The Stormy Challenges of an In-House Referral Program

Developing software in-house is always a risky business. This is as true for referral programs as it is for other types of software systems. Marketing lead-gen teams must fight through stormy weather when having to design requirements from scratch while simultaneously navigating the turbulent waters of IT concerns and project priorities.

At Impartner, previously Amplifinity, some of our most successful referral programs are for customers that had endured the storm of their home-grown systems before turning to us. These are both B2B and B2C brands that have previously been unable to scale their programs sufficiently to meet their referral goals.

With their in-house programs, these brands had high operational costs and frustrated their advocates with poor communication. While these programs achieved some level of referral success, they did not achieve the level of solid lead generation and closed sales that were anticipated.

This post will focus on the three main challenges of in-house programs: scale, advocate experience, and operational costs. Implicit in the text is the understanding that a solid SaaS referral platform addresses the challenges with the right mix of enterprise hardening and rich feature sets. Look for future posts with an emphasis on the best referral practices and program features that make for the most successful referral experience.

Scale

To scale is the ability to support millions of referral events without depending on IT to keep the software running, or requiring manual intervention to complete any of the referral processes, and with sufficient tooling to support program changes without involving IT.

We’ve seen in-house referral systems that successfully empower advocates to make referrals, but then require manual intervention to complete the referral process. They don’t effectively close the referral loop so advocates get rewarded in a timely manner, they may calculate rewards within a spreadsheet, or they may require manual steps to fulfill the rewards. These manual steps are manageable at the outset of the program, but when referral volume climbs to hundreds or thousands of successful referrals per month, manual processes cannot keep up. Operational costs go up and advocate experience goes down.

Advocate Experience

The number one factor driving successful referral programs is a fully-engaged advocate base. Once a customer, employee, or partner accepts your invite to become an advocate, your referral program has to do everything in its power to deliver a positive advocate experience.  

Happy advocates make more referrals. Unhappy advocates abandon the program. This happens when the referral loop doesn’t close, either because of inadequate system design or because of dependence upon a manual process.

With in-house referral programs that successfully close the loop, there remains a missed opportunity to stimulate the advocate to make more referrals, which is an active, and automated, nurturing program. Every time a prospect takes action, whether responding to an advocate’s email or completing a purchase, the brand has an opportunity to reach out to the advocate, thank them for their referral activity, and ask for more referrals. In-house programs generally don’t have this capability and lose out on a key method for amplifying the success of the program.

A closed-loop assures a positive advocate experience. An effective nurturing program turns that experience, and the referral results, to great!

Operational Costs

Manual processes and unclosed referral loops increase operational costs. Interestingly, these are not IT costs, but the cost of extra work on the business side to keep things moving.

On the IT side, the largest operational cost for in-house systems comes from the management of the referral program content. This includes the web pages that advocates and prospects use, the referral tools, and the emails that go to prospects and advocates. What we’ve seen in home-grown systems is how it is expensive to maintain this content and maintenance generally depends on IT involvement.

Successful referral programs are built on platforms that remove IT dependency from the equation once the initial integration to the back-end systems is completed. This requires tools that allow marketing teams to manage their own content and configure their reward rules. We have found this self-management capability to be very popular with our customer base.

It takes time and money to build and maintain an effective referral program. Organizations that choose to go it alone find that they are putting Referral Program Calm Watersmoney and time into an unproven, incomplete referral platform, which more times than not results in lackluster referral results. This blog has focused on the turbulence of in-house referral programs as compared to using referral software. In subsequent blogs, we will address specific capabilities that the most successful enterprise referral platforms use to calm those stormy in-house waters.