“The most reliable advertisements are those that come directly from individuals we know and trust. The suggestions of friends and family are entirely or partially trusted by more than eight in ten respondents (83%) globally.
I hope I piqued your interest in some referral marketing. You can independently establish a referral programme by just coding it if you have a sizable development team, lots of resources, and free time. But this isn’t the subject I want to talk about with you today. Software for referral programmes makes referral marketing simpler for companies of all sizes. And with this article, I’d want to provide some tips with you about what to look for in a referral programme software.

Avoid referral programme software vendors that are not scalable

One of the key factors affecting your chances of success is scalability. You must keep in mind that the volume of recommendations can abruptly rise or decrease when selecting a referral programme software. Additionally, your recommendation provider should be adaptable enough to change both the cost you pay as well as the resources used to complete your project. After all, monitoring 100 versus 10,000 referrals requires quite different IT infrastructure and cloud computing skills. Because of this, you should always use referral programme software that offers you the best of both worlds: quick response times during peak referral periods, and lower prices during periods when your referral campaign is moving more slowly than usual (which is perfectly normal).

What are the boundaries of your strategy?
Are high-level plans still reasonably priced, and do they include the necessary referral features?
Exists a free trial period?
How will my onboarding be handled?

Look for referral software that supports a variety of incentives.

Offering consumers tepid incentives in a feeble effort to cut costs is one of the worst sins in referral marketing. You must provide incentives that are alluring enough to entice customers to take the time, risk their friends’ confidence, and recommend your company if you want to launch a successful referral programme, which I’m sure you do. A pen bearing your company’s emblem won’t cut it. Because of this, it’s important to pick referral programme software that takes a variety of incentives, including both monetary and non-cash rewards (e.g., discounts, cashback, gift card credits). While you’re about it, it’s also crucial to look at the customer referral programme workflows that are enabled. Will you solely reward the referrer or will you also reward the recipients?

 Always go for a marketer-friendly referral program software

You don’t want Dan from IT to run your referral program (sorry, Dan). You want a professional marketing team to have the final say regarding how your referral incentives play out. Therefore, you need to avoid referral solutions that overcomplicate the referral flow and require a lot of ongoing development work from your IT team. Questions that you might ask include:

How does the dashboard appear?
Is the platform easy to use?
How many tasks can the marketing staff complete by themselves?
Is it simple to modify it without using code?

Whether the referral software of your choice supports role-based access to enable you to manage affiliate programmes and restrict the amount of users with admin capabilities is something else to take into account. This is crucial if you’re searching for a referral solution for a business-grade company with complex interdependencies and multiple teams working on the same project.

The one thing I can say with certainty is that there is no straightforward solution to this problem, having worked with many referral marketing platforms and confronted with a million different customer requirements. The ideal choice for you will always be based on the nature and scope of your company. The best referral programme will vary depending on whether a company is in the e-commerce, SaaS, or travel sectors.

What I do know is that Evolve checks all the right boxes for selecting a safe and adaptable referral tool that can aid you in accelerating the oldest kind of advertising, word-of-mouth.