Referral programs depend on pairings of goals and actions to appropriately reward participants. Together, these goals and actions form program rules. A goal is your desired target user behavior—what you want them to do. In referral programs, they can apply to both customer advocates and the friends they refer. An action is triggered when the participant achieves a goal.
The goals you set will depend on your program and the outcomes you want to drive. At least one conversion goal is required for every referral program. Examples of goals include:
Referred friend makes a purchase
Customer advocate makes 5 referrals
Referred friend becomes a qualified lead
impact.com relies on the events you send to us to act as triggers for the goal. During program setup, select your goal’s trigger and an event key.
You can place conditions on a goal if you only want it to be triggered in specific situations. Here are a few examples of conditions that can be applied to a goal.
Referred friend makes a purchase and the total of the purchase is at least $100.
Customer advocate makes 5 referrals who remain active subscribers for at least six months.
Referred friend starts a subscription and the advocate must also be an active subscriber.
Goal conditions can be based on several different types of data from our databases:
Data | Description |
|---|---|
User object (either customer advocate or referred friend) | Includes their core details, like email and first name, as well as custom fields. |
Event | Includes any fields inside of the event that can trigger a goal, like revenue, product name or plan. |
Goals | A count of goals and referrals is made accessible in the program logic, as well as whether this is the first time the goal is being triggered. This is useful for running programs that issue rewards every X number of referrals, or ensuring that a goal/action is only triggered once. |
Time | The system can reference the current time and compare it against key dates of the referral (like when the referral was started) or the user (like when the user was created). |
When a participant achieves a goal, an action is triggered. Actions can include:
Sending a reward, an email, or a reward and email to the customer advocate or referred friend
Issuing a tiered reward with a varying value
Retracting a reward if needed
For a Purchase made goal, the associated action could be Send email and reward advocate. With this goal and action pair, your customer advocate is notified by email and issued a reward whenever a friend they’ve referred makes a purchase.
Like goals, actions can have their own conditions to ensure that even if a goal is hit, the associated action only completes in specific circumstances.
We allow you to add criteria to both goals and actions because it’s possible to have multiple goals for the same action. Although the conditions for a goal have been met, you might want to set action conditions to control which reward is issued or email is sent.
You can think of goals and actions as a series of if-then statements. Let’s take a look at a few examples.
Desired Outcome | If (Goal) | Then (Action) |
|---|---|---|
Reward the customer advocate with a $20 gift card for every 5 qualified leads they refer | Referred friend becomes a qualified lead | Reward and email |
Reward the referred friend with a $100 credit on initial signup and the customer advocate with a $500 credit if the opportunity in Salesforce is set to “Closed Won.” | Referred friend completes initial signup | Reward and email (customer advocate) |
Reward and email (referred friend) | ||
Send the customer advocate a notification email when the person they referred successfully completes a demo. | Referred friend completes a demo | Email only |