45,000 (60,000 minus 15,000) |
| A brand has 90,000 active advocates and is expected to add another 30,000 advocates in the upcoming year based on the estimates from their planned promotions. | 120,000 (90,000 plus 30,000) In this scenario, the brand is expected to have 20,000 more active advocates than provisioned by the Referral Marketing license. The brand can contact their Salesforce rep to purchase additional advocate packs for the additional 20,000 active advocates. |
Referral Marketing APIs
To integrate your referral program with external systems, use the set of business APIs available with Referral Marketing. The number of times that you run the Referral Marketing APIs count against your Referral Marketing org’s API limits.
Key Considerations for Marketing Cloud Engagement
| Area | Consideration |
|---|---|
| Super Messages | Referral Marketing sends emails to a referral program’s advocates and their referred friends by using journeys in Marketing Cloud Engagement. When marketing managers design referral promotions, they finalize the emails that they send to advocates and friends. The emails that are sent for referral programs and their promotions count against your Super Messages count in Engagement. |
| Connection | Before marketing managers create and run referral promotions, the admin must set up the connection between Referral Marketing and the brand’s Engagement business unit. Without the connection, promotion emails aren’t sent to advocates and their referred friends. If the company has multiple Engagement business units, the admin can connect Referral Marketing with all business units that send referral promotion emails. For more information on the tasks involved in connecting Referral Marketing with business units, see Business Unit Connection in Marketing Cloud Engagement. |
| Journey Customizations | After marketing managers activate a promotion, journeys are created in the brand’s connected Engagement business unit. An Engagement user can customize the journeys and the emails used in the journeys. For example, customize the journeys to send mobile notifications or WhatsApp messages to advocates and their referred friends. To learn more about Referral Marketing’s marketing journeys, see What Happens After a Promotion is Activated and Customize Promotion Journeys in Marketing Cloud Engagement. |
| Profile Center Link in Emails | Referral promotion emails that are sent using Marketing Cloud Engagement don't include the link to Profile Center by default and marketing managers can't activate promotions when the Profile Link Check setting is turned on in Marketing Cloud Engagement. To include the Profile Center link in referral promotions, edit referral promotion email templates and add the required Profile Center details. |
