Referral Programs: how do they work? 

Since the explosion of the internet and social networks, word-of-mouth has greatly increased and so has its impact on brands.   

A referral program encourages your customers to recommend your products or services to their friends and family. It’s an effective and inexpensive strategy for retaining your existing customers and acquiring new ones.  

In this article, we will take a quick look at how a member referral program works and how your business teams can set it up in just a few clicks within the Scal-e platform’s Loyalty module.  

How do referrals work for members?  

For members (referrer and referred), a referral space allows a referrer to register one or more referred individuals, or a referred individual to identify their referrer, via a form on a dedicated landing page. Brands often offer both a referrer area and a separate area for referred customers. 

Once the referrer has registered their referral, the latter will receive an email, which may ask for confirmation. And vice versa. 

The referrer will be thanked with a gift (points or reward) and so will the referred person. Different levels of referral are possible: registration only, registration with purchase, etc. 

How to set up a referral program in Scal-e  

1. Connect your existing referral program to the Scal-e platform  

Through our ETL (e.g. via the API), you can connect any existing space to the Scal-e platform. Our Loyalty module allows you to import the HTML kit and host/use it in Scal-e with just a few clicks.  

2. Create a referral program on the Scal-e platform  

Your business teams can create a landing page with a registration form (like the example above) in just a few minutes using our dedicated Loyalty module.   

The Loyalty module enables you to create rules using any event (in this case, the event of registering a referral or of the referral becoming a member, for example).  

3. Make use of the functionalities of the Scal-e platform’s other modules  

Our Loyalty module also leverages the functionality of other modules (CDP, Customer Journey Orchestration, etc.) in order to:  

• Segment/score   
• Award points according to the customer journey (referrals, on and offline behaviour, purchases, etc.)  
• Recapture loyal customers’ habits, e.g. referrers/referrals, at the point of sale or online  
• Encourage referrers and referrals (proposed or confirmed) to take action (change of status) through omnichannel communication  

It offers many options for managing campaigns or personalising messages (email, SMS, etc.) according to points, benefits, status, etc.  

There are numerous referral systems that can be endlessly reinvented. All you have to do is imagine the program that suits you and develop it over time.  

The Scal-e platform is designed to provide you with the right solutions for your acquisition and loyalty strategies and to allow business teams to easily and quickly set up their referral program, either based on an existing program or by creating a program from scratch.   

Do you want to set up a referral program or upgrade your current one?   

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Scal-e is a CDP (Customer Data Platform) that enables you to connect several data streams (website, points of sale and others) in a single datamart. In this way, brands can access their data, such as unified customer profiles and real-time information, to get to know their customers better and respond to their needs at the right time, through the right channel. From the same platform, brands can also build their marketing strategy (audience builder, scripting, planning, loyalty and referral programme) and apply it without having to change software.