Drive 10x Sales In Your Shopify Store With Retainful’s New Referral Feature

Turn your existing customers into brand advocates and acquire new customers through a Referral program.

You can reward both your Advocates and Referrals when they complete a successful Referral purchase in your Shopify store and foster customer loyalty.

Running a Referral program in your Shopify store will help you boost your WOM sales and your customer retention rate. And Retainful has the perfect feature to help you out here.

So, please allow us to introduce our brand new Retainful feature, ‘Referrals’.

Referrals

We feel immensely proud in bringing you the newest and most dynamic attribute of Retainful, ‘Referrals.’

Referrals is an illustrious feature of our Retainful plugin with which you can run a Referral program and boost your Shopify store’s organic sales.

You can offer various Referral rewards, track your Referral performance, send Referral emails and many more, using this brand new Referral feature.

Excited Already?

Wait until you see its full capabilities, we are sure it will blow your minds.

Referrals Feature Capabilities

1. Referral Rewards

Retainful allows you to create individual rewards for your Advocates and Referrals. The first thing you must do before enabling the Referral program is creating the rewards and let’s see how to do it.

Creating individual rewards

You can create an Advocate reward and a Friend(Referral) reward individually. Most referral programs won’t let you do that.

Advocate – Your existing customer who has joined your Referral program.

Friend – New customers who have been invited to your store by the advocate.

Click ‘Add Reward’ to create the Advocate reward. You will be asked to choose the type of reward, which is discussed in the next step.

Note – The process for creating both Advocate reward and the Friend reward are identical

Choose the type of Referral rewards

By default, there are 3 reward options, Flat amount discount, Percentage discount, Free Shipping Coupon.

You can offer any one of these rewards based on your preference and customer expectation.

Select any one of the rewards from the list and then you’ll be taken to the reward section to configure it. It is discussed in the next step.

Configure your Referral rewards

For this instance, we’ve selected the Percentage discount.

You’ll be taken to the Discount page where you can select the discount value and more.

1. Reward Value – Choose the percentage/value of the discount you want to offer as a reward.
2. Minimum Spending Required – Select a minimum purchase threshold, the customer will earn the reward only when he exceeds the threshold limit. ( This option will not be available for ‘Free Shipping Coupon’)
3. Prefix for Discount code – You can add a prefix to your discount code.
4. Reward validity – Set an expiry date for the rewards.

Click ‘Create’ to create the reward once you are done configuring it.

Advocate reward has been created. Now follow the same process to create the Friend Reward.

Enabling the Referral Program

Once you are done creating both the rewards, it is time to Enable the Referral program.

Click the ‘Enable Program’ to enable it.

Remember when we said you can create a Referral program effortlessly using Retainful.

Well, that’s it, all it took is just three easy steps to create a Referral program.

2. Insightful Referral Dashboard

Once you enable the Referral program, you’ll be prompted with the Referral dashboard. Let’s discuss what you’ll see here,

A Lot of activities happen on the Referral dashboard, let’s break it down one by one.

General Referral Statistics

You can view the total revenue, Number of rewards issued and the number of referral members in real-time on the Referral dashboard.

Referral Email Templates

You can set up email notifications for your customers involved in your Referral program. These emails will be sent after they complete a Referral purchase.

Click ‘ Manage emails’ to view the email templates.

You can customize these emails as per your preference to make it look enticing. Click ‘Edit’ to open the Template window.

Referral Email Customization

On the template page, you can edit your subject line and personalize it using shortcodes to engage better with the customers.

Click ‘Customize’ to modify the email layout.

This will be your Referral email layout. You’ll find the editing options on the right side of the page,

There will be two sections ‘Blocks’, ‘Styles’, available for editing your layout.

Under the ‘Blocks’ section, you will find,

• Section – You can drag & drop columns into your email layout.
• Elements – You can add images, text, buttons, Social sharing icons and dividers.
• Store Elements – It lets you add coupons, unsubscribe button and Logo.

Under the ‘Styles’ section, you will find,

• Dimension – Edit the dimensions of your layout.
• Typography – Edit your text, here you can change your font size, font color, spacing, font alignment, and more.
• Decorations – Here you can change the background color and your border dimensions.
• Icons – Edit your social sharing icons.

You can use these options to modify your email layout. Once you are done customizing it, just click ‘Save & Set Live’ to activate the emails.

Monitor your Individual Referral Performance

The last stop in the dashboard is the Activity section. Here you can find details including the emails of advocates & friends, referral code, order total, Referral status and the date of the Referral sale.

Once your Referral program is up and running, your activity section will look like this,

You can use the filtering options to view the completed referrals, pending referral and even the fraudulent referral details.

3. Branding

Retainful’s Referrals feature lets you create an attractive popup that announces the Referral program to the customers on your storefront.

It has its own customization options which you can use to make the Referral popup look attractive.

Click ‘Branding’ located on the top right of the Referral dashboard to enter the Referral popup customization page.

Referral Popup Design

Storefront Referral popup introduces the program to your customers, so you’ve to make it look attractive.

You can design and customize it as per your preference by using the intuitive customization options.

1. In the theme section, you can change the color, font, placement and spacing of paddings.

(Note – Your Referral popup will be displayed on the right side of the same page, so you can view the changes in real-time)

2. Then comes the panel section, here you can customize the header, title and the widget body.

Notice how there are three sections on the top: a visitor, member and rewards.

There are two Referral popups based on the customer’s engagement with the store. A Rewards popup widget is also available.

You can customize all of them based on your preference.

3. In this section, you can customize how you want your launcher icon to be displayed on your storefront.

Once you are done with the customization your Referral popup will look like this.

4. Social sharing settings

You can select the Social platforms where you want your customers to share about your Referral program.

5. Guest checkout and landing page

Retainful’s Referrals is probably one of the fewest programs that allow guest users to refer their friends.

Also, you can choose the page where you want your Referrals to land after clicking the Referral link.

6. Customer in Referral program

Retainful has an individual tab that displays the customer’s Referral performance.

You can either view the performance of every customer or you can just view the Referral performance of customers involved in the Referral program.

That’s it!

We’ve seen the highlights of Retainful’s Referral feature. As it is a brand new one, it has been designed in parallel with the eCommerce trends.

Impressive, right?

Alright, let’s take a quick overview of how the program works and you can start creating and running your own Referral program.

How does Retainful’s Referral Program work?

• Each customer gets a unique link with a Referral code as they sign up or join the program.
• The customer (Advocate) shares their Referral link with their friends through Social media.
• The friend (Referral) visits your Shopify store using the Referral link.
• He earns his discount and makes a successful Referral purchase in your Shopify store.
• For successfully referring the friend, the advocate also gets his fair share of the reward.

Looks pretty neat, doesn’t it? Retainful’s Referrals can ease out your pressure of acquiring new customers by retaining your existing ones.

Wrapping up

Shopify referral programs are one of the best ways to increase your customer retention rate. It can also motivate the customers to drive repeated purchases and increase your WOM sales. That’s why we created a user-friendly feature that can run a Referral program effortlessly.

This hard work and persistence would’ve been impossible if you weren’t standing by us and supporting us all the way through.

Thank You!