Turn Loyal Users Into Growth Engines With an In-App Referral Program

Unlike an affiliate program where the reward is purely for the affiliate (person referring someone), you could trigger double-sided rewards at an referral program. Rewards can be anything; money, credits, extra trial, swag, or anything else.

Why does a referral program work:
It turns your happy customers into growth agents, leveraging trust and ease of access within the app.

1. Sign up to Reditus & complete the technical installation.
2. An user clicks on a text or icon within your app, eg. "refer a friend" "🎁" "share and earn"
3. They opt in to become an advocate
4. They receive an unique referral link
5. They share the link with their network
6. Reditus tracks who signs up via their link
7. Reditus tracks who started paying your SaaS
8. Rewards are triggered on moments YOU defined. Either at sign up, first payment or recurring payments.

In short, how does it work
You embed the Reditus in your app, which provides an unique link to all your users and shows their sign ups & rewards. Creating a viral loop within your own SaaS, and without any friction for your users.

🚀 Drives high-quality user acquisition as they come referred by Users
📉 Decreases your Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)
🔁 Improves customer retention as you get better customers in
💬 Builds organic word-of-mouth, and you can create a viral loop around your SaaS
📈 Easy to measure and scale. Everything is predictable and easy to scale.

Referral programs are effective because people trust recommendations from peers more than traditional ads, this will become even bigger with the rise of AI.

As the referral program is super flexible in the rewards you can trigger, we will give some options you can do. We will refer to advocate (person who refers someone) and lead (person signing up via advocate) to show the differences in rewards.

Advocate benefits; - Discount / stripe credits on their account
- Commission based on the payments made by the lead
- Free features based on number of paid referrals
- Extra account credits per (paid) sign up
- Gift card per (paid) lead

Lead benefits - Discount for signing up via advocate
- Extra credits / trial / features for signing up via advocate

Remember; if you want to trigger any kind of rewards other than cash, it would mean you often have to implement it on your side. At Reditus we would provide you a Rewards API, which you can use as the basis to trigger any kind of reward you want.

Best practise for rewards; go for rewards which help you to (keep) motivating your users to start recommending you.

Once these three things are installed, and tested, the tracking works automatically going forward. It would allow us to identify; who signs up via an affiliate/advocate, did they started paying, how much did they started paying and when did they stopped. We will also track (partial) refunds, which will automatically (partially) reject the commissions generated.

If you already use our tracking for the affiliate program, you don't have to do it again.

When looking more at the future, once the referral program is working you probably want to extend something similar to non users. This is where an affiliate program comes into play! When you already have setup the tracking from Reditus, it is simply setting up the program details and you are already good to go!

Running In-app referral program & Affiliate program in one tool The benefits of running a referral plus affiliate program in the same tool are pretty clear; - One tracking needed
- No duplicated referrals
- One system to manage everyone
- Fraud tracking for both programs
- No duplicate costs, pay for MRR generated for combined programs

Start for free with Reditus. Sign up here.

Think about to whom do you offer the referral program
You don't have to offer the referral program to everyone, if you have a freemium model you might not want to offer it to the free users. Or it might not make sense to offer it to users which just signed up to your platform. When you already have a high volume in 'sketchy' sign ups to begin with, choosing to whom you offer it would be a good idea to avoid fraud.

Tracking Fraud via the platform you use
Via a tool like Reditus you can track the most common ways of fraud, which is them running paid Google Ads with a referral link. They might steal traffic from you, by bidding on your brand name. This is something which happens quite often with an affiliate program.

Choosing the right rewards and moments
When you are going to set rewards, think about when you actually offer them. Giving a reward on generating sign ups, is a lot more fraud sensitive than doing on generating a paid referral. By choosing the right reward, and trigger; you could a lot of fraud to begin with.

- An referral program is in your own app to your own users, an affiliate program can be offered to anyone.

- An referral program can have non monetary rewards, an affiliate program is money focused
- An referral program can have double-sided benefits, an affiliate program gives only benefits to the affiliate.

See here everything on an SaaS affiliate program
See here everything on an SaaS referral program