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Unincentivised Referrals: You Are Already Acquiring Users Through Referrals

For most businesses, if you ask your new customers “where did you hear about us?” generally one of the most common answers you’ll hear is “word of mouth” or “a referral from a friend”. Even customers where you have a “clean” digital attribution and you can see that they clicked your Google search ad, even these customers will often tell you a friend referred them, particularly if your product is deliberative and has a long lead time. Chances are that yes, they clicked your ad, but they also spoke to their friend and/or had the product recommended to them beforehand.

Therein lies an opportunity. The key insight is that you want to make it as easy as possible for your users to talk about and advertise your product.

If you make it easier for users to refer each other to your product, then more users will get referred in. For this reason, I often recommend starting with setting up a simple, unincentivies refer a friend programme. Even if you cannot offer incentives to your users to refer others, they will still do it (assuming you have a good product, if you don’t, please work on that first).

If there is no refer a friend scheme set up, I’ll often recommend starting with an unincentivised programme. Just a few screens and clicks to make it easier for people to refer your product to a friend, something that they were likely to do anyway. This has the dual purposes of establishing a baseline of users who will come in via a refer a friend programme and helping you calculate the incremental value of incentives overall.