Hello everyone,
I came across this thread over a year ago and it seems that you all still need a solution (sorry). In the hopes of helping I wanted to share how I believe you can setup and manage a customer referral program (an affiliate program) for your business. Note: this solution favors a “brick and mortar” type service/shop.
Step 1:
Launch a referral/affiliate program for your service/store. Select a quality group of your most loyal customers and ask them to join your referral/affiliate program (quality over quantity). When they refer a customer to you the (new) customer will receive a discount on their purchase, and the referring member will receive a reward (more on this later).
Step 2:
Create two new customer groups, one for your referral/affiliate members (maybe call it "Referral Members") and one for your referred customers (maybe call it "Referred"). By adding these customer groups you will easily be able to send targeted marketing emails to remind your referral/affiliate members that they will receive rewards for referrals, or to remind your referred customers to come back in.
Step 3:
Add your referral/affiliate members to the "Referral Members" customer group.
Step 4:
Setup a discount code for each of your referral/affiliate members. These discounts will be applied to the referred customer’s purchase, and will be used to track referred sales by referral/affiliate member so it is important that they are unique. It is also important that they follow the same naming pattern. For example start all discount codes with “[REF]” and follow with the referral/affiliate member’s last and first name (“[REF] Jeffers, Sarah”). Following a naming pattern will make the discounts easy to search for and run reports against.
Step 5:
When a new customer comes in and says the wonderful line, “I was referred by…”, simply look up the discount code for the referring member and apply it to the sale. Also, add the (new) customer to the "Referred" customer group.
Step 6:
On a regular basis (maybe every 2 weeks or once a month) run reports on referred sales in your Square dashboard. You can run any report where you can filter on discount codes to show the success of your referral/affiliate program!
Step 7:
Based on referral performance (how many sales/dollars referred), reward your members! I think the easiest way to reward your members is with loyalty points, but you can use a custom rewards discount code or a gift card.
Step 8:
Keep it going. Use your customer groups to send targeted email campaigns, run specials where referrals earn even more rewards, the sky’s the limit.
I hope this solution can help some of you in the seller community.
Full disclosure, I am a software engineer and I am considering working on an automated version of the above solution as a 3rd party service. If you appreciate this solution, but would like to automate as much of it as possible to save you time, please show me your interest at https://affilly.me. Please take care!
