In every business, referrals are a powerful and inexpensive way to grow. Due to this fact, and the regularity in which a referrals system has been suggested by creators, we’re excited to have developed this feature for all creators. 84% of customers have more faith in the recommendations of people they know compared to traditional advertising (Source). Referrals are useful for the same reason that reactions and reviews work: social proof.
Our fully automated referrals platform is the best way to encourage other users to share your resources. In a nutshell, referrals work by providing other users with a special link they can share to earn a percentage of revenue from any sales that are made by users who click their link. The percentage of revenue is up to you to decide and can be as low as 1% or as high as 90%. Referrers must have a Tebex Wallet linked, because they immediately receive their commission as a split payment of your sales.
The Referrals page in your Creator dashboard is where you can adjust your referral settings, create a new referrer, edit existing referrers, and view the performance of your current referrals.
We provide two ways you can use referrals for your products which are to allow referrals from anyone or to only allow select users to be referrers.
Enabling this option will display a “Share and earn” section on the sidebar of all products you select to be included in the referrals program. We recommend setting this up for your products with a low percentage between 1-10% as it will encourage users to share your products with their friends more often. Setting the commission any higher may work if you’re aiming to grow as quickly as possible, but we expect most creators to keep the default low. 5% is safe!
You can set up custom referral deals with individual users. This is useful if you can form a partnership deal with another creator, influencer, or community owner so that you can give them a larger discount. Importantly, these custom deals can be set in combination with allowing anyone to be a referrer, where you can offer a default 5% rate and a far higher custom rate to specific users! A custom rate you set for a referrer will always override the default, even if it’s lower.
By providing a coupon code to go alongside your referral link, you will be able to encourage more people to participate in the program. People who use the coupon code to purchase your product will be more likely to refer others and share their experience, as they will gain an additional benefit from the referral. Additionally, providing a coupon code will make it easier for people to follow through with the referral and make a purchase, as customers are more likely to take advantage of a discount. This can lead to more sales and more referrals, resulting in a greater return on your investment.
Most drop-in referral tracking systems use a simple cookie, typically lasting for 30 days, to determine whether or not a product was purchased due to a referrer. This is fairly crude and inaccurate, since many users may be referred to an item on one device, but make the final purchase on a separate device where the cookie was not stored. Which results in referrers not being credited for sales that they were responsible for.
Furthermore, with the cross-sells we display, a buyer may be referred to one item, see one of your resources in the sidebar and decide to purchase that instead. The referrer should still be credited for this purchase, however, simply using the presence of a cookie to credit referrers for any sale made on any of your resources makes it possible for them to be credited for purchases that they should not be credited for. For instance, if the user is referred to one of your resources, decides not to purchase it, then some time within the next 30 days, stumbles across another resource of yours while browsing the site normally, and ultimately decides to make a purchase as a result of their normal site activity, the referrer should not be credited for that purchase.
While it's never going to be possible to completely accurately determine when a purchase is the result of a previous referral, we do want to design our system to be the most accurate that it can reasonably be. Paying referrers what they deserve, but not paying them more than they deserve.
Which is why, when a user is referred to your resource, we record the referral internally and remove the cookie as soon as the user is signed in. This allows us to remember which users were referred to which resources, regardless of whether or not the user switches to another device. Additionally, we use what we call 'viral links', to track when a user moves from a product page they were referred to, directly to another one of your products via the bundles sidebar, the recommended cross-sells resources sidebar, or the recommended cross-sells in the cart footer. Effectively, links to other products of yours discovered because of a referral link that they've been sent, will also be tracked as a referral by the referrer, and if the user ends up purchasing an item in your referred resource's sidebar, the referrer will be credited for that item, assuming that item has also had referrals enabled.
We previously considered no longer counting a purchase as a referral if it's been more than 3 days and was found through our resource homepage. However, someone could remember the product name and search for it specifically through our homepage, and that purchase would still be due to the referrer, we decided that it would be best to continue to count previously referred resources as a referral if purchased within the 30 days. After all, even if they stumble across the item naturally and not by searching, having previously been exposed to the product by the referrer less than 30 days ago will likely have been a contributing factor to their decision to buy it, if they choose to do so. As previously mentioned though, other products of yours discovered through our homepage will not be credited to the referrer if found within 30 days. It would need to be discovered through a 'viral link' which are only displayed in the aforementioned locations while a user is currently looking at a product that they've been referred to.
We believe that this is a fairer, more reliable way of tracking referrals, and will result in more accurate payouts, without becoming too overly complex to remain predictable.