Grow Your List With a Referral Program

Referral programs are something you may have heard of if you’ve been researching how to increase your subscriber numbers. Referrals are an excellent way of gaining new audience members by providing your existing audience with an incentive to share your content with their friends/contacts.

With 92% of people trusting referrals from those they already know, it’s no wonder referral marketing is bigger than ever–and we’re here to talk you through how you can benefit from it, too.

In this article, we’ll talk you through everything you need to know about referral programs, including the differences between email and customer referral programs, how to set up an email referral program, the process of adding referral links to emails, as well as some info on referral email templates.

What Is an Email Referral Program?

An email referral program is a marketing strategy that encourages your existing email subscribers to refer a friend/contact via email. This is generally accompanied by an incentive to persuade your audience to share your content - this could be a discount, free product, or merchandise, for example.

Email referral programs can be effective as they allow you to benefit from the relationships you’ve already made with existing subscribers. It also makes your audience feel valued, as you’ll be rewarding them for being a subscriber and inviting others along for the ride.

At beehiiv, we offer the Integrated Referral Program within our Scale plan, which allows you to automatically grow your subscriber base by incentivizing your existing subscribers to refer a friend.

If you’re unsure of what kind of incentives you could offer your audience as part of a referral program, beehiiv has already handled the hard work for you. By partnering with Slingshot, a company that helps brands to manage merchandise that is gifted to subscribers in return for successful referrals, you can easily add links to milestone reward emails to make it easy for your subscribers to claim their rewards.

Slingshot has its own range of rewards, including branded stationery, clothing, and tech. Plus, they allow you the ability to upload your own incentive catalog. Here’s a help guide if you’re interested in using Slingshot to manage your referral rewards.

How Do I Set up an Email Referral Program?

Setting up an email referral program may seem like a daunting task, but with the beehiiv platform we’ve made this easy.

Follow the below steps to set up an Integrated Referral Program with beehiiv:

1. Log in to your beehiiv account and click the Referrals tab (within the Grow section).

1. Click Create a new campaign.

2. Choose the type of referral campaign you want to set up.

3. Customize the referral program by adding rewards, limits, and parameters.

5. Create referral templates your subscribers can send to their contacts - this is where you can add your own branding and messaging.

6. Tailor the referral landing page - this is what potential subscribers will see when they’ve been referred by a friend.

7. Set up email notifications that will be sent to your subscribers and their referrals.

8. Test out your referral program to ensure you’re happy it’s working correctly.

9. Launch the referral program and announce it to your subscribers. We suggest doing this by email, social media, and whichever other channels your audiences use to follow you.

10. Track performance within beehiiv to measure how many new subscribers your referral program produces. You can then make tweaks as necessary to improve results!

Here’s a quick video talking you through the above steps in more detail!

How Do I Create a Customer Referral Program?

A customer referral program is similar to an email referral program, except instead of having a goal of gaining more subscribers it’s about encouraging the contacts of an existing customer to make a purchase.

When an existing customer refers a friend to your brand, they’ll be rewarded when their friend buys something from your brand - the referral is often in the form of a refer-a-friend code/discount.

This is similar to email referrals in that referral milestones still take place, but these would be for purchases rather than email sign-ups. Once your existing customer’s contact has made a purchase and essentially becomes a new customer, the existing customer will be rewarded and can complete future milestones to gain extra rewards.

How Do I Add a Referral Link to My Email?

It’s super easy to add a referral link within your beehiiv newsletter.

To do this, you can simply click the plus icon on the beehiiv editor and select the ‘Referral Program’ icon. This will prepopulate a section that contains information on how the subscriber that is receiving the email can refer a friend, while also informing them of how many referrals they’ve made previously and how many referrals they are away from their next milestone.

You can preview your email template to see how this will look, and even select a subscriber from the drop-down list on the left-hand side to see how this section will appear for individual subscribers.

How Do You Ask for a Referral Email Template?

There are lots of referral email templates available within the beehiiv referral platform.

These provide you with a ready-made base template on which you can build, including the following levels of customization:

• Messaging

• Logo

• Font colors and style

• Other forms of branding

Templates can be matched to landing pages in terms of branding to make sure that the referral program reflects your brand guidelines. This can also be extended to email notifications, where you can add your unique brand messaging to ensure these communications are received in a tone of voice that will be familiar to your subscribers.

Take a look at these top tips for more help with creating a successful referral program for your newsletter.

Wrap Up - Creating a Referral Program With beehiiv

To start growing your subscriber base via referrals, you’ll need to use our Scale plan, which includes the Integrated Referral Program.

This plan includes many other benefits, like A/B test customization, 3D analytics, dedicated email blasts, and all other features from our Launch and Grow plans, to make measuring and growing your email marketing campaigns super easy.