If you’re thinking about launching a referral program for your business, you may be wondering if it’s better to create it in-house or whether it’s worth the cost of a referral program software.
In this article, we have gathered eleven main advantages of choosing a reference software. We will use the GrowSurf reference program software as an example.
If you choose to create your own in-house referral program, here’s a checklist.
1-CONFIGURE YOUR REFERRAL PROGRAM IN 15 MINUTES
Your marketing team should not need to involve your developers in creating or updating your referral program.
GrowSurf comes with an easy-to-use campaign editor to make changes that you need to adjust copy emails or update the number of references needed to unlock a reward (here’s a one-minute video about creating a campaign in GrowSurf).
See how to successfully win a referral campaign
GrowSurf is designed for marketers to monitor and make changes to their referral program, and simplified for developers to implement.
2-FOR DEVELOPERS, INTEGRATION IS SIMPLE
Once you’ve set up your referral program, you can email instructions to a developer with one click.
Integration is simple and can take as little as an afternoon. These are only two lines of JavaScript code or two API calls. Based on what you define as a reference, there may even be no coding involved. Check out the documentation of our reference API here.
Once you’ve set up your campaign, you’ll receive detailed instructions that you can pass on to a developer
3-SAVE ON LONG-TERM DEVELOPMENT COSTS
Let’s say you decide to create your own referral program. You should then be ready to create and manage the features of the front-end reference SDK (e.g., cookies, URL settings, social sharing API) and server-side features (e.g., validation, business logic, emails/notifications, anti-abuse -slow-downs/flow limits, webhooks). Not to mention all the cutting-edge cases that accompany each of these technologies and in different customers/devices.
Once you launch your referral program and achieve success, you’ll finally discover that you need additional tools to fight fraud, visibility, reward management and customer support.
Compare the cost of this development work, compared to paying an affordable monthly subscription to Growsurf (our rates change as you grow) to access a reliable and dedicated platform to manage your references (we process hundreds of millions of customer requests – API per year).
Here’s what a reference feed looks like
4-BENEFIT FROM THE ANTI-FRAUD OF THE DEPARTURE
GrowSurf comes with a comprehensive anti-fraud system that is continuously tested in combat in the real world and constantly improved. We have developed very precise validations on the client side and on the server side that allow you to have peace of mind.
Your dashboard will always show you who a fraudster is, and you have a whole suite of combative tools to further secure your campaign (for example, blacklisting IP addresses and emails with support for generic characters, tracing original fraudsters, mass removal of fraudsters).
Your GrowSurf dashboard will always show you who the fraudsters are
Plus, you can still customize your campaign to manually approve all rewards, and you can still enable authentication in GrowSurf to further lock your referral program.
5-DIRECT INTEGRATIONS THAT MAKE YOUR LIFE EASIER
With our direct integrations, which include Zapier and Webhooks, you can sync data with the marketing tools you use daily for your business and automate the execution of rewards.
For example, connect with a click to our HubSpot direct integration, and you can then include unique reference links in your promotional email mailings.
Make it easy to share your participants by including their unique referral link in the page feet of your HubSpot emails
6-RESPOND TO YOUR TEAM ON HOW YOUR REFEERRAL PROGRAM WORKS
GrowSurf comes with real-time analytics that provide visibility into the health and performance of your sponsorship program.
Analytic gives you visibility into the performance of your referral program
7-BENEFIT FROM READY-TO-USE CUSTOMER SUPPORT TOOLS
Your GrowSurf dashboard also provides visibility for customer support and tools to easily help out and investigate problems.
- You get detailed activity logs for all participants and see all the interactions they’ve had with your referral program
- You can retroactively trigger references from your dashboard or assign references to a participant
8-DISCOVER AT A GLANCE WHO ARE YOUR BEST REFERENCES
Your dashboard allows you to easily see who your company’s best advocates are.
9-REWARDS MANAGEMENT IS INTEGRATED
Always know when to approve rewards or complete them; stay organized with reward status
Reward management helps you stay organized
10-END YOUR REFERRAL PROGRAM WHENEVER YOU WANT
Stop your referral program by clicking a button on your dashboard. This will prevent any new referral from happening and you will be able to immediately end your campaign without involving any developers. It’s up to you.
11-YOU BENEFIT FROM A DEDICATED SUPPORT TEAM
Whether you need help settling in or need best practice advice to optimize your referral program to succeed, we’re here to help you grow your business.
We constantly listen to feedback from our customers, and our team continually offers new features to improve the results of your referral program.
CONCLUSION
At the end of the day, creating a referral program is not a single type of agreement. While we personally went through these difficulties when we built our own in-house referral program, we know all too well how easy it is to get caught up in the creep of features that comes from creating a referral program from scratch.
At GrowSurf, many of our customers are Internet-based companies or SaaS startups that have a marketing manager or product manager responsible for setting up a referral program. This person has access to development resources, but understands that his team’s bandwidth is low and reserved for his existing pipeline of new features, bug fixes or technical debt reduction.
That’s why we built GrowSurf. Our referral software helps marketing and product teams launch a referral program in the simplest way possible.
Try GrowSurf today! (100% risk-free, no credit card required, cancel at any time)
This article first appeared on Growsurf.
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