Scaling and Tracking Word-of-Mouth — Will Fraser // SaaSquatch

Quotes

• “What happened was SaaSquatch started very centric into the referral space and to our customer interactions that really pointed us to the fact that there was a bigger problem to solve beyond referrals so we shortened it to SaaSquatch. And it connects us to our roots.” - Will“When you’re thinking about word-of-mouth, it’s just like anything in a sales or a marketing cycle. If you don’t ask for it, you rarely get it. So for all of those people who are getting word-of-mouth without any kind of specific program or initiative. You’re only getting about a quarter of what you should be getting if you’re really actually pushing that program forward and asking people for the referral essentially.” - Will“The first thing we say is whether you do or you do not believe in the ability to track referrals, you should be asking for them. We want to ask people when they’re happy, when they’re in those great moments and we want to be asking for referrals.” - Will“Now as far as tracking it, we have a core mission on our side which is you gotta make it easy. I know that sounds simple and if you’re a marketer you gotta understand that friction is the enemy of conversion and that’s all the table steaks. For some reason when we get into the world of referrals, we lose our heads and we forget it.” - Will“The first thing we wanted to do is make it as easy as possible. How do you get that referral experience in front of someone, inside of the experience that they’re already doing so that you can make it easy and compelling for them to make that referral.” - Will“A really well done referral program is actually seen as a feature by your customers. The idea here is to make it a compelling offer and all this is kind of basic to some degree. You’d be surprised how many people are basically putting up a no value to their referral programs and asking them to go ahead and do some very onerous thing.” - Will“It’s really how do we weave this referral program into the organic experience inside of your service, your story, your product. So it’s making sure that we ask you at the right time. It’s about being intelligent when you’re asking and making sure that you’re offering real value.” - Will“The biggest thing is try to put yourself into the eyes of your listener, your customer and just think about when they are gonna be the happiest and most excited about your product.” - Will“When it comes to actually tracking that, today we’re seeing things like third-party cookies being blocked by default and being banned on certain browsers. That’s really destroying the resolution of a lot of simply implemented solutions. It’s really making sure that any referral solution you put in place is using a first party cookie. So when someone clicks on that link, it’s direct into your property where you can mark your user and own that marking yourself. That’s a huge piece to actually increasing your trackability.” - Will“The other pieces, how do we make it easy through verbal. So much of referrals are happening through word-of-mouth. I think when you realize how much people are talking, we want to give them easy ways to just share what they’re into and to get you to try it out.” - Will“We like to think of things like how we can give a special offer or a tracking code that’s based upon something very memorable to the person making the referral. We would recommend their name, most people don’t forget it, giving them some kind of tracking code that’s related to their name is a really nice way for it to be easy for them to share it around.” - Will‘What’s important as well though as far as the tracking goes is to think just beyond the conversion. Making sure that we track it all the way through how much revenue has Ben actually made us through his referrals.” - Will“What we recommend is to break down who those people are and we encourage a loyalty or a rewards program that gets more people to act like that and then back it up with another loop that brings them into the referral program.” - Will