Loyalty and Referral Marketing

Jesse and Rich talk with the founder of Gratisfaction, Akash Malik, about loyalty marketing, contests, sweepstakes, and gamification. Learn how to implement these tactics across your website, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and more, and increase the value of visitors to your site.

Transcript

Jesse: Richie, Happy Friday.

Richard: Happy Friday, here we go.

Jesse: I’m back again. Here we go. It’s a podcast day for everybody listening. Hope you’re having a good day and now we’re going to introduce some pretty fun stuff today so that gets to be fun. We had a lot of heavy stuff lately, so we can mix it up a little bit.

Richard: Yeah. And by the way, feel free to have fun on every other day. We know you might be not listening to this on a Friday, we just got caught on a Friday but yeah we want to… To your point there, Jess, we’ve covered SEO, SEM, a lot of things that are heavy on the mind and we know that most people got into entrepreneurship because they knew it was gonna be work but they wanted to kind of do things on their own and be creative and find new ways to make some money. Today’s an exciting day because we have a guest that actually has a product that can help you do just that.

Jesse: Yeah, absolutely. Usually, people are saying “I’m going to start this online business.” They didn’t say “Oh wow, I can’t wait to write 2000-word blog posts.” They’re like “No, I want to do some cool stuff on Facebook and social media and I want to go viral”. I think this is going to be fun. There’s gonna be some stuff that you could do this weekend if you wanted. To help us out with that let’s bring our guest Akash Malik. Akash, how are you?

Akash: Hey, not too bad guys. Good. I’m from Australia. It’s about 4 a.m. and it’s all fun.

Jesse: Oh yeah.

Richard: And man we are definitely going to send you something, hopefully, send you some business mostly. Thank you so much for waking up so early or staying up so late, whichever it was. Which was it? Did you wake up early or do you stay up late?

Akash: I woke up early and now it’s all good.

Jesse: All right, we’re going to help our listeners out. So Akash is the founder of Apps Mav. It’s an all-in-one social media marketing platform but you didn’t start that…

Richard: At 3:00 a.m (laughing.)

Jesse: Yeah. What do you know? Give us a little bit of the history, your history in digital marketing and what brought you here.

Akash: Right. Yeah. Thanks for this question. I started the business at 10 a.m. Just kidding. We started off as a digital marketing agency, so we started doing websites and then came along, we did organic search engine optimization, Google AdWords. I used to be a certified Google AdWords specialist. I had to sit in an exam every year or a couple of years. And that was fun and games and then came social media marketing. So we started doing social media. What I found is that all that is good. And as time goes by, people start to melt the thing and it becomes highly competitive. All these strategies take a lot of time as well, to build your marketing mix, and it takes time to get results from these and sometimes it’s a sort of a hit and miss kind of a thing. So we started developing apps. We developed apps simply by Facebook and then we pivoted from that. And I used to do a lot of seminars, workshops, and beyond the panels. What I found is that there are certain things that every entrepreneur and retailer can take into their marketing mix, that they can do very quickly and that can start to give them very good results. And hence, these actions came about because that’s a mix of elements that come into your sales funnel directly.

Richard: Got it. So you’re talking and I’m looking at the site here too. Looks like you have various different… I mean way more than we can cover on one show. You have contest, referral marketing, I like it. What’s the one you started with, then what was the evolution as you started to build out Apps Mav?

Akash: Sure. So we started with apps which could just come onto your Facebook page. But Gratisfaction was one of the key apps we sort of pivoted into. The app in many terms is very simple because it allows you to sort of start your campaign very easily, and you can actually turn on or off different marketing elements that you’d like to activate. For example, you would just start off with a simple giveaway or start with a simple referral program or loyalty program and so on and so forth. So Gratisfaction is something that we started with. We then launched an app, gamification app called Scratch Card which is catching, and Gratisfaction also resulted in another sort of app, a subset of Gratisfaction which was called Social Boost.

Richard: Do you have any kind of a use case or someone that’s used this creatively, just so someone could actually hear from start to finish process of how they would have to make this happen?

Akash: Absolutely. We’ve got a very good Ecwid retailer, called Just Saiyan, out of New Zealand. And they’ve been using our app I think for about 10 months now. They’ve got some amazing results and they keep talking with us about the results they’ve achieved. For example, they were telling me that they’ve got nearly 12,000 referral codes getting out there that people are sharing because of the app, which gives them the opportunity to purchase discounts and rewards within the Gratisfaction. They give me some 90-day stats which was the revenue which is totally attributable to the Gratisfaction. That revenue has gone up by 34%, returning customers are generating 178% more from about 10 months. Conversion rates have gone up about six and a half percent. And their users i.e. the members who are signing up into the store and just attributed with the Gratisfaction has gone up by 19%. So these stats are amazing and they were telling me, the founder of the company Mark Bowman was telling me that they don’t really spend that kind of time on the app. They do not even currently utilize all the features that the app has and still they are able to get this jumps within their business.

Jesse: That’s awesome. Using Gratisfaction there is a lot of different options in there. So what would be an example, are they using things that are maybe Facebook-first? You get to the Facebook page and you do something or are they get to their website, justsaiyan.com and then you have pop-ups and things like that? What’s the entry point for consumers into Gratisfaction for them?

Richard: And in real quick, by the way, love, love, love the accent, that combination Australian and Indian and I’ve understood everything except for I’ve tried to type in that — we like to promote Ecwid stores — how exactly do you say that? Spell it out for us, please.

Akash: That’s J-U-S-T-S-A-I-Y-A-N.com. Around and pull it up here.

Jesse: Just saying. I might have missed a letter there.

Richard: Can you say that one more time, sorry, J-U-S-T-S-A…?

Akash: I-Y-A-N dot com.

Richard: Perfect. Okay, so now go ahead and go into Jesse’s question, sorry about the interruption there.

Akash: Yeah, no worries. Jesse, thanks for the comment on the accent, I’ve been living in Australia for about 18 years. Born and raised in India, so the accents got a bit mixed. It’s not shrimp on the barbie yet to which you guys in USA are used to. Now, your question is great. What happens with the Gratisfaction is that you either can you get some pop-ups and immediately, as soon as you sign up into the store, the customers are rolled into the loyalty and referral program and then a follow the program. These are the two elements within Gratisfaction that can be easily activated. You can also activate many kinds of giveaways and instant-win campaigns which I’ll talk to you about later as a question arises. But with the loyalty and the referral program, you’ve got to understand one critical thing. In your sales funnel, you’ve got to basically widen the sales funnel which means that more and more people who are coming to your website, who are coming to your Facebook page are giving you a lead and they’re not walking away from your online destination. The other thing you’ve got to realize is that how a business becomes successful. And that’s why we launch Gratisfaction, that’s the quickest way for you to try for your current customers. So with the current customers you’ve got to do three things. One is to get them to buy more frequently from you i.e. raise the long-term value with the customer because that’s the easiest and lowest-hanging fruit for any retailer. They can quickly start engaging with the current customers. The second is, which is very important, is to get referrals from them, get them to be brand ambassadors. So incentivize them to share your message and introduce their friends and their network so that their friends can come and purchase from your store. That difference can come back and purchase from your store. What we’ve noticed is that the friends who are referred by your existing customers converse more and more than any other visitor or customer that will come to your site. The other thing we found that they convert much quicker and they stick around and become long-term customers as well because the loyalty element triggers and sort of comes into the picture. So coming back there are two key elements within any marketing mix which Gratisfaction also helps you get. And I talked about the sales funnel is that you’ve got to convert more people into buying customers and you’ve got to get them to be brand ambassadors. So how do you keep them on the long-term value and keep them buying more and more is through the loyalty element. Traditionally, if you look at the loyalty element it will only give you rewards for purchases. But with apps like Gratisfaction, you can reward people for actually bringing or participating. For example, watching your YouTube video or for example, sharing one of their messages through Twitter. And there are these different actions that they can take, every action like answering a quiz question, for example, you could ask customers “what do you like with our website?” “What do you not like with our website? Hey we’re going to launch a new T-shirt. What color do you think we should launch a T-shirt with on what do you think the name should be?” So these things not only engage your current customers who may not even have had paid but just created a store account. And what more keep them engaged. But what happens is that they feel that they are in war with the company as part of the company and in turn when they do all these things they get loyalty points which can then be redeemed to pay for products. And therefore the visibility on mindshare off your website is much higher than other competitors. The other element is the referral element which I would say is the best marketing technique you can get. It’s the easiest marketing technique. And it works simply and very effectively and very quickly — it’s when you start rewarding your existing customers to share your product details, your website details with their friends and family. And also the friends and family get a discount which we call a double-sided referral to come to your website and purchase products. As soon as somebody signs up onto the Ecwid store, Gratisfaction will automatically enroll them into the loyalty program and send them a coupon code, a unique coupon code that can be shared with their friends and family, and if their friends and family come to your website and use this coupon code, then the referral will get rewarded either with points or coupon codes of both. And that is up to the merchant to tweak.

Richard: Man, that is so amazing on so many levels. And I’m gonna start.

Jesse: I mean I have about five questions. But you go first.

Richard: Real quick but first and foremost, we’ll go back since the history of man, word of mouth is always trumped everything, right. It’s just there’s nothing that someone you already know, love and trust that recommends something, there’s nothing that’s above that. And so first and foremost that’s great. Secondly, the gamification piece in there. Ever since Facebook has gone public, organic reach is just, it’s close to dead, right. So until you get other people to participate on your post, they won’t start sharing with all the other people, they want you to pay to get that reach. And that’s great. Also, one of your points there was they feel like they’re participating. And any time that somebody is participating in and they feel like they’re actually helping decide what the color is, decide with the name and that product is, decide… People tend to on a psychological level, they want to support what they think they helped create. I don’t want to talk too much because I don’t want Jesse to forget his questions but wow, on so many levels. I can’t wait to dive a little deeper into this. The last thing I wanted to say though is this something they actually have to sign up? I’m looking at the actual site right now, is that like the rewards button on the side or something like that to get that coupon or are they getting pixeled or how does that actually work?

Akash: Right. So that’s a good question to understand how that whole thing works. Coming back to the comments and observation that you made. One was a very good observation about word of mouth. Word of mouth has been there ever since the evolution and what we do now as digital marketers, we believe in word of mouth. So word of mouth meaning your website should be able to send messages and just simply word of mouth is offline and word of mouth is online. And that’s what the Gratisfaction does. And gamification is a very good concept and the key word you used. Because if you involve, if you bring in mechanisms into your business you will have much much more engaged audiences. People will convert much more and participate much more with your website and also with your business. The third point you brought in and that is very relevant is that you’ve got to involve your customers and get them engaged with the brand. I mean, we forget that the sole existence of our business is because of our customers. And we also do not typically involve them with a lot of decisions and the decisions are made behind the website, behind closed doors. But what we have to do is bring it out and bring our customers and tell our customers “Hey, this is your company. You take the direction, you tell us, I’m going to introduce this new product. I want you to name it, guys. You go ahead and name it for me”. When people get involved, they obviously will talk about the website because now they have a stake, they have skin in the game. Now coming back to that particular question that you asked about how this works. As soon as somebody comes to your website, you’ll see a popup. As soon as somebody comes to the Ecwid store, a visitor will see a popup and they can read different kinds of popups and the popup behavior can be tweaked. For example, you may want to have an exit and then popup or a popup that comes out after eight seconds or when somebody scrolls down your web site for about 10 percent. And so these are the behaviors that we have within Gratisfaction. So the pop-up comes up. Now even if you do not see the pop-up for any reason or you have seen the pop-up once and closed it, then we don’t want to irritate you and show it again. The fact is that as soon as you sign up or sign in to the store, you are enrolled into the loyalty program. Having said that the popups are great. that they look awesome and they are triggered at the right moment. We are looking down the line to use artificial intelligence and other rules of behavior that will ring in the pop-ups at the right time for the right target market and that’s the personalization bit that we are looking at in 2019.

Jesse: Yeah. There’s this Jesse here. I can tell you that I have looked into this actually for Ecwid. And boy, I’ve looked at some very expensive programs that looked like they would be very very hard to implement. So this is awesome, I know it’s not that expensive but think about… Well, I’ll make a point first on it — because I’m a paid search guy. I know how much people spend to bring traffic to their site. And a lot of times those people leave and you get nothing from them. But what if people maybe aren’t ready to buy now but they just love the brand they’re like “Wow, I love what you’re doing.” They see this popup and they’re like “All right, I’m going to subscribe to the YouTube channel. I’m going to follow on Instagram/Share on Facebook” and do many other things that you want them to do. And the value of that traffic that might have just bounced is now subscribed on many of your social channels and they may be doing that to unlock a coupon and that’s fine because there’s a value attached to a person following you on different social profiles and if they follow you on every single one of them there’s a huge value in that and even if they’re not a customer today they might be a customer later. They could do all these referrals like you said. To me, and again I’m thinking of my paid search background. OK, I paid a buck for this person to get there and now I’m extracting value from that dollar. Even if they’re not buying right there now you might want them to buy but…

Richard: You might not get the $40 purchase or whatever it is, but if they go do that, like your Twitter, like your Instagram, like your Facebook. That might also help affect the algorithm. Oh there’s more stuff going on here. And you might actually get more organic reach on other things even though that didn’t. So no matter what you’re helping the foundation of your company.

Jesse: For sure. Ultimately the goal is sales. So you really want the sale and this helps get the sale but it also helps you even if you don’t get the sale. I love it for that reason and I know that some of that stuff, if I had to do this on my own without an app I would never do it. There’s just a lot of work to set up all these different links and things like that, so  Akash, that’s awesome, man, I love this edition and I’m trying to think of it. “OK if I’m listening to this podcast in my car and the workout, where what’s an easy thing to apply.” Like is the loyalty program where you would start or is there like an app that you might think would be an easier thing for people to start with.

Akash: Sure. The easiest thing to start off with although it sounds very difficult is to start off your loyalty program. And along with that, you should start off your referral program. Now if you said that “OK, hang on I’ve got to think about the loyalty program.” You can straightaway start at the referral program and start rewarding your existing customers or new customers that sign up to share a discount coupon for your store with their friends and family. So they look good. And because they’re sharing and if their friends and family come in and buy it, then they get rewarded. It’s sort of a double-sided reward for both the referral and the invited friend to come to a website and engage with it.

Jesse: And so that’s something that people could do that this weekend, right. They can say “All right, I’m gonna launch this program” and then most people have an email list of previous customers. Can be sent via email to other previous customers as a little bit of a bonus, is that what could happen, right?

Akash: Absolutely. Look, it would take you just about five minutes to set up your loyalty program because over the last couple of years, we have gone through various versions of onboarding. We have looked at how customers are using, what their questions are what their issues are. And we have simplified a very enhanced onboarding experience. We will ask them questions about… The setup is quite easy and you can set up your Gratisfaction loyalty program and a referral program within five minutes, to be honest, because we’ve done some predefined settings as well based on what customers like and what gets you the best results. So yeah, you could set it up over the weekend and have a beautiful loyalty and a referral program both for you.

Jesse: And sales over the weekend and the money arrives in your bank account on maybe Tuesday.

Akash: Well, if you took the program correctly, if your referral program seats, it’s also about incentivisation. If it’s going to give just a 5% discount that can be shared by the referral with dear friends and family. There’s gonna be two issues, A — they’re not going to share it because 5% is not much. B — is that even if they’re share it may not incentivize their dear friends and family to come in and purchase and visit your store and purchase from your store, unless your products are also well and there is a great value proposition there. I would suggest that you know that. As you just now mentioned Jesse that people are spending more and more on Facebook. We started off with let’s say 10 cents cost per plate and that’s gone on to a huge amount nowadays and we spend on Google ads and we spend on organic SEO and we tried to constantly get new customers but we forget that if you put incentivizer attractive to your current customers, look after your current customers, they will share your brand with their friends and family and get you new customers. A referral scheme has to be quite attractive and incentivized as to motivate the referrals or your existing customers to share that with their friends and family.

Richard: Yeah. Richard’s here as you are speaking. It really hit me with this referral thing on many levels but mostly back to kind of psychologically. People tend to like people what they want to be like or are like. And so why wouldn’t it work, right. You’re somebody who likes games in this and that you probably have friends who like games, you usually don’t become friends with people who are complete opposites of us. There are exceptions to the rule, obviously, but that’s great. So in these contests, do you tend to start the contest in email with your current customers and then bring it because organic reach is lower or? What’s the starting point of where maybe a referral campaign or a contest would start? I know you said with your current customers but do you do it on that started on social or do you start on the things that are off social?

Akash: That’s a good question. What we are talking about here is seeding the referral program. How can we get it so that it starts to go viral? How do we start it off? What I suggest is that first of all, think about it a referral program. How are you going to incentivize them, the advocates. Existing customers or even people who had just signed up to a store and had not yet purchased from your store. So how can you incentivize them enough that they will share their message about your brand, about your products with their friends and family. And you were absolutely correct saying that people want to feel good about sharing great products, great discounts with their friends and family because guess what, there are still two things here. One — they want to feel good about it. And second is they really want to help their friends and family about the discoveries that they have made. They will share the program and share more if there is incentivization involved with it. As I said, the first thing is to think about your referral program as to how will you incentivize your advocates. And then what will you give to their friends and family. What will be the discount or the incentivization. That discount needs to be quite attractive, so that your current customers share that with their friends and family. Now what you will do is you announce that on social media, you announce that on your Facebook page, posted that on your Instagram feed. Do that on Pinterest or whatever other social media you have, put it on your website, declare there, send a newsletter to your customers talking about referral program as to how they they will win and their friends and family will win. Winning means they will get incentivization and discounts for sharing, referring the Ecwid store to their friends and family.

Richard: That’s a great point, the answer in short is all the above. It makes sense too, because back to the beginning of the show. This is fun. This is light. This isn’t a “buy this”. “I bought this”, although that message is kind of going through that, it’s more sharing and fun and “Wow, participate with me” and it’s not like they’re sending a link to the product page that’s an ad. It’s actually something that seems like literally the gamification piece.

Akash: Yes, yes. This is one of the gamification elements there. We just set up our referral program and start announcing it. Very easy announcement. “Hey, guys, we’ve launched our awesome referral program because we want to reward our customers. We want to say thank you to you and and it’ll be awesome if you can share this with your friends and family.” Because guess what, when they come in and buy they get a discount as well. That makes them an advocate, your existing customer, they look awesome as well because now they share an attractive discount with their friends and family. But you know, as with everything else unless you tell people, they won’t know about it. You can do social media marketing to announce your new referral program, to announce your giveaway, and so on and so forth.

Jesse: That’s the time to start spending on advertising, to boost those posts on Facebook, organic reach is down to nothing right now. But if you’re boosting a post to people who already follow you it’s a fairly cheap way to invest in some Facebook ads there. This makes sense to make sure all your people hear about it. Also we spoke about launching a referral program, a loyalty program, but the best part is that once it’s launched, new people get added every single day. So new visitors to the site are now a part of the referral program. There’s a big launch but there’s also a recurring benefit from it. That’s awesome. Moving on from that aspect of Gratisfaction, the other stuff here, they’re so once he would sign up for a referral program the contest and sweepstakes. I’m looking at the website right now. There’s so many, it’s hard to mention all the different options here. So many fun things things here. I just give a couple of them. You could do a an Instagram sweepstakes contest. A pin to win contest. This is where you can be creative and think about your product mix. What do you need from your customers? Do you need them with a picture of your product in a cool place? Sticking with the T-shirt example, do you need a social content all the time? Can you get your customers wear a t-shirt in front of a famous landmark and you get some sort of freebie or something like that. It’s not the best example, but here’s your creativity can run wild. Whatever kind of contest you can do. It looks like you already have it. Is there a favorite, you have for the contest?

Akash: That’s a very good question. What we’ve done is we provided all these methods for people to participate in it. You can make a combination of these methods and lunch amazing fun giveaways. I’ll give you an example. Broadly speaking, you can do either an instant win campaign or you can do a giveaway/sweepstakes. So what’s an instant when is you could say “Watch my YouTube video” which would be a product video or a new launch product video. And as soon as you watch it, you’ll get 50 points, or you can get an instant 10% off. What you could do is turn it around and make it fun. We all know that to engage an audience, make them watch more than 5-7 seconds is very difficult. You turn this around and say “Hey, guys, I launch this giveaway. You need to watch the video to the end and find a mystery code there. Tell us that mystery code, if it’s correct, you get free shipping”, for example. Now you turn it around into gamification, and you now have very engaged audience, because the person is going to watch the complete video to find that mystery code. It could be a code in the video or a question around the content of the video. For example, if you’re watching a video of how we do custom printing of your name on the T-shirt. What’s the process involved cuz ultimately want to drive the message, that we do custom printing. It looks very difficult to get the get the audience engaged, to watch the complete YouTube video that is 50 seconds or a minute. What I would do is redo your video and insert a little code in there on YouTube. It’s very easy to do that. Or you could have a question that a person needs to answer after watching that video in order to get that reward. So you just turn around those actions around. You could do a treasure hunt for example. Write a keyword somewhere on your three product pages. And then you could launch an instant giveaway and say on this particular page. So let’s say this is the product in want to push down. Let’s say it’s a t-shirt called Ecwid t-shirt, for example. You want to push that t-shirt. So on that Ecwid t-shirt product page you put in a code and ask people through Gratisfaction. You say “Visit us on this page. We have put in a mystery code. Go to that page. See the mystery code, come back to the giveaway and if the mystery code is correct, they would get that reward. Suddenly you’ve done two things: you gave out a fun thing and you have also put attention to that particular product that they can go to, and consume the content, because they’re trying to find out what is. Or you can ask questions around that product page. Let’s say and say ‘Hey, what discount we have on that product, what is size, what color of this product available. Or what is your view about that? You visited this product, please tell us about the emotions or feedback on a particular product. Would you buy it or not? Let’s say, a 50-word answer, no matter what their answer is, you give them the reward. Now you’ve driven people to that page and you have a very engaged audience because now they’re reading it, because they want to answer that question, because they want to get that reward. So that’s how this thing works as instant-win. The other aspect of it is that you can use his actions and turn it into a sweepstake or a giveaway. What sweepstake does is for every action that they participated, for example, watch my YouTube videos, share message on Twitter, on Instagram, pin it. For every action they take, they get some points. At the end of the sweepstake, when sweepstake ends and closes, Ecwid merchant draws a winner out. I’m gonna give out two free t-shirts, a watch, a $200 gift voucher to the three people who got the most number of points. Now they put the loyalty points as well. Because of the loyalty points, who gets top three loyalty points, some participate in more actions, some participate in less actions. You can draw the winners and give them prizes. That’s how you turn it around, these entry methods, you can use them in a fun and engaging way to drive that audience.

Richard: I’d love it in cash. A quick question, Richard here again. I love your pricing model, entrepreneurs are spending money all the time, so I love that it starts at free. And you know, it’s kind of like a MailChimp, ask as you have more loyalty members that goes up a little there. But what is exactly considered a loyalty member? Is someone a loyalty member once they do certain amount of actions or is it just when they sign up, how does that work?

Akash: Good question. The first thing is that the pricing model we kept as that we want to give every feature of the product to every Ecwid merchant. Basically, because we want you to use each and every element in there and get the maximum benefit. Every plan includes every feature except white label. You can start with a free plan which is 400 loyalty members. Another way for you is to evaluate the app, there is no commitment on it. On the app you can tweak, activate, re-activate any feature you want. Coming to your question about loyalty member: anybody who signs up to your store or signs in after you install Gratisfaction is called a loyalty member. And we want more people to become a loyalty member simply because remember with referral, the more people who have signed up to your store, the more people will participate in your referral, share with their friends and family, and more people to come to your website using that discount coupon. They use that, as soon as they use that, they become a referral as well.

Jesse: Wow, I can think of a ton of places this could be used. I’m ready to start my referral program right now. Rich?

Richard: No, other comments on my mind, it is blown. I’m literally over here signing up right now.

Jesse: That’s awesome. For anybody else looking to sign up right now, go to the Ecwid App market, look for the Gratisfaction app and as we heard it’s free to get started. So get started on your referral marketing right now. It’s all sorts of fun little tricks in there and contest so it’s time to go on. Akash, really appreciate you being on the show. Listeners out there — get after it, make it happen!