Overview
A benefit of refer-a-friend programs is that they help brands identify customers who also have followers and influence. Extole makes it easy to convert an advocate with reach into an influencer who can drive traffic and generate conversions. And, if you’re recruiting influencers in other ways, you can use Extole to better measure their impact.
Influencer Discovery: When your customers share your brand with their friends and family as part of your referral program, Extole retrieves available social information and segments your high reach, high influence customers. These people are all likely participants in a separate Extole-powered program with influencer-appropriate rules & limits, creative, and rewards.
Personalized Influencer Codes and Links: An important part of an influencer program is the personalization or customization of the link or code shared by your influencers and used by her audience to encourage new people to check out your brand. Extole’s influencer programs allow you to quickly assign those links and codes.
Full Tracking From Click to Conversion: When influencers share their customized influencer link, Extole tracks their impact with full-funnel metrics from clicks to conversions and even the quality of acquired customers.
Automation of Influencer Rewards: With Extole’s reward engine, you have access to dozens of rewards for the influencers when they drive conversions. Use your own gift cards or coupon codes or choose from our catalog which includes open-loop cards like Visa, gift cards from Amazon to Zara, and even services like Apple iTunes and Uber.
How to Create a Unique Influencer Program
Identify your influencers
Create a unique program in Extole
Generate personal share links for your qualifying influencers
Promote your program to your influencers (invite email)
Analyze your Results
Identify your influencers
By definition, an influencer is someone who has a heavy social following and has a heavy influence over potential buyers.
Your company has likely already identified or started working with influencers. If so, you can use our platform to track and reward these people more accurately. Alternatively, you can use the Extole platform to help you identify people with a high social following.
If you are just trying to identify people who have already shared who have a high social following, you can go to our Reports tab and view the Influencer Share Links Performance and/or Top Share Links reports in the Segments & People section.
Create a unique program
In order to track these influencers separately, and give them unique offers and creatives, you'll want to create a new influencer program for these people. For information on creating a new program click here.
You will want to make sure the messaging reflects your new offer AND acknowledges or appreciates these customers for driving more activity for your brand.
On the Advocate (Influencer) side, you'll want to configure:
Microsite - The microsite is the portal the influencer accesses to apply to the program initially and then access their dashboard once they've been approved. This creative controls everything in the background of the Application Experience, Share Experience, and Influencer Stats.
Application Experience - This is a user’s entry point to the program. First, the potential influencer is prompted to enter their email for verification purposes, triggering the Authentication Email. After clicking the link in the Authentication email, potential influencers can then submit their applications to the program. The creative controls the variables associated with both of these steps in the application process AS WELL AS the approval method (auto-approval is enabled by default).
Share Experience - This is embedded in an influencer's dashboard. This creative controls the share options provided to influencers.
Influencer Stats Embedded - This is the "meat" of the influencer dashboard. It displays their profile picture; number of referrals and earned rewards as well as earned value (total value of all rewards earned); “Your rewards” feed, which includes reward type, value, and source; and “Your activity” feed, which displays share instances and channel information.
Approval method:
Auto Approval - In the Application Experience you can choose to enable an automatic approval process (on by default). Enabling this method means that all potential influencers who submit applications will automatically be approved and receive the Application Approval Email.
Manual Approval - If auto-approval is disabled, you can then approve influencers by creating one-off or batch approval events. Once the approval event is created, the influencer(s) will receive the Application Approval Email. To create an approval even go to User Support > Create Event (for one-off) or Tech Center > File Transfer (for multiple).
Consider configuring the influencer emails, sent in the following order:
New Influencer Email - This email includes generic language welcoming a new influencer to the program and includes their personal share link as well as a link to their dashboard.
If auto-approval is enabled, influencers will receive this email immediately after they have submitted their application. When using a manual approval process, influencers will receive the email after an approval event has been created.If your program excludes the Application Experience, you can enable this email to be sent when you invite influencers individually or via batch file.
Remind Email - This email will automatically send to invited influencers who have not opened the initial email after 7 days.
Authentication Email - For use cases that skip the Invite Email, the Authentication Email is the first email received. This email is sent to potential influencers who have entered their emails in the first part of the Application Experience to verify their identities. This email contains a link to apply for the program.
Application Received Email - This email is sent once an influencer has completed and submitted their application and displays a summary of the fields they entered.
Application Approved Email - This email is sent at different times depending on the selected approval process. If auto-approval is enabled, influencers will receive the email immediately after they have submitted their application. When using a manual approval process, influencers will only receive the email after an approval event has been created. The email contains a link to the Influencer Stats page.
Application Declined Email - This email is sent when a potential influencer’s application has been manually declined. This email will by default include a link to the client’s standard RAF program and encourage the influencer to participate.
Stats Email - This email will be sent to approved influencers to display the number of referrals, number of rewards, and earned value (total value of all rewards earned).
Earned Reward Email - This email is sent to influencers when they earn a reward. The message may contain information about the company for which the reward was earned, the value of the reward, instructions on how to redeem the reward, and a CTA to continue sharing.
Has Not Influenced Email (Scheduled or Triggered) - There are two versions of the Has Not Influencer Email: Scheduled or Triggered. The scheduled version allows you to specify the number of days influencers have been inactive before the email is sent (default 7 days). The triggered version sends the email to an entire Audience using logic to automatically exclude influencers who have been active.
On the Friend side, you'll want to configure:
Landing Experience - This is where the friend will land / what they'll see when they click on an Influencer's link.
Earned Reward Email - If you're using email capture, you'll need to enable this and then configure the friend earned reward email.
Generate personal share links
IfA best practice for influencer programs is to create a personalized share link that the influencer can share on their social media account or blog. Here's how:
Navigate to my.exotle.com and select your influencer program
Scroll down to the "Influencers" section of the influencer program page
Click "+ New Influencer"
Add the influencer's information
Promote your program (invite email)
You can choose to send the influencer an invite email when you create them, or you can send them an invite email at a later date. To do that, either edit the influencer and click "Send Invite Email", or bulk-upload multiple influencers via File Transfer (which your Implementation Manager or CSM can help you with!). Please note your campaign must be published for influencers to receive the invite email.
Influencer programs do not have a share experience, as these consumers do not need to go to a share experience with different share channels - rather, they just want their link/code to publish.
Analyze your program
When navigating to the program dashboard, you will be able to get event level data from this program - meaning you will be able to see how many people are participating, the number of conversions and the revenue driven.
If you want to get more granular data on individual influencer performance, scroll down to the Influencers section on your program page, where you'll see a table:
While the table default sorts by revenue descending, you can sort each column by clicking on the column heading. You can also search by and edit influencers via this UI.