Introduction

Through a referral program, you can encourage satisfied existing customers (champion users) to promote your app, product, or service to their friends and family. Referrals can be a powerful and cost-effective way to grow business, leveraging the power of word-of-mouth marketing. They are a great way to establish customer loyalty and acquire new long-term customers.

Advantages of getting referrals for your app or service

• Cost-effective user acquisition: Referrals are a low-cost, high-impact way to acquire new users because you're leveraging the existing trust and influence of your current users.
• Higher quality users: Users who are referred are often more engaged and loyal, as they've received a recommendation from someone they trust.
• Viral growth potential: A well-designed referral program can create a self-sustaining growth cycle where referred users also refer others, leading to exponential growth.
• Brand advocacy: Referral programs can turn your existing users into brand ambassadors who actively promote your app or service to their network.
• Increased loyalty and retention: By rewarding users for referrals, you can foster a sense of loyalty and encourage them to continue using your app or service.
• Build a stronger community: Referral programs can help build a stronger community around your app or service, as users are more likely to interact with and support each other.

We will achieve the use case by creating a Push campaign to get referrals for your app or service.

Expected Result

Users receive a push notification on their phones to refer their friends:

Create a Push Campaign

In this section, we will create a Push campaign to get referrals.

Step 1: Target Users

1. Navigate to the sidebar on the left and click Engage, and then click Campaigns .
2. On the All campaigns page, click + Create campaign.
3. Under Outbound, click Push > Periodic.
   
   You are taken to the first step, Target users, of defining your campaign.
4. Enter the following details:
   1. Team: Select a team if your organization has teams enabled for your account. For example, UseCases. For more information, refer to Teams in MoEngage.
   2. Campaign name: Enter a name for the campaign. For example, Referrals.
   3. Campaign tags: Select the required campaign tags.
      
5. In the Target audience section, select All users.
6. In the Target Platforms section, select Android.
7. Click Next to move to the second step, Content, where you can define the content for your Push campaign.

Step 2: Content

This section contains various templates that you can choose from to define the content of the Push notification.

1. Select one of the templates and follow the steps described in Push Templates.
   You can select the timer template to create a sense of urgency among the users.
2. Enter the required content for the campaign. We can enter a title, message, and summary manually, or generate them using Merlin AI. For more information, refer to Generate Push Messages with Merlin AI.
3. You can customize and personalize the content according to your brand color, style, and communication. The editor helps you change the background color, image, text, font, and so on.
4. Add basic details such as Image and Default click action.
5. Add buttons to add a custom CTA. You can add a Share now button and link the click action to share the referral directly. The final notification can look like the following image:
   
6. You can also create multiple variations of the content using Merlin AI and perform an A/B test. MoEngage recommends trying multiple variations and letting Sherpa dynamically optimize the user distribution.
7. Click Next to move to the third step, Schedule and goals, where you can define your campaign's schedule and goals.

Step 3: Schedule and Goals

1. Define the periodicity and when to start and end this campaign.
2. Define the conversion goal based on your requirements.
3. Change the deliverability settings based on your requirements. For more information, refer to Create Push Campaigns.
   
4. Click Publish.

Conclusion

In this use case, we created a Push campaign to create a referral campaign to generate new users from existing loyal users.