One of things that excites me most about building Referly is that I am able to take figuring out the best method for acquiring customers to a whole new scale.  Instead of working as the head of marketing for a single company, I can now literally participate in the customer acquisition planning and execution of thousands.

Referly API: Leverage Existing Users with Refer-a-Friend

The most obvious use case for Referly is to set up a refer-a-friend program on a business website and encourage existing users to participate by sharing their customer tracking link with friends.  This is what Love With Food and hundreds of others are doing, and since we launched our API hundreds of businesses have signed up to get our help generating new sales and signups.  Referly helps businesses acquire customers in two ways:

Referly Customer Acquisition as a Service: Pay for Results

When you sign up with Referly you set a reward amount you are willing to pay, usually it gets higher the greater your lifetime customer value is.

While existing users are the best and highest quality referrals you can get, sometimes their referrals just aren’t enough.  This is why we  also work to create campaigns to get you additional customers through paid, SEO, and other methods.  We make money when you get customers, because we try to acquire them for you for less than your bid amount.  That way you never pay more than your bid but you begin to access a whole new base of users.

How We Make Money: Performance

For example, if you bid $2 per new user and we are able to run a Facebook campaign that acquires them for $1.50 each then we keep the $0.50 each time.  This starts out small but it begins to add up as we learn more about your business and work with you to refine the customer acquisition models and bring higher value customers.

Alternately, some businesses bid so low that we can’t get them customers – but we are able to run experiments and give them that feedback without them risking a lot of money up front.

Marketing of the Future

Referly has just barely scratched the surface of customer acquisition automation and crowdsourcing, but we believe what we are offering will be the distributed sales and marketing department of the future – where millions of small and medium businesses will turn first when it comes to acquiring new customers online.  Try it and see!