The Hack - Gamifying Referral Emails

AARRR stage - Referral

Growth Problem - How to Keep Referrers Engaged

Haxplanation:

There is a whole raft of things that you can gamify in your startup. This runs the gamut in terms of complexity: from creating an entire community around your product with voting, badges and other involved gaming elements, through to something as elementary as installing an upvote widget on your blog.

You can do as little or as much gamification as time, money or skill will allow. But one thing is certain - you need to gamify at least part of your product. There is nothing quite like adding game mechanics to help increase the adoption of your product, retention of users and, you guessed it, growth of referrals.

Gamifying the referral process can be a surefire way to increase the number of invites sent out and accepted by your users. Read on to discover how to hack this.

Just Hack It:

• A prominent feature of a gamified product is the use of progress meters of all sorts both in the app itself as well as at other user touchpoints, including email
• For referrals specifically, you can set up a progress meter that tracks the number of invites that a user sends out
• You can then create an autoresponder series that will trigger emails telling the user just how much of a boss they are for inviting their friends. This is while showing them just how close or far they are from their referral target
• This simultaneous ego-stroking and reality-checking will keep users engaged throughout the process and maintain their interest in achieving your goal
• Hack gamification referral emails in this way and you're guaranteed to open the invite floodgates
• Just make sure that your app can handle all of the new user sign-ups
• Your technical infrastructure is pretty robust, right? For your sake, we hope so.

Source or Inspiration:

http://roy.roypovarchik.com/2014/07/springsled-users/