Design a Referral Program

Marketing managers can design a referral program and its promotions by completing a few simple steps in the Referral Marketing app.

Here are the steps to design a referral program:

Example Cloud Kicks wants to run one evergreen promotion that runs throughout the year and offers a US$10 discount for the advocates and their referred friends. They also want to run two time-bound promotions, one during the company’s anniversary week and another on December 31 and January 1. The marketing manager creates one referral program and adds three promotions to it. The evergreen promotion has a start date but no end date. The company anniversary promotion runs for a week and the year-end promotion’s start date is December 31 and the end date is January 1.

Example Cloud Kicks wants to run a referral program for their advocates in France and Canada. For France, they want to reward the advocates and their referred friends with a 10% discount voucher. For Canada, Cloud Kicks wants to provide a 15% discount to the advocates and a 10% voucher to the advocates’ friends. In this case, Cloud Kicks can run two promotions, one for each country.

Example Cloud Kicks wants to run a referral program that consists of an evergreen promotion for all its customers and a time-bound promotion for a specific customer group. For the evergreen promotion, the marketing manager selects a start date but doesn't select an end date or a target audience. For the time-bound promotion, the marketing manager selects a start date, an end date, and a Data 360 segment campaign that consists of the promotion's target audience.

1. Create a Referral Program
   The launchpad for any referral strategy is the referral program. After marketing managers create a referral program, they can manage and implement all aspects for their referral strategy from the referral program.
2. Add Rewards
   Referral programs incentivize the advocates and referred friends for engaging with the brand. Marketing managers can design a range of rewards such as commission payouts, cashbacks, or gift cards that appeal to the target audience. They can add multiple rewards types in a referral program and offer different rewards to advocates and their friends. If a referral program includes multiple promotions, each promotion can offer a unique set of rewards to both advocates and their friends.
3. Add Advocates
   Advocates of a referral program are the customers who are willing to refer your brand to their friends. Marketing managers can either add all customers as advocates or add a select set of customers to the referral program. If the number of customers to be added is small, marketing managers can add the advocates one by one. Or, marketing managers can work with the admin to set up a process that adds all the advocates simultaneously.
4. Promotion Template
   Promotion templates determine the configuration of promotions. In a promotion template, decide stage names, the stages at which advocates and their referred friends are rewarded, and the activities that rewards are provided for. Each promotion is based on a promotion template. The promotion template decides the promotion's stage names, the activities for which the promotion rewards advocates and their referred friends, and the promotion's email content. Before you create a promotion, decide if you want to use an existing promotion template or create a unique template for your promotion.
5. Create a Promotion
   Promotions are the primary vehicle that runs your referral program. Marketing managers can design different types of promotions with varying duration, audience, rewards, and stages.
6. Use Marketing Cloud Next for Outbound Engagement
   When you set your communication method as Marketing Cloud, you must add Marketing Cloud Next as an outbound engagement to send emails at different stages of the promotion journey. Emails at the Promotion Launched stage are segment-based and uses Data 360 segments to target the right audience. For all other stages, emails are event-based, that trigger a flow for content distribution.