How to Automate Your Referral Marketing Program (Step-by-Step)

Referral marketing programs are an excellent way for companies to increase customer acquisition and revenue. They leverage the power of word-of-mouth marketing by incentivizing existing customers to refer new prospects, creating a scalable and cost-effective acquisition channel.

But what happens when you scale your referral program? If you're not careful, the process of running a referral program can become time-consuming and expensive. As your program grows and more customers participate, manually tracking referrals, verifying eligibility, and fulfilling rewards becomes increasingly difficult without the right tools and processes in place.

That's why it's crucial to build a scalable, automated referral program that scales with your business needs. By automating the entire process with referral software, you'll save yourself significant time and resources that would otherwise be spent on manual tasks. This allows your team to focus on higher-impact activities like strategy, optimization, and customer engagement.

By automating the entire process, you'll save yourself time and be able to focus on other aspects of your business.

This guide will help you learn how to automate your referral marketing program and make it easier to manage at scale. We'll cover key automation opportunities, software considerations, and real-world examples to help you build an efficient, high-performing referral engine.

Key Benefits of Automating Your Customer Referral Program

No more tiresome manual work. Managing a referral program with a few hundred participants may be feasible to do manually – if you have a dedicated team. But what happens when your program grows to thousands or tens of thousands of participants? This will involve an overwhelming amount of manual work, from writing individual emails and tracking referrals to verifying eligibility and issuing rewards. Automation eliminates these tedious tasks so you can scale effortlessly without needing to hire an army of staff.

Saves your team valuable time. Referral management software automates many processes to make it easy for your team to set up campaigns efficiently. Automation handles routine tasks like sending campaign emails, generating unique referral links, notifying winners of rewards, and sending periodic reminders to drive engagement. This frees up your marketing team to focus on higher-level strategy rather than tedious execution.

Boost business revenue. Automation is built into referral platforms like GrowSurf. The automation tools streamline the entire funnel - from email link tracking and referral attribution to reward eligibility checks and fulfillment. By removing friction and ensuring a seamless experience, automation helps maximize referral conversions and ROI. You'll have more time to focus on strategic initiatives like offer optimization, creative testing, and scaling top referral sources.

Reduced costs. With automation, you don't need a big team to manage your referral program. You only need a lean team of marketers and customer success staff to oversee the strategy, creative, and engagement - while the software handles execution. Tools like GrowSurf and email marketing platforms do the heavy lifting of sending campaigns, tracking attribution, and processing rewards. This allows you to run an effective referral channel without the overhead of additional sales, operations, or engineering hires. Even better, most referral software is user-friendly enough for marketers to manage without deep technical skills.

Automating Your Referral Program

The good news is that there are plenty of tools you can use to automate the entire referral program from start to finish. At the core is a dedicated referral marketing platform like Growsurf, which handles program enrollment, referral tracking, reward management, and reporting. These tools integrate with your existing tech stack, connecting to CRMs like Hubspot, email marketing platforms like MailChimp, payment processors like Stripe, and more. This creates a seamless, automated flow across all touchpoints from customer acquisition to reward fulfillment.

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Automated Program Enrollment & Lead Capture

When someone visits your site (directly or via referral link), the referral software can automatically capture new visitors' emails and enroll them in your campaign as participants. If they arrived through a referral link, the system will associate them with the referring customer to properly track and attribute that referral. This allows you to effortlessly grow your program's reach through viral sharing while ensuring accurate data for analytics and reward eligibility.

Many referral platforms offer features like automagic form detection that work seamlessly with existing website forms. For example, GrowSurf can automatically enroll new visitors who complete any form on your site, associating them with the referring customer if applicable. This ensures comprehensive tracking without disrupting the user experience or requiring additional integration work.

You can define what constitutes a "successful" referral based on your business goals. For example, you may only want to reward referrals that result in a paid conversion, like subscribing to your product or service. The referral software allows you to set custom conversion events, so a sign-up alone may not trigger a reward payout until the referred visitor takes your defined success action. This flexibility ensures your program drives the right behaviors.

All participants are automatically added to your referral dashboard with key details like enrollment source, referral attribution, conversion status, and more. This centralized view allows you to easily monitor program performance, identify top referrers to engage further, and access the data needed for payout calculations. The referral tracking happens seamlessly in the background as customers share and convert through your automated funnel.

Automated Email Campaigns for New Referrals

Referral software allows you to configure automated email campaigns that trigger based on specific referral events within your program. For example, you can set up a welcome series that sends to newly referred participants as soon as they're enrolled.

For example, let's say an existing customer refers a friend to your referral program. The referral software can automatically trigger an email flow to that newly referred friend - a fully customizable journey informing them about the program, highlighting the incentive, and encouraging them to complete your conversion event. These automated emails get new referrals into the funnel quickly while delivering a seamless brand experience.

Additionally, you can set up automated email campaigns for participants who enrolled directly on your website or were manually imported, rather than coming through a referral. These could include promotional emails highlighting the benefits of referring friends, re-engagement campaigns for inactive members, and more - ensuring no potential referral source goes untapped.

Promoting the Program

The best thing you can do to ensure your program gets the popularity it deserves is to tell your customers about it.

Luckily, there are many tools you can use to automate the entire promotion process in a matter of a few hours – MailChimp and GetResponse are only some of them.

For example, you can choose to promote your referral program via newsletters you'll send out on a weekly, monthly, or bi-monthly basis, depending on your preferences.

Additionally, you can automatically promote your program in your email signature. Adding a link to your referral program into your email signature will make it very visible and easy for customers to get all the details about the program. On the plus side, it's incredibly easy to do – simply set it and forget it. Even better, it's subtle and not as obvious as other tactics.

You can even automate to promote your program after a customer performs a certain action, such as making a purchase.

The best thing is that most email marketing tools come with pre-made email templates that you can customize to fit your brand voice and look.

What's more, you can also use social media to promote your program. By using a tool like Buffer, you can automate social media promotion to happen on a daily, weekly, bi-weekly basis, depending on your preferences.

Even better, you can promote your program in user accounts.

Think about it: your customers may be spending a great deal of their time here. They'll see your referral program every time they log into their account.

Managing Rewards

When creating a customer referral program, you get to choose the type of rewards you want to give out to your customers – one-sided, two-sided, milestone rewards, etc.

For example, you can set up for both the referrer and their friends to get rewarded when a referral happens. This will apply to every person who refers your brand and the friend who takes action through that link.

What's more, you can choose how many referrals a person needs to unlock their reward and the expiration period of the referral link. For instance, if the referred person doesn't perform the desired action within the given time period, they will be tagged with an "action expired" label on your dashboard.

Even if you have a custom reward that's very specific to your business, tools like GrowSurf let you automate it through integration with Zapier and Webhooks.

Zapier is a code-free way of connecting to 2,000+ apps. For example, you can connect to a third-party service to automatically ship out branded merchandise when a person unlocks a reward.

Webhooks can come in handy when your reward is something very specific to your business. Webhooks are automated messages sent from apps when something happens. Let's take Dropbox, for example. When a successful referral event happens, the dedicated server will receive a webhook payload that they would then use to determine who the referrer was to apply cloud credits to their account.

Additionally, some referral systems let you:

• Manually approve rewards 
• Automatically approve all rewards but manually mark them as fulfilled
• Automatically approve and mark as fulfilled 

Let's say you choose to manually approve rewards. In this case, an email will be sent to you every time you need to approve a reward in order to get unlocked for the winner. But if you want to avoid the manual work, you can always choose to automatically approve and mark as fulfilled. In this case, every process will be automated and you won't receive any notifications.

Fraud Prevention 

Not all of your customers will be as sweet as a rose. Some of them might try to engage in fraudulent activities, such as:

Most referral marketing software come with an anti-fraud system that can be automated to detect risky behavior by suspicious participants. These participants will be visually displayed on your dashboard.

Reminding People to Promote

Let's imagine the following scenario:

A customer signed up to your referral program. However, right before they got the chance to send their unique referral link to a friend, something distracted their attention.

This is normal and can happen to many people. That's why you have to make sure to remind your customers to promote your program.

For example, if there are some customers that haven't been active for a while, send them a reminder email. This process can be entirely automated with a CRM system.

Here are some other actions you can take to remind people of your program:

• Schedule reminder emails to people who have been inactive for a certain period of time
• Send reminders to all customers every quarter
• Send reminders to everyone who clicked on your referral program but did not complete an action

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Measuring Referral Program Performance

As customer retention software, referral marketing platforms also provide a dashboard of each participant’s activities: when they signed up, how they shared, who they referred, and more. Your team can quickly identify top performers and those who may be leaving your program soon.

The dashboard is your centralized view of seeing how well your referral program is doing. For example, you can:

• See the total impressions, participants, and referrals based on a specific timeframe
• Understand which social channels your participants are sharing on the most
• Import your existing participants' list or download your participants' list 
• See granular details of your participants and their activity 
• Manage rewards

The best thing is that you don't have to do anything from your end. The platform will keep track of your key metrics automatically and serve you the data to help you improve the effectiveness of your program.

Recommended Automation Tools

Let's take a look at several automation tools that you can use to automate your referral marketing program from start to finish. This is only a list of some of the tools we recommend. There are hundreds of others that may benefit your business but didn't make it to the list:

Final Word

And there you have it!

Several actionable ways you can use referral marketing automation tools to save time and grow your presence.

And everything starts by having a powerful referral marketing platform in place. Most referral marketing platforms will integrate with all the tools you need in order to automate your program from start to finish.

To sum up:

• By automating your referral marketing program, you'll save yourself time and be able to focus on other aspects of your business.
• Some of the perks of automating the process include reduced manual work overload, an increase in business revenue, and reduced costs.
• There are plenty of tools you can use to automate the entire referral program from start to finish. These tools include a referral marketing software like Growsurf, a CRM like Hubspot, and an email marketing platform like MailChimp.
• There are several processes that should be automated, including: increasing the number of sign-ups, emailing new participants, promoting the program, managing rewards, fraud prevention, reminder emails, and measuring the effectiveness of the customer referral program.

Build your customer referral program without the dev time

Sign up for a free trial of GrowSurf to lower your customer acquisition costs, increase customer loyalty, and save gobs of time.

Try It Free