Defining Referral Quality
Mary Miller is a CRM leader at Wag!
Mary Miller brings extensive experience in customer relationship management and referral marketing, focusing on personalization and quality control. At the summit, she will share how Wag! leverages Extole and Braze to create a seamless referral system that rewards the right customers while combating fraudulent referrals.
See the key chapters from Mary's talk, and dive in where you'd like.
Why is identifying high-quality customers a key tactic?
How Wag! Uses Extole
Transcript
So at Wag!, we operate a two sided marketplace, which means there’s a lot of possible referral programs. We primarily use Extole to drive new pet parent business with referrals from both existing pet parents as well as the pet caregivers on our platform.
The Referral Structure at Wag!
Transcript
So we run a standard give, get referral program, so new users will get credit to put towards their first service. So that’s how we are acquiring new users and then the existing customers that are making the referrals will also get credit on their end for their next service. And in the case of pet caregivers, we actually pay them a cash payout for any new pet parents that they bring to the platform.
The Power of Personalization
Transcript
Initially, we had all new pet parents sort of falling into the same onboarding flow. It’s pretty extensive. It’s like a 30 day welcome flow trying to get them to book their first service. And we wanted to create a better one to one relationship with our users to really make them stick around. So we carved out a few personalized flows based on a sign up source and one of those areas that we recognized as a big opportunity was our referral base. So we honestly just made it pretty simple. We made a few copy edits, we updated our cadence a little bit and shortened the flow and then added reminders of their credits that they had available from the referral. We saw the activation rate for that particular flow more than double, actually what our average activation rate is.
Why Identifying Referral Quality Matters
Transcript
So using Extole audiences feature, we’re able to track which of those customers are making the most successful referrals. So it’s one thing to kind of send out your referral link to a bunch of people but who’s actually converting. So really looking at where those successful referrals are coming from and who those folks are that are building up those networks and really tapping into that, into those so now we can target that group, even though it’s a little bit smaller of a group than we would normally be targeting. It’s creating a better qualified new user for us and that’s really valuable. So we can offer more personalized messaging, we can add some additional rewards for them, using some bonus campaigns to really kind of keep that momentum going. It’s also sort of on a related note, Extole has been really helpful in helping us identify fraudulent referrals. This is something that, because we have a two sided marketplace, this is pretty common and they have some great tools that help us identify those so we can sort of nip them in the bud before people really kind of take advantage.
Combatting Fraudulent Referrals
Transcript
We’re actually okay with people finding a promo code and using it on the internet. So that’s fine, because ultimately they’re coming and booking a service and hopefully coming back and booking a second service. For us, the biggest issue is because we have pet caregivers who are sorry. Those are the folks that are actually walking dogs or dog sitting. They are also often on the pet parent side of the business as well and so they may have accounts on both sides but using different email addresses in a lot of cases. So we’re not able to necessarily determine a one to one match there. It’s possible for a pet caregiver to create a pet parent account, essentially refer themselves and get both rewards. It happens and you know, there’s only so much we can do to control it but with Extole flexible rules, we’re able to look for those sort of red flags that are unique to our business, like the same address, or, you know, similar types of email addresses, things like that. So it’s been really helpful for us in cutting down on fraud.
Combining Extole & Braze
Transcript
Leveraging Braze and Segment, which are two of the partners that we use and obviously the data that we’re receiving from Extole. We’ve been able to add sort of a dynamic content block to the top of all of our campaigns that will call out any credits that pet parents have available in their account. Obviously, someone’s more likely to book a walk for their pup if they’ve got, you know, 20 bucks that is going to, you know, come off the cost of that. We also use that in our Braze Content Cards, which is another functionality there. So when you open our app, there are little tiles on the home screen and one of them may say you have $20 in referral credits to spend on your first service and we’ve seen a pretty significant uptick in conversions and credits being redeemed since we implemented this. Otherwise, there really wasn’t an easy way for someone to identify how much credit they had available, if any and it’s a persistent reminder in all of our campaigns. And if someone doesn’t have credit available, we actually include a link for them to refer their friends.
How to Identify the Best CLG Tactics
Transcript
So there’s a variety of answers for that. One is just, I have almost 20 years of experience in this field, so a lot of these tactics are things that I’ve done at other companies that I found success in and things that I wanted to test here at Wag!. So this is something we tested and saw a big uptick. So it was kind of a no brainer. Also just looking at feedback from our customers. We have an NPS that we run for app users and we gather feedback in a variety of areas and just understanding how people were maybe hesitant to book a service if they didn’t have a discount, because, you know, the cost was a little high for the first time and realizing that it wasn’t easy for users to see how many credits they had available within our app. So that was something that would have required a lot more dev work of our product and engineering team, whereas it was a pretty simple fix for us to put a little snippet of code in our emails. So it’s definitely some low hanging fruit but we’ve seen a lot of success with that.
Why DIY Referral Platforms Fall Short
Transcript
Actually, that’s one of the reasons that we started using Extole. We had a referral program for years. We’ve had one. It was built in house by our product engineering team. Unfortunately, getting tests prioritized. It wasn’t a high priority on their end. From the marketing side, we wanted to be able to sort of have more control over what sort of programs we were running for referrals and being able to run like a burst campaign where we offer, you know, double reward for a small period of time, even just AB testing reward amounts or triggered messaging that we’re sending out to folks. So that was one of the main reasons that we enlisted Extole, was so that we could have a little bit more control on the marketing side. And as a relatively small company, Wag! moves pretty quickly and they’re not afraid to, you know, test out new things, so we have a little bit of free rein to kind of run that stuff as long as it doesn’t require product or engineering support, it’s a little easier to get it prioritized on our end.
Turning Customer into Brand Advocates
Transcript
It’s actually something that we’re still sort of working on but I think we all see it as a huge area of opportunity. We often find organic bumps from like Tiktok or, you know, Instagram. We have a lot of caregivers that are very active on social media. You know, regardless of what kind of experience they have, we’re going to see that you know, impact on that but this is an opportunity for us to really empower caregivers to build their own network through referrals. So our goal is to empower caregivers to build their own business essentially on our platform and so we rely on their feedback to help drive product improvements. And, you know, bringing in new business on the pet parent side, as well as additional caregivers. And I think Extole can be a really important tool for us to help identify and reward those super active pet caregivers and turn them into even more valuable brand advocates for us. So that’s sort of the direction that we’re heading in currently.
Identifying Your Key Customers
Transcript
I think starting simple there as well is key, because in the CRM world, we have a million different KPIs that we look at depending on the campaign. So identify what are like, maybe the two or three that are really going to, you know, tell the story. It could be account sign up or making a purchase. For us, we have a couple. It’s creating an account and then actually completing a service. Those are two different steps and then looking on the advocate side, how many successful referrals are they making? Because those people that are making multiple referrals are the ones you really want to hone in and grow and build a relationship with them.
How Treasury Wine Estates Uses Extole
The Value of Unearthing and Rewarding Brand Ambassadors
The Importance of Leveraging Happy customers
The Value of Rewarding Loyal Customers
How to Keep Customers Engaged with New Offers
How Extole Offers a Hands-On Partnership to Treasury Wine Estates
The Importance of Programs that are Truly Sustainable
When you have a proper system in place, you can identify which referrals are quality, which aren’t – and how to reward the right people.
Mary Miller
