Copy Uber, Dropbox & Airbnb: Refer Your friends via receipts

Guest Author

From Day 1, we set out to leverage (what we believed to be) the missed marketing of email receipts.

We knew that all of the big Ecommerce guys and girls were already including a form of marketing in their receipts. We were even able to find some examples of this. But we weren’t privy to the data and any kind of information on how successful those marketing tactics were.

In that regard, we’ve had to do our learning based on our own data set. Initially this was quite slow, but we’re now sending in excess of 8000 receipts a day, which means our learning has accelerated significantly.

We have now used that learning to build a new kind of upsell that we believe will increase engagement and conversions significantly.

Say hello to our Referral upsell

I mentioned that we didn’t necessarily have our own data about this before, but what we knew was that companies like Uber, Dropbox & Airbnb have successfully used their referral programs to accelerate the growth of their businesses:

And in Uber’s example, they were using their receipts as a primary way to remind their users about the referral program.

We had also learnt two things about our receipts which suggested this might be a hit for CM Commerce users:

  • Our receipts had a average open rate of more than 70%; and
  • Recipients spent an average of 15 seconds actually reading the receipt.

This is proof that the receipts had a captive audience and that a lucrative referral could be wildly successful.

So we set out to run a manual test (alongside one of our favorite users, Nic Harry, who also helped conceptualize the test), where we just used a standard Discount-based upsell (which we’ve always had available), but changed the copy to ask Nic’s customers to share the coupon code with their friends. That interaction was exclusively manual and we couldn’t programmatically control or enhance it.

But it worked. Nic immediately saw an uptick in engagement and conversions.

With all of these favorable signals, it was a no-brainer to invest energy into building a truly powerful referral upsell.

About the Referral upsell

The core of the referral upsell works on the dynamic that your customer is able to share a discount coupon (you define the value) with any of their friends and if their friends act upon that, the referring customer will also get a discount (you define this value too) as a reward.

The major benefit of this is that such an interaction increases your revenue on two fronts:

  • You are using word-of-mouth (from happy customers) to organically help you acquire new customers. Word-of-mouth marketing is significantly cheaper than other paid marketing channels.
  • You are rewarding your existing customers and at the same time incentivizing them to spend more money in your store (which increases their Customer Lifetime Value).

To facilitate this, we also wanted to make it as easy as possible for your customers to share their unique referral links via e-mail, Facebook and Twitter. Whilst they could manually share the URL anywhere, we wanted to focus on getting the experience as smooth as possible for those three channels.

As always, we also take care of everything in the background for you: we create the coupon codes, we make sure that they’re only issued when a referral was successful and we keep track of the success you have in this regard.

The best news: this is available immediately to all of our Shopify & WooCommerce users (with support for Magento & EDD to follow).

Just go to your Receipt template and add the Referral component to your receipt.

Happy referring!