Refer a Friend – even smarter!
While the much-awaited weekend beckons, there’s nothing quite like ending the week on a high! And our development team sure gets a high either rolling out new products or some nifty enhancements to one of our existing ones. Today, we are pleased to announce the release of some major enhancements to our Refer a Friend extension.
For those who haven’t heard about/ used this product, let’s just say that it is a smart piece of software that will help you benefit from a combination of viral and affiliate marketing (without launching a conventional affiliate program!). Read complete details on Refer a Friend.
Refer a Friend has been a hugely popular product – to the best of our knowledge, there’s no comparable extension in the market- and with today’s enhancements, we reckon it will differentiate it even further.
Here’s a quick summary of some of the most important enhancements:
Added a new action type
Offer customers discounts/ commissions based on a % of the purchase value of their referrals. Previously, you could offer only a fixed sum or fixed percentage to your customers for referrals. Quite simply, this should incentivize your customers to refer more friends, as the more the parties referred by them buy, the more they benefit.
Ability to broadcast the referral link
Not only can customers earn more per referral, they now have the opportunity to generate more referrals. Besides broadcasting the referral link by e-mail, they can choose to publish it online on their website or a blog post (why, they could add these links on their social networking profiles!).
New rule conditions related to order volume and size of discount
You can set a condition to allow customers to use the referral discount only if the order value is greater than a certain sum and/or the total discounts they are entitled to is more than a specified value. Such rules will help you ensure that the referral program is always a profitable proposition for you.
Dynamic explanatory label for greater clarity of the rules
The last thing we want is for the rules and options to make it confusing for you to understand and manage. Therefore, we provide this ‘dynamic explanatory label’ that interprets the (complex) logic/rules and presents it in a simple language every time a field is updated.
Some examples of how the labels would read are given below:
- This rule gives $10 discount after reaching $40 total referral purchases
- The rule checks this condition by summarizing purchases of each referral.
- The discount can be earned 4 times by a referrer accumulating discount sum
- The earned discount can be used 1 time(s), only if the order total is greater than $100 and can be applied together with a coupon
Ability to allow/block additive discounts
You can now allow/forbid your customers from using a referral discount together with a shopping cart coupon or any other promotional offers/ discounts.
Allows same person to be referred by different customers
This means that a customer is not prevented from referring someone who has been referred by somebody else as well. Of course, who gets the referral discount depends on whose invitation the recipient chooses to act upon to make a purchase.
Personalization of the referral message
The standard message template is sent when a customer refers friends contains the referrer’s name. We believe this will help increase the e-mail open and clickthrough rates.
Triggers limit for each action type
You can set limits to the number of times every rule is triggered. For example, say, you have a rule to “give 10% off for 3 sign-ups”. If the trigger limit is set as 1, the discount can be earned only once, while if the trigger limit is set as 2, then the customer is entitled to 20% discount when he generates 6 sign-ups from referrals.
Previously, we had trigger limits only for 2 of the 3 action types; these limits are now available for all action types.
Processing priority default value
Default priority values will be inserted when creating a new rule in the interface, so that you don’t have to enter it each time.
“Eligible for discount” field in the customer area
Improved look to the referrers page for the admin
Besides all the new and improved features, we have taken care of some of the outstanding bugs in the previous version. These include:
- The “Cancel” button is now functioning in Google Chrome and Safary
- Return discount on non-completed orders
- HTTPS problem with AJAX invitation form
- Hardcoded button titles
- Unregistered referral has non-zero number of items purchased and total
- Deprecated Prototype notation
We hope you like the new features. Do feedback with your comments or questions. We are all ears to your inputs.
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