How to Write a Referral Email Your Customers Will Love

When you run a referral program, email is one of the most effective distribution channels to support it. Especially when you want to let your customers know about the rewards they can earn.

According to Campaign Monitor, email marketing has an ROI of $42 for every $1 spent, making it a highly valuable channel for promoting referral offers.

Creating an effective referral email requires careful consideration of several key elements. While it may seem complex at first, once you understand and implement these elements, crafting a standout referral email becomes much simpler. Indeed emphasizes the importance of a clear subject line, highlighting your relationship with the referrer, and providing specific examples to demonstrate the candidate's qualifications.

Here we break down the essential elements of an effective referral email and how they work together to create a compelling message that increases the likelihood of your referral being considered:

Elements of a Successful Referral Email

While there isn’t a specific formula that guarantees immediate success for referral emails, there are some elements that are key to increasing that probability. Here we gathered some of them: 

1. A Simple, Clear and Attention-Grabbing Subject Line

The subject line is the first impression your referral email makes, so it needs to be compelling enough to get opened. As Zippia advises, "Your subject line should catch the reader's attention. This will be the first thing that they see and is a crucial part of the email." Aim for a subject line that is clear, concise, and includes the referrer's name to immediately establish credibility.

While there are many recommendations for crafting subject lines that are short, interesting, clever or catchy, the most important qualities are simplicity and clarity. As the blog post states, "Less is more and the clearer, the better."

As Indeed states, "Include your referrer's name and the purpose of the email in the subject line to catch the reader's attention." This straightforward approach helps the email get noticed without resorting to gimmicks.

Honestly, it’s all it takes to craft a good subject line.

You don't have to make it too complicated. Less is more and the clearer, the better. Sometimes, trying to impress recipients with gimmicky subject lines can lead to your email being marked as spam. As Zippia warns, "Keep your subject line short but with enough information that your reader will know what to expect when they open it." Clarity should be the top priority to ensure your referral email gets delivered and opened.

Spam Words and Phrases to Avoid

It's crucial to avoid words and phrases commonly associated with spam emails, as these can trigger spam filters and prevent your referral email from reaching the recipient's inbox. As Routine advises, "Keep your language professional and maintain a professional tone without sounding too robotic or trying too hard to sell." Here are some examples of spam trigger words to avoid in your subject lines:

• Click here
• You are a winner!
• Claim your prize
• Exclusive deal
• Offer expires
• Lottery
• This isn't spam
• Order now
• Limited time

Examples of subject lines

Instead, you can use these subject lines as a reference:

• Hey John! Your friend Sarah gave you $10
• 15% off in your first month 
• You have 25$ for your next purchase
• Give your friends $5 and earn $10

Many email service providers allow you to A/B test your subject lines so you can track which one performs better.

2. Clear and Compelling Incentives or Rewards

Clearly explaining the rewards or incentives you're offering is crucial for convincing recipients to take action on your referral. This is your chance to convince your future customers to sign up for your product or to redeem an offer.

It's also crucial to clearly outline any terms, conditions or qualifications for the incentive upfront. As Zippia advises, "Be straightforward. You want to state the reason for the email in the first sentence of the email. You don't want to bury the reason and make the reader wonder why they are reading the email." Transparency builds trust with recipients.

Don't leave any room for guessing - be as detailed as possible in explaining your reward structure. Clearly specify whether it's a one-sided or two-sided referral program, if there are any gamification elements, and how the rewards are earned.

Providing comprehensive details about the referral program structure and rewards in the email will help clear up any doubts or questions recipients may have upfront.

If you're unsure about structuring your referral program rewards or need additional inspiration, studying real-world examples can provide valuable insights. As the blog post suggests, you can refer to resources like 41 Referral Program Examples for ideas.

3. Personalization and Relationship Context

Personalization is crucial for effective marketing, but it's especially important for referral emails to provide a great experience and establish credibility.

Personalizing your referral email by speaking in a friendly, relatable way that resonates with the recipient is key to getting better engagement. This requires knowing your audience well and maintaining an ongoing connection. Routine reinforces this, advising "Keep your friend in the loop through the entire process. Also, do not forget to intimate him and more importantly take his consent before making the referral." Building this personal rapport makes the referral more credible and impactful.

Personalization can take many forms in a referral email, but one of the most basic yet effective approaches is addressing the recipient by name. "This sounds simple but delivers great results. The user feels you're addressing them more directly." Zippia concurs, advising to "Format [the email] like a business letter. This letter should be professional and formatted like a business letter. Keeping it professional will help leave a great first impression." Simple touches like using names and a formal structure can go a long way.

Of course, it doesn’t stop there. You can use birth dates, job titles, their company name, product recommendations based on past purchases, etc.

Personalization has its foundation on data. And all of it starts with your email subscribe forms, the more custom fields you add, the more relevant information about your customers you’ll have to use later.

Personalization can significantly boost email performance metrics like open and click-through rates. Here are some email personalization stats to keep in mind:

Personalization from your end as a company is important too, that’s why Growsurf supports customization for your referral email by allowing you to set up a custom email address.

It’ll help you build trust with your customers over time since they’ll see your name and email address in their inbox. This will help you boost your open rates because they can identify you as a reliable source.

4. Good Design

A great benefit of emails is that you have certain freedom when it comes to design. It’s one of the best ways to express your company’s DNA and communicate your ideas better.

Your logo, color palettes, typography, graphics and everything else that your branding involves is another communication channel where you can stand out. It’s also a way to build recognition and loyalty from your customers.

Templates are the best resource to make this process easier whenever you have to send out an email.

But good design in emails doesn’t have to be all vibrant colors and fonts. It can also translate into placing all of these elements we mentioned before in the right place.

5. Strong CTA

You got the recipient’s attention with your subject line, engaged them with your visuals and copy. Now it’s time to encourage them to take action. This is a step you should never overlook.

But where do you place the CTA? Good question! It can be a button itself if that’s the case. For example, this could be:

• Sign up now
• Try for free
• Start your free trial
• Join now
• Get it now
• Redeem your offer

Make sure that your CTAs are supported by the benefits your customers will get. You may ask, what do you mean by this? 

For example, let's say you're an email automation company. You have a use case of an onboarding email series and you use "Start your free trial" as a CTA. You want to support that with one of the benefits customers get from using your service.

So it could be something like "Start your free trial and onboard new clients with one click" 

6. Social media sharing buttons

Email can be good for your customers, but maybe they have some friends who might be interested in your offer and they’re more likely to find out about it through other platforms.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Instagram, you name it. By adding these social media sharing buttons in your email you make it easy for your customers to share the content with their friends.

On the same note if you have mobile apps, then you can add a button that links to the AppStore or Google Play too.

This will help you reach more people and give you another alternative to track how many of your customers are more engaged on those platforms.

7. Content Hierarchy

Even though referral emails shouldn’t be too long, the reality is that most people will still scan through the content. This applies to both visual and written content.

The goal is to prioritize and organize the content in a way that’s friendly for the user to process it. There are many techniques to optimize content hierarchy, mostly for visual content like:

• Proximity
• Scale
• Alignment
• Color
• Contrast

Yet, there are two common patterns in design that you should keep in mind for your referral emails:

• F Pattern 

This is the most common pattern, especially for written content. Viewers scan the content from the top left to the top right and then down on the left side, looking for headlines and subheaders.

• Z Pattern

The Z pattern is most used when there isn’t too much written content. Instead, with this pattern you can highlight other aspects like CTAs.

As its name indicates, users scan the content forming a Z. From the top left to the top right and then diagonally down to finish with another horizontal movement from left to right.

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The Importance of Automation in Referral Emails

There's a bunch of people involved in referral programs, that's why to be able to reach them through email, you need automation. Not only because it makes the whole process easier and faster, but also because it’s the way you can rely on multiple tools to get the most out of your referral emails.

For now, let’s talk about two relevant aspects of email automation that are involved in the personalization process:

1. Segmentation

The first one is segmentation, which allows you to send your referral emails to all those customers who might be the best fit for the offers and promotions you have.

• Demographics
• Job title
• Age
• Content they consume
• Products they use 
• Interests

You can use integrations with other apps to simplify this process. For example, you can integrate your email with your CRM or e-commerce platform to import the data and segment your customers.

2. Behavior-triggered emails

This goes hand in hand with personalization. Because having access to a behavior-triggered feature allows you to send an email when a customer completes a certain action. It gives you the chance to track where your customers are at in their journey.

This means that you can send an email to let your customers know about your referral program after they complete an action. Ideally, you’ll find out what those actions are and when they’re most likely to share it or participate in it.  

Segmentation and behavior-triggered emails play an important role in the referral email process.

Simply because both of them allow you to know a little bit more about your customers’ preferences at the same time you improve the email experience for them.

Types of Referral Emails

When we talk about referral emails, chances are we face one or even both of these two situations:

1. An email to encourage your customers to send invitations to their friends

Here we can see an example of an email sent by Setapp, a subscription service for iOS and macOS apps.

The email encourages customers to get their invitation link. Then they can share it with their friends and get an extra month for each who joins.

Image Source: Really Good Emails

What we can highlight in this example:

2. The reward/invitation email itself

In this case, we can see the example of Allset, which is a marketplace for local dinners and restaurants.

Image Source: Really Good Emails

What we can highlight in this example:

• Only 2 paragraphs and the message is clear
• Good branding: logo, typography and colors.
• Social media sharing buttons to share the email content, as well as to connect with the company.
• Links to their website and mobile apps.
• A link at the bottom to address the questions the user might have

Referral Email Template

Considering the examples above and everything that we discussed in the post, here’s a basic referral email template you can use and modify according to your referral program and your customers’ needs.

Subject line: 

A gift from your friend (name)

Email copy:

"Hey (name)! 

Your friend (name) loved using (your product) and thought about you. That's why he wanted to share his referral code with you.

By using (name)'s code you can have free full access for 1 month to our product.

Here it is: REFERRALCODE2021

Sign up for free now!"

A Quick Summary

Don’t underestimate the power of good emails and use them to the advantage of your customer referral program instead.

Adding these elements to your referral emails will give you better results. You don't have to include them all if you've never done it before. Instead, you can play around and start by integrating them little by little.

Once you know what works and what doesn't, you'll have your customized formula for referral email success.

If you want to learn more about the influence of emails, you can take a look at How Morning Brew's Referral Program Grew to 2.5 Million Subs.

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.

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