Using Referral Features With Shopify

You wouldn’t let your friend buy something that you thought was total junk, would you?

A referral marketing strategy rides on this exact concept - incentivising customers to refer a friend to your business. Consumers are talking about their purchases more and more, whether it’s word of mouth, pinging your friends an email or text, or tagging one another in posts on social media. Referral marketing is most prominently seen in the e-commerce landscape, whereby business owners offer generous discounts to new customers, mutually benefitting the existing customer and their friends. What more could you want? It’s a winning concept: facilitating the referral of your business from customers to their friends, and ultimately encouraging consumers to talk about you!

Marketing strategists are implementing referral programs through a variety of methods, such as email and popups. It’s not imperative, but often businesses incentivise the original customer to recommend their product to a friend. Many organisations also engage with influencer or affiliate campaigns to enhance their referral program. Referral marketing taps into the same influence as customer reviews on product pages. Consumers put their faith in other consumers, so a recommendation that comes from a friend is all the more powerful.

Which way is the best way?

It's time to get started with your referral campaign! There's no time like the present. It’s likely that you’ve already got a drip campaign which is triggered by certain consumer actions, like when they sign up to your site. Many business owners will integrate their referral program within this chain of emails.

Another effective way to launch your referral strategy is through the email receipts and confirmation emails you send out. Post-purchase emails are the perfect tool to promote your referral program: not only do these emails have some of the highest opening rates, but customers are seemingly happy at this stage of their buying journey. In some cases, your product or service might be so exemplary that a customer won’t need any motivation to spread the word, but in others, rewarding existing customers to spark interest in their friends is necessary. An enticing offer will ignite a repeat sale from your existing customer and generate new, loyal customers!

ReferralCandy

Introducing ReferralCandy: an app which basically organises your referral marketing strategy for you. Based on the concept that we pay attention to our friends’ recommendations, ReferralCandy strives to maximise referral rates and makes it simpler for customers to share promo codes with their friends. There are also some amazing add-ons such as fraud protection and automated ROI analytics, so that you can assess the running of your referral program in real time.

How does it work?

When a customer purchases a product from your site, ReferralCandy delivers a discount to them, and invites them to share it with their friends. If a friend of theirs also purchases something from your website, the initial customer will receive a referral reward. It’s a simple notion that mutually benefits all parties and ultimately increases your sales and conversion rates.

7 of the best things about ReferralCandy:

1. Easy Integration


If you’re a Shopify account holder, ReferralCandy is really easy to set up and is designed to be extremely user friendly. We’ll provide a step-by-step guide on integrating ReferralCandy into your Shopify store later on.

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2. It’s completely customisable

Marketers can easily adjust and customise their incentive (discount, offer, promo), and copy to ensure that brand tone of voice is conveyed effectively. You can edit your referral campaign using the simplest drag-and-drop email editor, or you can adjust content using HTML/CSS to really enhance your scheme.


3. Automated emails

ReferralCandy automatically delivers your rewards to relevant customers so you don’t have to. Trust that customers will receive the necessary codes to revisit your e-store, and invite their friends! This clever little app also delivers automated reminder emails (embedded with a referral link) to push advocates to refer their friends and increase sales figures. Referral programs rely on persistence which can cost your business a lot of time and money, so this is where ReferralCandy really takes the load off. 


4. Like, Tweet, Tag: Don’t forget Social Media

We never stop communicating on social media, which is why it is the perfect place to promote your referral marketing scheme. ReferralCandy’s software makes your scheme easily sharable with social sharing buttons. In this instance, your business is demonstrating some strong, social credibility. We’re all sheep, so when a customer sees a social audience sharing your product or service, they’re more inclined to engage with it. 


5. Analysis

The neatly designed all-in-one dashboard tracks a whole realm of metrics, including how your referral scheme compares to others in the industry. Insights like this are invaluable for marketers who can easily assess and adjust specific factors to optimise their campaign even more.


6. The sky’s the limit

It doesn’t matter if your referral program generates 10 or 10,000 advocates, ReferralCandy won’t cap you.

7. A helping hand

Get in touch with their savvy technical support team when you’re integrating the software or to maximise your referral program once it’s set up.

How to set up ReferralCandy

1. Sign up!


If you’re interested in signing up for ReferralCandy click here, and you’ll be redirected to your setup guide. At this point, business owners will need to enter some details such as your logo, customised email template, discount codes etc. Once this is complete, click “integration” and save the tracking code and email.

2. Add ReferralCandy’s tracking code

The way ReferralCandy works is by collecting data from the purchase page on your website. Copy and paste the code, generated by ReferralCandy, and that’s it: they’ll begin automatically running your campaign and collecting relevant data!

3. Send invoice emails to ReferralCandy

Whenever you send a confirmation of purchase email to a customer, remember to copy in ReferralCandy, so that they’re included in the referral chain. For more help with step 3, click here.

Let's get started

Need help getting creating a referral marketing campaign that works for your business? Get in touch with us! At Elkfox, we’re Shopify gurus who always rely on data driven decisions when growing businesses!