Project Management Approach to Launching a Good Referral Program Over the last 12 months I’ve launched 30+ referral programs, mostly for Y Combinator backed startups. What I learned is that 9/10 founders are launching their referral programs for the first time and unfortunately don’t have a great framework to work with The internet is littered

Part 0: What you should be measuring and what you should be fixing I like to divide up the referral program into 4 distinct measurable conversion points so that we can better optimize each step separately. Referral programs are complex — there are multiple different levers we can pull to optimize — let’s focus on

Part 1: Promoting your referral program Low View Count← Improve Visibility Top of the funnel we have visibility of your referral programs, i.e. out of all of your active users, how many have seen your referral program. This is measured by the percentage of your users that generates unique views of your referral program page.

Part 2: Increasing participation of your referral program if you’re getting lots of visibility on your program, but not a lot of participation, here is what you can do: Adding urgency to share (tricky to accomplish, amazing results) Improve your messaging (easy to do, decent results) Make it easier to generate a share (easy to

Part 3: Deliverability of your channels Emails opens are low ← fix SPAM If you’re doing well in (1) and (2), but you have a super low number of email opens (hint: you should DEFINITELY be measuring email opens and link clicks), there is a really good chance you’re going into SPAM. This is why

Part 4: Conversion rates of your referral offers If you’re doing well in (1) (2) and (3), but no one is clicking your link/visiting your website using the referral links => work on your messaging and your offer First, always mention who invited them and why. Experiment with a colorful promotional email vs. a personalized