Refer a Friend 1.3.4

Your customers can certainly be your best brand ambassadors. Refer a Friend from aheadWorks Co. 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!). It stimulates your customers to invite their friends to your store. This is how it works…

Your customers refer their friends to your store and get a percentage or flat discount on their own purchase – while you get more customers and greater revenues!

The popularity of this extension since its launch bears testimony to the uniqueness and usefulness of this application. With a series of major enhancements rolled out recently, there are more reasons for Refer a Friend to be a ‘must-have’ application.

Features

For your customers

Earn great discounts/ referral commissions
Reward customers who contribute more to your business. With this extension, your customers have more reason to recommend your products to their friends. More the friends your customers refer, the greater the discounts and commissions they earn. As a store owner, you have enormous flexibility in deciding how to reward your customers for different outcomes (e.g. sign ups or referral purchases): a fixed discount, a % discount, or a % commission on the referral purchase.

Advanced tracking and user-friendly interface
The customer panel in the user area provides statistics and notifications when a discount or commission has been earned. A detailed table shows the list of everyone referred with their status: signup, purchases, items purchased, total value of purchase and current earnings (discounts/ commissions). Your customers will love this transparency as they see immediately the results from their referrals. Moreover, as customers never lose their referral details, they can use these for ‘productive’ referrals in future too!

Ability to broadcast the referral link
Not only can customers earn more per referral, they 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!)

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.

Personalize the referral message to boost conversions
The standard message template sent when a customer refers friends contains the referrer’s name. This is likely to increase the e-mail open and clickthrough rates, and thus their chances of earning referral commissions.

For you

Increased brand appeal
The Refer a Friend extension helps enhance your brand image as your product is recommended by people known to your potential customers.

Unlimited rules and great flexibility in setting rules:

• Discount usage limit can be set by you, to give you greater control over your marketing efforts.
• Flexi-rules based on targets: signup quantity, purchased items quantity, purchase amount, etc.
• Offer customers discounts/ commissions based on a % of the purchase value of their referrals. This should incentivize your customers to refer more friends, as the more the parties referred by them buy, the more they benefit.
• Rules work per each referred customer, or for all referred.
• Ability to allow/block additive discounts: You can allow/forbid your customers from using a referral discount together with a shopping cart coupon or any other promotional offers/ discounts.
• 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, the extension offered 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.
• Dynamic explanatory label for greater clarity of the rules: The ‘dynamic explanatory label’ interprets the (complex) logic/rules and presents it in a simple language every time a field is updated making it easier for you to understand and manage the rules. 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
• “Eligible for discount” field in the customer area.
• Referral's orders limitation condition - restrict the quantity of orders that will take part in discount calculating.