Extend your Referral Program Reach with Gather - New Feature

This new feature from Gather unlocks a new way to extend the reach of a Lead-Gen Referral Program.

A typical journey for a referral program, designed to increase leads or opt-ins (lead-gen referral program), may look like the following:

Customer enrols as an advocate -> customer invites friends -> a friend accepts an invitation by opting in -> both friend and advocate are sent their rewards.

Where this study shows that referred friends tend to be more loyal, there is an opportunity to incentivise referred friends to enrol as advocates themselves and go-on to refer their network.

This extends the reach of a Lead-Gen Referral Program, and with Gather this can be done with 1 click.

As soon as a friend accepts the invitation, they are presented with an option to enrol on the referral program with 1 click where they can begin to refer their friends.

This journey is suitable for the following types of referral programs:

• A launch referral program. This is if you are launching a new product or brand and are building a launch list (or a waitlist).

• A competition or a giveaway where the more friends an entrant refers, the more entries they get.

• A simple newsletter referral program. For example, when a friend is invited to subscribe, they may land on a page featuring the latest issue of the newsletter (so they get a feel for the newsletter content). This is where they can be served a form to opt-in. When they confirm their opt-in, they can be presented with a button to invite subscribers.

Why is this Feature A Good Fit for a Lead-Gen Referral Program?

Gather offers two types of referral programs:

• A Lead-Gen Referral Program. This is where referral success is determined on an opt-in (for example a newsletter referral program).

• A Conversion Referral Program. This is where a successful referral is determined by a sale conversion. An example of this is a referral program for an e-commerce or DTC brand.

Unlike a Lead-Gen referral program, when a referred friend accepts an invitation as part of a Conversion Referral Program and receives their incentives, they would need to go on to complete a purchase for the referral to be marked as successful.

The opportunity for asking a referred friend to enrol as an advocate comes after they make a purchase decision (i.e. they become a customer first). In the case of a Conversion Referral Program, a post-purchase call to action is used to convert new customers into advocates.

Click here for detailed instructions on how to implement this new feature in your lead-gen referral program.

If you run a Conversion Referral Program, This article runs through how you can leverage this new CTA button as a part of a conversion referral program.

Improve Conversion Rates with Mailchimp and Gather

To celebrate Gather's new integration with Mailchimp, I'll run you through the essence of this integration and how it will help improve your conversion rates.

How Gather helps Improve Conversions

Gather isn't your average optin popup provider. With Gather's rules based system, you can target the popup to only present itself to certain customers based on their behaviour.

One of Gather's core values comes from giving you the ability to automatically place your prospect customers in a funnel, when you would otherwise lose them as they exit your site without taking a desired action.

This gives you the chance to convert those customers at a later opportunity, and hence improve your conversion funnel.

Imagine if you knew what those customers were interested in, what they were looking at, when they opted in?

Well that's already possible with Gather. Gather gives you the acquisition URL from which an opt-in came.

Now, with the Mailchimp integration, not only does Gather send your opt-in's name and email address to your Mailchimp list, it also sends Mailchimp  the acquisition URL (the page they were on when they signed up).

This gives you the opportunity to segment customers based on their interests. Which also means you get to send them highly targeted emails, aiding with conversion optimisation.

Connecting your Gather account to Mailchimp is as easy as 1, 2,3:

1. Tell Gather you wish to connect to Mailchimp, with a click of a button.

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2. Log into Mailchimp to authorize Gather

3. Select the Mailchimp list where Gather would push new email leads.

Here are a few examples to illustrate how this new functionality can benefit you:

Ecommerce Example - More Power to your Store

Cart abandonment is such an issue for many ecommerce merchants. This is when a customer adds an item to their cart, checks out, but leaves without making a payment.

By the time a customer checks out, they usually register with the store, adding their email address. With that, Mailchimp is then able to send the customer an automated reminder email.

However, until a customer adds their email address in the check out process, cart abandonment emails cannot be sent.

Gather can help with that.

When enabling the Exit Intent Mode, and adding a cart targeting rule  on Gather, when a visitor adds an item to the cart and for whatever reason they decide to exit the site, they can then be given the option to opt into your email list and can be offered a compelling discount code.

A significant number of visitors will opt-in at this point, where Gather gives them the discount code automatically. Gather then sends their email addresses to Mailchimp, including the page on which they were on when they signed up (the acquisition URL).

Mailchimp works with a number of ecommece software, like Shopify, to track customers by email and provide you with details as to if they have made a purchase, and how much they made in orders?

Ok, this is when you can get super smart:

You can then create a segment for a particular customer interest (based on the URL information sent by Gather to Mailchimp), and only for customers who have not made a purchase yet.

That way, you'll know which customers have not completed a purchase despite being given a coupon code.

You can then send an automated email with Mailchimp to remind them to use their code, and perhaps follow up with a series of emails with information about other products which are related to the product they were originally interested in.

Content Marketing Example - Better Email Open Rates

Combining Content marketing, opt-ins and email marketing is a powerful pattern for targeted customer acquisition.

As your content grows and you add more and more content categories, you may find that your email readership and open rates fall due to the wider set of interests you now cater for.

For example, an opt-in who is interested in cake baking, may not be interested in content related about farmers markets.

When Gather sends the URL Acquisition details to Mailchimp, you can start segmenting readers by their interest categories, based on the page they were on before opting-in.

As and when a particular segmented list reaches a certain number of subscribers, you can start tailor-sending emails specific to that segment based on their interested; which in turn helps with keeping the content sent to readers (or customers) targeted and relevant to them, increasing open-rates and clickthroughs.

These were just two of many wayswith which you can utilise the power of the Gather - Mailchimp integration.

Hope that helps.

Having read this, do you have any other ideas that come to mind? 

What other customer information would you like Gather to send to Mailchimp?

I would love your comments below.

Iz. Founder, Gather.