How to Promote Referral: in an Email

Promoting referral in Emails is a great way to boost results. It puts your scheme in front of customers who may not have yet seen it, and reminds those who have to share it with friends. 

To promote your scheme in Emails, you need to create a landing page and link.

Creating a landing page

You can create your own landing page on your site (e.g. https://www.yoursite.com/refer-a-friend). This is where customers will be sent if they click the link in your Email telling them about referral. 

Linking from Emails

By default, customers who reach your referral landing page will be asked to enter their name and Email address before they can share. If you’d like to remove this step (and potential deterrent), you can do so by passing additional data in parameters. 

Four parameters are required:

• firstname - the customer's first name
• surname - the customer's surname
• Email - the customer's Email address
• situation - a parameter that indicates where the customer saw the link. Structure the situation parameter using three elements based on the type of promotion you’re running: channel, type, date (e.g. Email-newsletter-jan23). Providing this parameter will let you analyse the impact of this Email (or any other promo) on driving additional referral traffic.

Add these parameters to the landing page link, like this:

https://www.yoursite.com/refer-a-friend?firstname=FIRSTNAME&surname=SURNAME&email=EMAIL&situation=SITUATION

Replace the capitalised parts with the correct values for the customer.

For example:

https://www.yoursite.com/refer-a-friend?firstname=Barnabas&surname=Fortescue&email=barney@mention-me.com&situation=email-solus-jan23

Testing offers while promoting in Emails

Customers who follow your Email link will be randomly assigned to an offer in the latest experiment. If preferred, you can send them to a specific offer in an experiment (although this will bias experiment results).

To do this add ?variation=0 (or 1, 2, 3 etc. to specify the offer to be shown) to the end of your landing page URL.

For example:

https://www.yoursite.com/refer-a-friend?variation=0&situation=email-solus-jan23

Types of Emails to consider

• Dedicated referral Solus Emails. We recommend sending these at least once every 2-3 months.
• Inclusion in a newsletter or regular marketing Email.
• "Always-on" inclusion in all of your marketing Emails (e.g. as a link, icon, or button in the header or footer of your Email).
• Referral as a dedicated Email in your Email journey (e.g. new customer/postpurchase Email journey, welcome journey etc.)