Best-in-class Referral Program Software

Customer referral programs offer many key benefits for marketers:

• Scalable, High Margin Growth: By transforming your existing customers into brand advocates, you effectively gain a zero-cost salesforce.  This reduces your reliance on costlier acquisition channels, which leads to higher margin growth.
• Acquisition of High Quality Customers:  Word-of-mouth marketing is how most businesses acquire their best customers.  Referred customers convert 5x faster, have a higher Average Order Value (AOV) and a higher Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV), as they tend to shop more, remain loyal and provide a higher profitability margin over time.
• Operationalized Word-of-Mouth Marketing:  Referral programs operationalize word-of-mouth, allowing you to measure it, optimize it and get more of it (i.e. scale it).  Furthermore, referral programs help you extend your brand's reach into networks that might be missed by traditional advertising.
• Reduced Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): One major advantage of referral programs is the potential to reduce CAC, because every customer acquired through referral is brought by an existing customer (versus a paid channel).  Instead of relying on paid channels, you can utilize your existing customers to spread the word about your brand and reduce overall CAC.
• Effective Return on Investment (ROI): Compared to paid channels, a referral marketing program yields significantly higher ROI, even after accounting for the costs of infrastructure and incentives.
• Increased Customer Retention: Referral programs reinforce the loyalty of existing customers. When customers share your brand, they're more likely to continue shopping with you, increasing retention rates.
• Data-Driven Marketing Insights: By tracking who makes referrals and who converts from them, referral programs generate valuable data that can be used to identify your most engaged customers and refine your marketing strategies for more targeted and effective campaigns.

In summary, a customer referral program is an efficient growth marketing strategy that drives customer acquisition, reduces CAC, increases retention, boosts profitability, and provides actionable customer insights.

Friendbuy offers a comprehensive platform to create, manage, and optimize referral programs. The platform allows you to set up referral campaigns, track their performance, and reward your customers for successful referrals. With easy-to-use sharing widgets and a variety of sharing options, Friendbuy makes it simple for customers to share referral codes or links via SMS, email, and other social channels. Friendbuy's platform automates the referral process and maximizes referral performance by: 

• Making it easy for customers to share referral offers
• Enabling referred friends to convert quickly 
• Making it easy to track and reward successful referrals

Friendbuy has a seamless integration with Shopify that lets you leverage the power of referral marketing with just one click. The integration offers a variety of features designed to maximize the effectiveness and integrity of your referral program:

• Stackable Account Credit: This feature allows your customers to accumulate account credit from multiple referrals, which they can apply to larger purchases. This is a substantial improvement over non-stackable, single-use coupon codes. Additionally, your customer experience reps have the ability to manually adjust account credit amounts as needed.
• Automatic Coupon Generation: This feature generates unique coupon codes for referred friends on the fly, eliminating the need for you to upload and replenish a code bank.
• Reward Validation: Our integration provides out-of-the-box fraud checks and business rules to ensure your referral program maintains a high quality.
• Referral Dashboards: Our ready-to-use referral dashboards enable advocates to track their referrals, view the status of their invitations, and send reminder emails to referred friends.
• Checkout Redemption Widget: This feature allows customers to easily redeem their accumulated account credit or loyalty points directly from the Shopify checkout page.
• Handling Returns and Cancellations: Friendbuy automatically accounts for product returns and order cancellations before issuing referral rewards, ensuring that only valid transactions are rewarded.

The integration provides all the tools you need to run a successful referral program, backed by the functionality and convenience of Shopify. For more detailed information, visit our Friendbuy & Shopify Plus Integration page.

Yes!  Friendbuy lets you customize every touchpoint of your referral program to match your brand. You can easily customize referral program widgets, create branded landing pages, customize email templates, and even use your own custom domain for the referral links. This helps strengthen brand recognition, ensures a consistent brand experience for your customers and their referred friends, and maximizes referral program performance.

With Friendbuy you can offer a variety of rewards to incentivize customers for successful referrals. Some common reward types include discounts, store credits, gift cards, cash rewards, or even free products or services. You can also choose to offer different incentives for the referrer (the advocate) and their referred friends to maximize participation in the referral program.

The Friendbuy team has extensive experience powering referral programs for different types of businesses, and we are ready to help guide you in selecting the most suitable incentives for your specific industry, ensuring your referral program resonates with your target audience.

Friendbuy provides a comprehensive analytics dashboard with real-time insights into key metrics, such as the number of referrals, conversion rates, revenue generated, and the ROI of your referral program. The dashboard also allows you to track how people share (which sharing options they use) and how referred friends are converting. In addition to new customers acquired, you can track the numbers of new email addresses and phone numbers acquired through the referral program.

With Friendbuy's extensive experience and industry benchmarks across different categories and services, we know what your performance should look like, whether it’s for Fashion & Apparel, Home Goods, Health & Beauty, Fitness, Food & Beverage, Insurance & Regulated Industries, mobile apps, subscription services or B2B products.  Our Customer Success team can quickly spot areas of underperformance and help you maximize results by making informed decisions about optimizing and scaling your referral program.

Friendbuy has robust fraud prevention features to ensure the integrity of your referral marketing program. The platform employs advanced algorithms and security measures to detect and prevent fraudulent activities such as self-referrals, duplicate accounts, and fake referrals.  Validation protocols are in place to ensure referred customers are new customers, and Friendbuy also allows you to set custom fraud prevention rules, such as limiting the number of referrals per customer or implementing a waiting period before rewards are issued.  Effective fraud prevention measures give you the confidence to offer compelling incentives, which are necessary to achieve strong referral program performance.  Drawing from our experience with a diverse range of businesses, Friendbuy offers the flexibility and customizability to effectively address fraud prevention regardless of your industry or business type.

Friendbuy’s referral marketing platform is uniquely built to help you implement the following referral marketing program best practices for maximum success:

• Compelling referral incentives for both advocates and their referred friends.
• Multiple sharing options for your users.
• Robust fraud prevention to ensure program integrity.
• User-friendly templates for widgets, landing pages and emails that facilitate brand consistency, easy reward redemption and clear, concise copy.
• A prominent call-to-action on your site or mobile app for quick and easy sharing access.
• A dedicated landing page to drive referral program awareness.
• Post-purchase touchpoints - such as an overlay and email communications - to drive referral program awareness when customers are maximally engaged.
• A clear and straightforward buyer experience for referred friends to optimize referral conversions.
• Automated communications via email and SMS.
• Integrations with your email and SMS platforms to send targeted referral program communications and to add newly acquired email addresses and phone numbers to your contact lists.
• Reminder emails for unredeemed rewards.
• Running periodic referral campaigns such as offer boosts and referral contests to invigorate participation.
• A/B Testing and optimization of referral messaging (including email subject lines).

For more in-depth information uniquely facilitated by Friendbuy’s referral marketing software, check out our blog post on referral program best practices.

Friendbuy has a rich history of empowering referral marketing programs for globally recognized subscription brands including Walmart Plus, Athletic Greens, Nuuly, Mint Mobile, Smile Direct Club, Axios, and Nestle. We understand the unique dynamics of subscription-based businesses and have designed our platform to support and boost subscriber growth.

Friendbuy integrates directly with popular subscription platforms like Recharge and provides the APIs necessary for a seamless integration with your custom platform. We facilitate tracking of free trial sign-ups and their conversion to paid plans, making it simple to incentivize and reward advocates for referring friends who become paying subscribers.

We offer flexibility in reward structures to suit your business model and customer preferences. Advocates and friends can be rewarded with a free month off of their subscription, a credit, points or even gift cards for successful referrals. Our experienced team is equipped to advise on designing a reward structure that will effectively meet the unique needs of your business.

Friendbuy provides a robust, flexible, and intuitive platform to help subscription businesses maximize their growth through effective referral programs.

Absolutely!  Friendbuy's platform is designed to meet the unique requirements of B2B referral programs.  Capabilities to effectively manage a B2B referral program include:

• Automated reward fulfillment for gift cards and cash rewards, which are popular choices for motivating B2B customers to refer.
• Integrations with CRMs, such as Salesforce.com, to streamline referral event tracking and adding lead contact information.
• Customized referral tracking for B2B buyer journeys, including leads, free trials, multiple paid plans or sales rep assisted closed-won accounts.
• A tiered reward system that offers different reward amounts based on the milestones reached by referred friends (e.g., the selected paid plan).
• A dedicated conversion funnel for referred prospects, featuring tailored incentives for the buyer and personalized messaging.

By leveraging Friendbuy's flexible and customizable platform, you can create a robust B2B referral program that promotes word of mouth for your product, drives new leads, and generates growth for your business.

Yes, Friendbuy offers a comprehensive referral program API to meet your specific needs.  Here are some common use cases:

• Generate Referral Links and Codes: Use our API to generate referral links and codes that can be placed anywhere, such as in your mobile app or in email communications.
• Order Validation: Incorporate product returns and order cancellations into your referral validation process prior to sending rewards to ensure that only valid referrals are rewarded.
• Reward Fulfillment: Utilize Friendbuy’s webhooks to deposit store credit directly into your ecommerce platform for seamless reward fulfillment.
• Purchase Data: Send purchase data, whether online or in-store, to Friendbuy to track referral purchases.
• Custom Events: Send custom events, such as mobile app downloads or completing an application, to Friendbuy to incorporate into your referral program design.

For more information on how to use our API, you can refer to our API documentation. With Friendbuy's API, you gain the flexibility to customize your referral program to best fit your business needs.

Friendbuy is committed to helping you manage your referral program in full compliance with data privacy, security, and regulations such as GDPR, TCPA, CAN-SPAM, and CCPA. Here's how we ensure compliance with each:

GDPR & CCPA: We understand the importance of data privacy under these regulations. Our platform incorporates robust security measures including encryption and secure data storage to protect personal information. We offer multiple methods to support data deletion and access requests, managing customer consent effectively. Each data item in Friendbuy has a predetermined lifespan, and is automatically deleted from our system after that period, ensuring compliance with data retention policies.

CAN-SPAM: Friendbuy ensures your marketing communications respect user consent. We provide email opt-in checkboxes on all referral widgets to ensure customers willingly accept to receive marketing messages from your brand. Moreover, we include unsubscribe links in all marketing emails, and we always confirm customers are not on the opt-out list before sending emails.

TCPA: For compliance with TCPA, Friendbuy’s referral marketing software provides SMS opt-in checkboxes on all relevant widgets. This ensures that customers provide express consent before we collect their phone numbers on your behalf.

By providing these comprehensive features, Friendbuy enables you to run your referral program in a secure and privacy-compliant manner, respecting all necessary regulatory obligations.