SUMMARY OF CONTENTS:

  1. Overview
  2. Create an Email Referral Campaign Creative
  3. Build a Referral Landing Page
  4. Connect Data with MTE API
  5. Set up an M-Trigger to Automatically send Reward Creative
  6. Key Advantages to this Approach

 

OVERVIEW

We suggest having an email campaign that directs subscribers to a page on your site where they can refer friends. Many of our MTE clients currently do this, and it has proven to be very effective. Here are the general steps below.

 

Create an email referral campaign creative

The purpose of this will be to encourage your current MTE subscribers/customers to introduce their friends to your brand. This Creative should have a link that directs the customer to a referral page on your site.

 

Build a referral landing page

The landing page for the above Creative would be used to send out referrals.

Here is something that we mocked up that would work well on such a page:


Create a default message that can be edited by the user.

Have a tool which integrates the address book of popular email clients like Gmail, Yahoo, etc., to improve User Experience and make it easy to input email addresses. Here is a great example of a tool which your developers could leverage to achieve this: http://www.cloudsponge.com/.

 

Connect Data with MTE API

The MTE API must be connected to this "send Invites" page to send the email. When an invited person receives this email from your subscriber, they will click a link to your site. If you want to pass any information to the visit then that would need to be in the URL. 

Next, to reward the subscriber for sending email referrals (or even sign ups or sales), then you will need to get this information into MTE. This is done first by creating a custom Data Field (name this anything you chose). The logic for what constitutes a "reward" would need to be determined. Once you have determined the logic for this with your developer, pass this data into MTE under the newly created custom data field for the original subscriber who sent the email. You can then use M-Triggers to build an automated reward campaign for subscribers who have qualifying referrals - see below for how to do this.

 

Set up an M-Trigger to Automatically send Reward Creative

Build an M-Trigger rule that that sends a PromoCode creative to the primary subscriber that matches your conditions, i.e. custom field Referral Count 

Click here to learn about M-triggers

Click here to learn about M-Connect API

 

KEY ADVANTAGES TO THIS APPROACH:

Protect your Sender Reputation

Remember your subscriber might send out a referral to every contact in their address book and many of them may not want this email and may label it as Spam or Unsubscribe. When a subscriber asks for a referral from their friend via the webpage, we can control the IP it is sent on to monitor and protect your Sender Reputation.

Avoid unsubscribing your most engaged customers

Another point to remember is that a forwarded email can lead to the new recipient unintentionally unsubscribing the original recipient from the list. For example if a customer from your list forwarded the email to a friend and their friend who received the forwarded email clicks "unsubscribe" it will unsubscribe the person who sent the email from your list. 

Growing your list 

If you direct the referral recipient to your website it is possible that you can get them to OPT-IN to your list. This could be a great way to growing your list of Opt-in subscribers.