TL;DR
- We sent a survey to our clients asking them how we could improve our referral program.
- The results were pretty clear, so we’re taking them to heart and trying them out for a few weeks.
- Our referral program will now give the referrer and the refere a free month.
- We’re making changes to our marketing strategy to keep more money in our client’s pockets.
- It’s one of the ways we’re thanking the oxio community and encouraging them to help us grow.
The quest for the perfect referral program. The long way ‘round.
Referral programs exist to increase sales by encouraging customers to talk about a company they like with the people they know. It rewards customers for helping a company grow through word of mouth. Those are the basics.
So, when we started our referral program, the basics were what we had in mind. We’ve learnt a thing or two since. Studies show that 20 to 50% of all purchase decisions are made based on word of mouth, but that only 7% of word of mouth happens online. So, to reach people offline, we created a referral program that offered $25 to the referrer and $25 to the referee. Pretty straightforward, but we thought we could do better.
To test our hypothesis, two weeks ago we sent out a survey about our Referral Program 2.0. And, well, we can’t thank you all enough because we got a lot of answers. Like a lot. Close to 5000 in just 24 hours. That’s 16% of our clients. And their opinions made it very clear: 49.3% of those surveyed wanted a free month referral bonus.
Today (for posterity: it's February 9, 2022), we're doing exactly what our clients asked us to do. As of right now, and for the next few weeks, we’re turning our referral program into more of a rewards or loyalty program to thank our best ambassadors: our clients.
A free month to get you talking.
Yes, you definitely read that title right. For a few weeks we’re replacing our $25 referral bonus with a free month of oxio.
To make it happen we reworked our marketing budget. We’ve got a budget of $100 to convince a new client to switch to oxio. Before today, 75% of that went to ad placements. Not anymore. To find a balance between investing in our growth and investing directly in our clients, we’re moving a pretty significant amount of that into our referral program. We think it’ll work, but we thought giving it a try first would be the smart thing to do.
Marc, our CEO and cofounder, while reading the first draft of this blog post, summed it up nicely:
If they can help supercharge our growth, we want to do everything we can to give this money back to our clients instead of to the media companies. We believe that the oxio community has the potential to help us grow and that we have the potential to give them more in return. Win-win, right?
Oh so right, Marc.
Okay, so here’s how it works: each time someone uses your referral code to sign up for oxio, we look at your plan and, at the beginning of the referee’s third month at oxio, credit your account for that amount . If all goes well, you’ll see the credit within two to three months. (It’s not an exact time frame because the time from signup to first bill varies from customer to customer). You can keep track of all the free months you’ve earned in your client portal.
In an attempt to keep everything in one place, and instead of covering this blog post in asterisks, we put all the details right here:
- Every person who signs up for oxio with a reference code will get their first month of oxio for free.
- Every time a referee uses a reference code, the referrer will, at the beginning of the referee’s third month at oxio, receive a credit to their account. The amount of the credit will be equivalent to one month of the referrer’s plan at the time their reference code was used.
- The credit of one free month is not redeemable for money.
And, just in case you’ve got a thing for diagrams, I drew one. But, you may want to skip it. I am a writer, after all.
Plus, and this is where things start to get really good, there are no limits to the number of referrals. We aren’t taking away our 60-day satisfaction guarantee. We haven’t stopped being us. Everything else at oxio is just as peachy as ever.
Not too shabby, eh?
Now, you might be wondering:
Has oxio absolutely lost it?
The short answer is, no. The less short answer is, well, longer.
We have a 60-day money-back satisfaction guarantee that lets anyone try oxio, no strings attached. But, so far, only 0.7% of our clients have used it. And, if you’re wondering, yeah, those are pretty damn good numbers.
To us, that means that once someone decides to switch to oxio, they like it here. And when you like something as much as we like to think our clients like us, you’ll probably recommend it if someone asks you for advice. (You would, right?) But, we wanted our clients to tell everyone how awesome oxio is without being asked.
That’s where a referral program worthy of actually being used comes in. We want to reward our clients for engaging. For encouraging everyone they know to join in. Finding this magical unicorn of a referral program is probably going to take some trial and error, but at least we’ve started things off right.
We trust our clients. We know they like us and they know that we’re open and transparent with them. We work hard and we’re not about to stop anytime soon. That’s what being in a long term relationship is all about. And we are in a long term relationship with our clients.
If our clients already like us, why bother trying to improve our referral program? Well, we’re happy you asked.
Why we’re improving our referral program.
As far as businesses go, we’re pretty young. We’ve still got a lot of growing up to do. Literally and figuratively. And, we want to do everything we can to grow up to be the oxio we want to be and you hope we will be.
For us transparency is, and will always be, ridiculously important to us. That’s why we’ve taken the time to explain that this change to our referral program is, for now, temporary. We’ll always try new things. If they work, there’s a good chance we’ll keep them around. If not, we’ll find other ways to reward everyone who believes in what we do.
To all our clients, thanks. We know we say thanks a lot. So much that it could even be our tagline. But really, we wouldn’t be where we are without you.
To all our soon-to-be clients, we can’t wait to meet you!
Written by Danilo T. in close collaboration with pretty much everyone at oxio.
