Data shows that customers acquired via referral are up to 5x more likely to share. These customers were introduced to your referral program, took advantage of the friend offer, and converted into customers.

Now it's time to turn these newly acquired customers into advocates. Encourage these customers to continue the cycle of sharing.

There are a few steps to take to drive friends to become advocates:

Take advantage of the moment of delight when your customer has just purchased and is anticipating their new products -- this is when your customer is most likely to share. Asking for a referral right after a customer makes a purchase is extremely effective as this request touches them when they are happy and connected to your brand. They are on a buyer's high -- and you don't want to lose out on the high-quality shares that come from this promotion source!

When you thank a customer for making a purchase, you can promote your referral program as part of the purchase confirmation in one of two ways:

In general, post-purchase promotions tend to drive 10-20% of program traffic. However, the pop-up share experience outperforms a static call-to-action by 16x and is the recommended approach whenever possible.

Please note that your advocacy rate (Advocates / Advocate Viewers) may be affected if you have confirmation page CTAs enabled. This is because the confirmation page CTAs appear for every purchase made, so the number of Advocate Viewers (advocates who see the share experience) will be very high. On the other hand, confirmation page CTAs improve your Participation Rate (Advocates / Transactors) because they drive advocacy!

Another great way to promote to recent customers is with the Mail After Purchase email. This is an email that is sent to all customers who shop on your site, inviting them to participate in the referral program. This comes directly from the Extole platform, which means no resources are needed from your marketing team or your ESP.

You can choose to delay this email by hours or days to align with your transactional emails and/or shipping times. For more information, please visit this article.

We have two Friend Retargeting reports you can use. The first, called Friend Retargeting, provides a list of all friend email addresses that were shared with and whether or not they converted. The second, called Furthest Step Reached, allows you to configure the steps someone has reached more granularly. For example, you can ask "Who were the people who registered, but haven't converted?" or "Who were the people who were referred, but haven't converted?".

Running either of these reports allows you to target a specific promotion of your referral program to people who have already engaged with the program in one way or another.

Once you have a segment you'd like to promote the program to, it's important that you create a unique promo link for each type of promotion you plan to send -- whether that's via email, Facebook, Twitter, etc.. This way, you can measure the performance of each individual program promotion. Simply create a unique promo link for the appropriate promotion, send the promotion to a targeted customer segment list, and come back to the dashboard to monitor its performance.

Here's how:

Choose a cadence that works for the segment you want to promote to. On that schedule, run a Friend Retargeting Report or Furthest Step Reached Report and send targeted promotions to those segments. Keep in mind high-traffic periods and roll these seasons into your promotional plan. For example, after the holiday shopping season, you may run a Friend Retargeting Report at the start of the new year and promote your referral program to the new customers you've acquired over the holiday season.