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I wanted to implement a "Refer a Friend" application. There seems to be two main ways of doing this:
1) people enter in a friend or some friend's email address by hand, and then send the referral out.
There are free scripts that do this.
There are scripts that cost money that provide functionality to refer multiple people and to have reporting on the back end.
2) There are scripts that ask the user to login to their gmail, hotmail, yahoo, etc, account and it crawls their contacts and sends invitations to all of them.
I thought about this a lot. The obvious payback would be the possibility of large numbers of new people getting referred to the site.
But it made me twitch.
I've done this crawling for social network sites like www.linkedin.com. But that served MY needs. Not some sellers needs.
The people selling this type of software, don't seem to ever mention how twitchy it might make people.
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I decided to go with option 1 using a paid script from Optistar called Tell. I'm trying to figure out how to incentivize it before I launch it.
I need to vastly grow my mailing list. My goal is 500 people by the end of the month and I'm a long ways from there. But if everyone on my list told 3 people and if that continued, I could reach my goal.
So offer a dollar off of purchase for each referral? Offer a free gift for 10 referrals?
I need to make sure my software that I picked, won't let someone make up email addresses just to get the gift (or whatever the incentive is.)
So I'm scratching my head about it some more.
You would have been better off with MailChimp, which would have been free for the first 500 subscribers. and sending 3,000 emails per month. Where MailChimp shines is with analytics.
ReplyDeleteMichael, I am using MailChimp, though not 100% happily. Still in a trial period until today. But MC doesn't have refer-a-friend, does it?
ReplyDeleteHave I overlooked some magic MC?
The emails my wife sent out for her company, had a "Forward this email to a friend" link on them. With MailChimp you will be able to track that.
ReplyDeleteYou may want to look at affiliate software for tracking of referrals or if you ambitious you could look at using software for the cart that also has built in affiliate software, effectively making every customer an affiliate. You might be able to come up with a nifty marketing campaign around that. check it out over a jrox.com, it might just be what your looking for.