A referral program is just the execution of a system that makes the earlier and existing customers inform the potential customers that you provide amazing services. It makes your existing customers push their friends to buy your products.
Here we bring you some great examples of SaaS companies that have noticed their revenues shoot up due to their extraordinary customer referral programs:
Airbnb Referral Program
It has been found that 47,000 people used Airbnb in the year 2010, and the number rose to 17,000,000 in 2015. This was possible only because of their excellent customer referral program. They monetarily incentivize customer referrals and do not involve in direct cash. When any Airbnb customer refers a friend, he or she is given a travel credit, and also the referred customer avails a discount on their first trip. Thus, Airbnb takes word-of-mouth as a significant element for their business.
Dropbox Referral Program
Dropbox, a well known cloud-based storage service, is barely an amazing SaaS company. But still, they managed to increase 100,000 users in 2008 to over 4,000,000 in merely 15 months. That is approximately a 3900% increase in the number of users in a small time and it continued to increase with a 60% growth in users in 2010. Dropbox did not do anything different but by giving incentives to the users along with increased customer value, they managed to keep their existing customers engaged by word-of-mouth value and helped to save on marketing costs.
The best thing about Dropbox is that their referral program is direct and simple. You get additional storage space for referring any person to use Dropbox. They also provide users with stepwise instructions on their referral services.
Uber Referral Program
When you happen to type “Uber” on Google search, the majority of the search results carry the word “referral” with it.” Uber ‘s customer referral program offers credit towards free rides to the referring customer. It is a known fact that Uber is emerging at a great speed, with an increased number of drivers every day, and escalating its presence in more cities across the globe. Uber offers incentives to the people for referring as well as recommending the service and has become the primary source of transportation.
Paypal
Paypal made use of good old-fashioned cash to form their customer base. This made Paypal’s growth consistent and reached an enormous value of $365 in net annual income. Paypal began its customer referral program by certainly offering incentives to the people to refer their contacts to sign up for an account.
