Referral Analytics and Optimization

My name is Michael Longganeker. I'm the head of operations here at ReferralRock. I'm joined today by Blake, who's our senior product manager. And just sort of a quick admin note, this call will be recorded, so you'll get both the recording and the slides after the session. So don't worry about screenshots or additional notes. Also, Blake will be monitoring the chat, so if you have any questions, please, you know, ask during, during the presentation. Also, you can reach out to me at any point, sort of following this call. My email is on the screen. M. Longandackerferralrock.com so feel free to reach out if you have any questions. So today, today we're going to be talking about referral analytics and optimizations. In particular, we're going to talk about how to use referral indicators to understand and improve referral programs. So we're going to cover three main topics. We're going to go over the referral funnel and key indicators. We're gonna talk about program analytics and walk through our new dashboard. And then finally we're gonna talk about program optimizations and open up for any questions that you, that you might have. So starting with the referral funnel. The referral funnel is a framework for approaching and visualizing referral programs. So it consists of two different journeys. You have your member journey and that's gonna be how your customers, how your partners, how your affiliates and anyone else who's sharing your business. It's going to be how they experience your program. And then on the other end, you have your referral journey. So this is how the referred friends, referred colleagues, any other leads that are coming through the referral program, what's their experience with the program? So starting with the aware stage, this is, are potential members actually aware that you have a program? And then from aware of those people that are aware, how many of them actually share. So the goal of that member journey is to drive shares. And so you kind of want to see how they are, how they're sharing and how many they're sharing from shares. They're going to share through a variety of different ways. They could share through links, emails, sms, maybe they're adding referrals directly and that can be simplified as this shared message here. So from the shared message we go to reach. So reaches where the referral journey starts. It's when that, you know, that referred friend clicks on a link, they're taken to your referral page, your website. And so reach is going to tell us, you know, how many people, how Many referred people is your program reaching. And then finally referrals, how many of those referrals then converted and actually participated in and became referrals within your program. So to sort of talk through that a bit more aware, you know, do people know about your. That your program exists? Share are people telling others about your business? Reach is what's being shared, actually clicking and resonating. And referrals are people converting after being referred. So then what we want to do, and this is what our new dashboard is all about, is we want to take that understanding of the referral funnel and then we want to map that to two key indicators. So the referral analytics dashboard has six indicators. Three of these are really focused on understanding the aware stage. And then there's going to be an indicator for each of the other stages. So for aware, we have, you know, added members. This is going to be the number of new members added to the program activated, the number of members that engage with the program for the first time, and member visits, the number of members visiting their member portal, which is a great approximation for like overall engagement share. Then it's going to be the number of times a member clicks on a share method. Reach is how many unique people have heard about your program, both converted and unconverted referrals. And then referrals are the number of converted referrals added to the program. Like I said, I'll be sharing these slides. So if you wanted to explore any of these indicators in a lot more details, take a look at this analytics report article. So taking a step back, just kind of wanted to talk about the benefits of using referral indicators and why we've introduced these to how we approach analytics here at Referral Rock. So indicators help us reduce complexity and really allow you to focus on what matters. So by simplifying analytics, we can remove a lot of the guesswork from how you look at data. So if indicator says X, that tells you you need to do Y. They also allow us to monitor change and trends over time so that you can see kind of how your program's performing, what are those fluctuations, and just really, you know, by simplifying that, you can kind of get a good pulse of what's happening within your program. And finally, they allow us to predict performance and proactively make adjustments. So a lot of these indicators are actually leading indicators, which means that we can get a sense of how likely the program is going to succeed based off of these early warning, early signal from these key leading indicators. And so with that, I'll kind of dive into our analytics dashboard. So sort of here's a screenshot of what that looks like, but we'll, we'll go ahead and walk through a, an interactive demo. So this is taking some data so that you can kind of see what this looks like after a program's been running. And so what we have here are those six indicators that I had mentioned. And you can kind of track like how those are changing between different time periods. You can filter data. So if you wanted to look at different date ranges, this would always compare to the prior period. If you wanted to show data for a certain program or multiple programs, this will give you more insight there. If you wanted to then break down each of those programs, you know, you can break breakdown program to kind of see for each of these key indicators what is happening at a program level. And then finally you can actually monitor those trends over time. So you can kind of see how the current periods performing, how that's, and how that compares to prior periods. So this allows you to, you know, understand spikes or drops as well as just generally kind of see trends and changes to give you more insight into your program. And then finally, you know, one of the ways we use indicators is like, hey, this is where you need to focus. Then if you want to do additional data, additional analysis, you can use our member and our referral visits dashboard to really understand what's going on within your program at a very, at a very detailed level. So happy to answer any questions around sort of the program analytics dashboard, but just kind of wanted to keep it very high level at this point and introduce some of these concepts. So kind of getting started, wanted to share four tips to help you start analyzing referral programs. Um, so first one, always recommend to kind of work backwards. So we know the goal of any referral program is to get referrals, but referrals are the result of up funnel activity. And so when you think about referrals, in order to get referrals you need reach. In order to get reach, you need shares. In order to get shares, you need awareness. So sort of I like to start with referrals and then kind of work my way back to help prioritize where, where to focus. TIP. 2. You want to use share and reach indicators to predict program success. So we'll talk about this a little bit more. But share and reach are going to be your best ways to kind of determine does your, is your program actually going to result in successful referrals? Three, you want to use data. So you know, indicators are great. Look at the data, they're going to kind of tell you what you need to fix. But anytime you look at data, you don't want to just look at it by itself. You want to look at it with the context of what's going on within your business. Are you a seasonal business and therefore the data trend is expecting or did you recently run a promotional campaign and therefore that's understanding the spike. Maybe there's a holiday and people aren't necessarily as active. So definitely take into consideration your own context when you analyze data so that you don't necessarily misinterpret the data and can't kind of really understand why things are happening. And for, you know, don't overcorrect. So when you're looking at the indicator just like, hey, I'm ready to make a change. You know, don't just do it purely based off of the data, but understand like, hey, is this a normal fluctuation or is this an actual cause for concern? And so when you're looking at any data, you kind of want to track like hey, what had happened over the last seven days, but then also how did that compare to the prior period? Maybe you look at over how that does over time, maybe you're looking at like seasonal changes or year to year changes. So definitely don't look at data by itself. And then when you do make the changes, you want to make sure that you give those changes time. So you don't want to be like, oh great, the indicator told you like you need to make this improvement. So you know, go ahead and make that change, but then give that change time to actually see if it results in the expected change of the indicator versus just sort of constantly changing the program. So just a warning that changes take time. So you know, we're going to talk through kind of how to analyze these different journeys. So we're going to start with the referral journey and as I mentioned before, like this is us working backwards. So the first question you should ask is, are you getting enough referrals to meet your program goals? Is your program on track and great, you can kind of move to like this reach component and if not just an indicator, like hey, you probably need to do some additional analysis for up funnel activities. Second, are you reaching enough people so that they have the opportunity to convert? So we know that reach is the best predictor of referrals. Like if people aren't aware of the program or if you're not reaching them, they're not going to convert to referrals. So definitely Want to focus on reach as one of the primary indicators that we pay attention to when it comes to analyzing the member journey. Again, we're going to kind of work backwards from shares on up. So our members sharing your program. Shares are the second really important metric that we want to look at because shares are an indicator of reach and we know that reaches indicator of referrals and there's a lot that goes into sharing. And so you know, just, you don't just want to look up funnel, but really kind of focus on that share metric. And then if you say, hey, this needs to, I need to make some adjustments, then you kind of want to explore more of these aware based metrics. So when it gets to sort of analyzing the aware part, you want to say, are members visiting their member portal kind of estimate like overall engagement and then finally like, are you consistently adding new members and are they activating? We know that the best referral programs have a constant kind of stream of new members coming in and sharing. And so you just want to make sure that you have the processes and the workflows in place to constantly adding those new members based off of, you know, any of those sort of key moments within your natural lifecycle. So once we analyze these programs, you're gonna see four common problems. On the member side, you know, the main problem that we see is just general lack of awareness. And we know that, you know, promotion and lack of awareness is the number one reason programs fail. And so oftentimes this is like the main problem. But you know, you can use the indicators to better understand what's going on. So lack of awareness is basically people don't know about your program. The second problem that you see on the member side would be an uncompelling offer. So this is when people know about your program, but they aren't actually sharing because the offer is not compelling enough. On the referral side, you know, the problems that we see are like not clicking. So this would be, hey, members are sharing, but referrals don't actually like engage with that share message. They're not clicking to take any further action. And then the last one being low conversion, hey, referrals actually like click the share message, but they don't. So they click and engage with the share message, but then they don't actually convert and become a referral. So diving into each of these kind of problems in turn, a lack of awareness, you know, people don't know about the program or forgotten. You can tell this by looking at the indicator. So this is a no engagement would show us, hey, the member visits are low. Basically no one's engaging with the program or there's no new members. So that would be like the added, like the members added is low. So if you have a lack of awareness problem, the things that you can do are run promotion and engagement campaigns. You can add additional access points. So you know, we talked about this a little bit but like you want to make sure that your program is part of the, you know, the interactions and channels that you're already interacting with those members. So think about things like hey, can you put the program on your website? Do you send a newsletter in apps? Any of those different interactions is a great place to provide an access point to the referral program so that those members can share when they're ready. It also allows them to be reminded like oh right, they have this referral program and there's a lot of ways to do that in a non obtrusive way so it doesn't detract from whatever the main goal of that, of that access point is. Third, you can update program notifications. So ReferralRock offers a ton of different types of program email notifications to remind those members to share. Our monthly summary is probably the most, the most obvious of these and the best place to do so. Definitely make sure that email is set up and looks good. And then finally, you know, add automation to consistently invite and activate new members. So talked about this a little bit already. But you know, the best programs are constantly adding new members and activating those members. So look at ways to build on processes or workflows so that happens automatically. So for the uncompelling offer, so this would be when members are aware of the program but they're not actually sharing. Ways that you can tell this would be member visits are high, indicating hey there's, there's general engagement but shares are low or new members aren't engaging. Maybe you have a bunch of members added, so added as high, but the number that's actually activated is low. And then another thing that can sometimes happen is shares are low, member visits are low. Which would be an indication like hey, you need to do you have an awareness issue. But then you've also tried multiple awareness solutions. In that case you might actually also have a uncompelling offer. And so if you have an uncompelling offer, the ways to fix this are to improve messaging. This is where I always recommend start. So you know, look at your emails, look at your program landing page, look at your portal and make sure that messaging is really designed for the audience that you're speaking to. I won't go into it on this call, but here's a great support article, kind of talking through how to approach messaging and some best practices there. So definitely a good place to start and reference when you're trying to improve your messaging. You can also change the member and referral rewards. I like to do this after the messaging because it's harder to change. You know, you've already got some stuff set up but then also you know know members especially are kind of expecting certain rewards and so hey, if they're not sharing, great, you need to make those adjustments. But I always like to do this after the messaging to see if the messaging resolved the issue. So is it a messaging issue or is it more of a reward issue? And then if you are going to make reward changes, just a tip here is you might want to consider doing this as like a seasonal campaign or like a, like a time, a time based campaign. And that's just a nice way to kind of throw out a. Or not throw out but like have a different reward offer for a limited time period. See how that offer performs during that campaign, that seasonal campaign. And if it works, great, great, maybe that becomes the more standard offer. And if it doesn't, it's kind of easy to pull that back in a relatively low risk way. So if you are thinking about changing the rewards, definitely something to consider there on the referral side. So the first issue we might see is like they're not clicking. So this would be a members are sharing, but that sharing isn't resonating with the referrals. You can tell this because the share is high but the reach is low. And if you see this problem where the share is low but the reach is high, this is very uncommon. But if that happens then you've either implemented a non standard setup or you know, you have existing shared links that are driving repeat referral visits. So maybe you have an affiliate program where it's like a bunch of bloggers or content creators and they have an existing link out there that continues to like drive referrals but doesn't necessarily. They're not constantly like resharing it. So you know, when you look at that, if you see that, you know, just unpack kind of the data with the context of what's going on within your particular setup. But if you do have the problem of referrals not clicking, you know, again, first thing, start with the member share message. This is going to be the message that the members share to the Friends, you know, make sure that it includes the offer, speaks to the audience. Again, a lot of great tips here. So start there and then if that doesn't work, or in addition to that, you know, consider changing the referral reward. The referral reward is a lot easier to change than the member reward. And that's just because the interaction with the referral is often like a one off interaction versus the members. You know, they, they've joined the program, they kind of expect, have expectations of what that reward is that they're going to get. So if you are going to change the rewards, you know, it's easier to start with the referral again. If you need to change the member one, do so. But kind of that's the order of operations. I would go share message or messaging rewards, referral rewards, and then member rewards. And then the last problem that we see is going to be low conversion. So this is where referrals are clicking the share message, they're engaging. So they are reaching them, but you're reaching them so that you see like the business, they see the offer but they're not actually converting. And you can tell this because reach is high, but referrals are low. And another thing you can do here is if you, if you say, if you take the number of referrals over the reach, that'll give you like a rough kind of referral conversion. And you can compare that to maybe other landing pages that you have as a benchmark. But in general, just as a high level way of looking at this, if reaches high and if referrals are low, you likely have a low conversion problem. And to fix that, you know, again, you know, improve the referral page messaging, you know, start there. You can also look for ways to reduce complexity of the referral ask. So you know, depending on how your program is set up, you might want to think about ways to kind of making that initial ask a lot easier. We've seen programs with really complicated forms or programs where they're asking for like a purchase right off the bat, but it's not an impulse purchase, it's, it requires a bit more consideration. Maybe it's a higher value purchase or just generally takes longer to decide. And in those instances, you know, think about ways to reduce complexity of that initial ask so that people are more likely to convert right away and then you can, you know, kind of naturally nurture them or follow up with them as expected. So reduce the complexity of the referral ask is a great way to improve overall conversions and then finally think about that referral reward and how you might make adjustments there. So this is kind of bringing it all together. So we talked about the referral funnel. We talked about how there's two components. You got the member journey and the referral journey. And you have your four stages of aware, share, reach and referrals. We're going to use indicators to kind of help us tell what part of the funnel that we need to improve. And then when it comes to making those improvements, you know, this, this slide is trying to emphasize or illustrate where you can make those changes. So if you have an awareness problem, you know, think about running like campaigns, whether that's through our referral rock campaign or through your own email software, you know, adding access points. You can do that with our program link builder or embedding within your app itself notifications. You know, you update these within the program editor, the emails within the program editor, new invites. That would be our, you know, referral campaign automation or your own systems for sharing. You know, you're looking at messaging. So within the program editor, you got the member portal program landing pages, you got emails. You could also do rewards within the program editor itself, share messages. That's going to be the program editor. And anything on the reach referral end is going to be that referral page or the rewards within the program Editor.