Clean, Simple Referral Program Promotions Work
by Chris Plumb
Anyone can start a referral program for their business – one can simply ask their customers for referrals and hope for the best. Others (and we like to think they’re the really smart ones) choose to use solutions such as uRefer (www.urefer.com) to facilitate a trackable and measurable referral program, using incentives to drive their customers to make qualified leads. But what makes a referral program truly successful, aside from the inner-view into one’s referral network that uRefer provides? What elevates it to a level where customers are fully engaged and excited about their participation?
It’s no secret that poor design and inconsistent messaging can negatively affect a customer’s perception of a business, and that certainly applies to the promotion of a referral program. Something as simple as the scale, color, and placement of an image that promotes a referral program can have a dramatic impact on how a customer percieves the value of a referral program, and its ease-of-use. In other words, keep it simple!
Example of how to promote a referral program: Clean design and clear messaging grabs the attention of potential advocates and makes referring a pleasant and straightforward experience.
I’ve always subscribed to Steve Krug’s “Don’t make me think” philosophy of usability, which certainly applies to the visual cues that designers use when developing images for a referral program website or email promotion. This also applies to the denisty and length of marketing copy. For instance, a program that has a lot of eligibility requirements and a lot of different potential rewards needs to be conveyed in as simple and succinct of a way as possilbe, preferably without ALLCAPS and excessive exclamation points. When was the last time you signed up for a website because they promised you a “SUPER AMAZING EXCLUSIVE LIMITED TIME TO ACT IS NOW COOL DEAL!!!!!!!1!!11!!!!!!” in a 50pt, bold font with a blinking arrow next to it? When was the last time you read every little detail in that three-paragraph description of something on a page that should have been no more than a line or two?
Example of how NOT to promote a referral program: Overuse of caps and exclamation marks combined with an overly complicated layout will overwhelm and scare off potential advocates.
Studies show that in today’s digital era, people generally do not read every single word in the text that marketers invest a lot of time in money in – rather, they scan and skim the page (Jakob Nielson, “How Users Read on the Web,” www.useit.com). Referral programs must be easy to understand and easy to read. The presentation should be to the point and concise. Text should be clear, legible, and formatted in a way that aligns with users’ tendencies to scan for content that is relevant to what they’re expecting to find. In regards to a referral program, any images should be pertinent to the offer, and over-used, tacky stock photography with posed people smiling and shaking hands should be avoided as often as possible. We, as an everyday-web-browsing culture, are learning more and more how to tune these visual offences out and get to the core of what we’re looking for in a webpage (or simply move on).
Think of it as the classic example of passing a billboard at 70 miles per hour – there are only seconds during which a markter can convey a complex idea or message to a driver so that they can process what they saw while keeping their eyes on the road. If your referral program website has a visually-intriguing banner that explains the benefit of participating in the program to the customer (which it hopefully does), the person viewing it should be able to understand what is offered and what they must do to participate in a matter of seconds.
Customers who are happy with a product or service they’ve received from a business will often be eager to refer friends. When it comes to promoting an online referral program to those customers, a referral tool that is well-produced and easy to understand is much more likely to be the conduit through which they will share the great experiences they’ve had.
Written by Theresa Trevor