Having more engaged advocates is better. Among the benefits of a broad base of advocates are the facts that they themselves are better customers and they bring in higher quality customers.

To measure how broad your advocate base is, we use a metric called Participation Rate. Participation Rate compares the number of advocates to the number of transactors (e.g. purchasers, registrants) over a time period (usually a month). A high Participation Rate means that you are reaching more customers and is an indicator of the effectiveness of your advocate program.

Participation Rate = (advocates/transactors) * 100

Advocates: the number of unique people that have advocated on your behalf (e.g. the user has shared, dropped a hint, left a rating or a review, etc.).

Transactors: the total number of unique people who have transacted (here, both referral and non-referral). This is a proxy for the total potential reach of your advocacy efforts. We use the term "transactor" for every unique person who transacts in a specified period. In your program, the desired transaction may be a download, a booking, a purchase, or a registration – whichever event we reward! We only count each person once, so if you have two transaction events (like registration and purchase), this will not affect your Participation Rate.

Simply put, if you have 100 folks buying or joining in a period, and 10 of them are advocating in that period, then you have a 10% Participation Rate. Another way you can think about this is that for every 100 people who have transacted (here, both referral and non-referral), you can expect that 10 will become advocates.

Looking at an increase in total advocacy is an important measure of program health. Participation Rate measures your advocacy in comparison to your total site traffic. As more people interact with your site, we want to see more advocacy take place.

Participation Rate is a key indicator of program health. You must be doing something right if your customers are actively seeking out and engaging with your program! Furthermore, high Participation Rates are the hallmark of optimized promotion programs and well thought out creatives and incentive structures.

The most effective strategy to improve your Participation Rate is to make sure you're reaching your customers during a moment of delight. This typically is tied to immediately after making a purchase. As you can see below, there is a strong correlation for Extole clients who market to their customers immediately post-purchase and a high Participation Rate:

Another way to improve your Participation Rate is to optimize the advocate side of your funnel so that more people share. The metrics you will want to improve are advocate click-thru rate and advocacy rate.

Advocate click-thru rate: the percentage of CTA impressions that result in a user clicking on the CTA.

Advocacy rate: the percentage of users that click on a CTA that go on to refer at least one friend. Note that your advocacy rate (Unique Advocates / Advocate Viewers) may be low if you have confirmation autopop enabled. This is because the confirmation autopop appears for every purchase made, so the number of Advocate Viewers will be very high. On the other hand, the confirmation autopop improves your Participation Rate (Advocates / Transactors) because it drives advocacy!

A healthy referral program uses a robust mix of inbound (ie: on-site placements) and outbound (ie: email and social media marketing) promotions.

This is a good time to work with your customer success manager to determine which promotions are performing at benchmark (so you can continue to execute on these promotions) and which are performing below benchmark (so you can make optimizations to bring these promotions to benchmark).

Dedicated outbound promotions involve reaching out to your audience, or a subset of your audience, with a dedicated communication about your referral program. For example, you could outreach to your recent customer list once every two months to invite them to participate in your referral program. The best thing about performing dedicated outbound promotions is the ability to monitor its performance on the Extole dashboard and making intelligent and data-driven optimizations based on performance.

We also have 3 promotions we can turn on automatically without you needing to do any work!

1. Mail After Purchase - an email that gets sent after every purchase asking people to refer.

2. Autopop on Confirmation - on any order confirmation page we can automatically pop the share experience asking the converter to refer.

3. Overlay CTA - on the bottom righthand or lefthand corner, we can turn on a floating call to action that hovers at the bottom of the page.

Adding additional onsite placements is an easy way to increase the number of advocates that participate in your referral program and bring up your Participation Rate. Easily accessible placements, such as global header or footer placements, can quickly ramp up your program's performance.

If it's not possible to use real estate in your site's header or footer, CTAs on high traffic pages (such as product category or special offers pages) are a great solution to mitigate not being able to have a global placement.

It's imperative to your program's performance that your offer structure is appealing to your customer base. There are several things about your offer structure you need to ensure when looking to optimize your Participation Rate:

Burst campaigns and dedicated outbound promotions are two great and simple ways to bring more advocates into your referral ecosystem.

Burst campaigns are limited-time promotions (typically about a week or so) that included dedicated outreach in advance and an increased or modified promotion structure. For example, if your reward structure historically involves giving the friend and advocate ten percent off, during your burst campaign you could double that and give them twenty percent off. The combination of increased promotion and incentives is an effective and reliable way to boost Participation Rate with an influx of new advocates.