Raul Galera is the Chief Advocate at ReferralCandy, the #1 referral program platform online.
ReferralCandy.com is one of the pioneer referral marketing companies in the eCommerce industry. They have worked with thousands of brands, including Reebok, UniQlo, and Tidal, among many others.
Since its launch in 2009, they have over 30,000 paying users with over $10M in annual revenue. What’s even cooler is that since they’ve paid out over $300M in referral commissions to clients.
Referrals are critical for a lot of businesses. For instance, MorningBrew has reached over 2.5M subscribers and attributes 30% of its subscribers to their referral program. The same goes for Harry’s, when they gathered 100K emails in a single week.
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What you will learn
- The top 3 tools for a virtual business
- How to scale digital and social “word of mouth” and loyalty for an online business
- How to maintain company culture in a hybrid business model
- The importance of timing
- How to grow your business by 30% without spending a fortune (referral marketing)
Transcript
Jeff Bullas
00:00:03 – 00:01:05
Hi everyone and welcome to the Jeff Bullas show. Today with me, Raul Galera now. Raul is the Chief Advocate of ReferralCandy, the #1 referral program platform online and we’ll discover a little bit more about that soon.
ReferralCandy has been one of the pioneer referral marketing companies in the ecommerce industry. It’s worked with thousands of brands, including Reebok, Uniqlo and Tidal, among many others. Since its launch in 2009, they have over 30,000 paying users with over $10 million in annual revenue. What’s even more cool is that since they paid out over 300 million in referral commissions to clients and we’ll discover a bit more about that as well.
So referrals are the key for a lot of businesses as we know, for instance, Morning Brew has reached over 2.5 million subscribers, and that would be really cool to actually dive into that case study a bit, from using ReferralCandy program. Same goes for Harry’s and I assume that is the Harry’s shaving brand I would suggest, Is that correct?
Raul Galera
00:01:06 – 00:01:07
Yep,
Jeff Bullas
00:01:07 – 00:01:31
Okay, and where they’ve gained 100,000 emails using the platform in a single week. We’re gonna talk about is basically what ReferralCandy does, how it can help your business, how it can help online stores and we’re gonna talk about the power of word of mouth marketing and loyalty. So welcome to show, Raul. Great to have you here.
Raul Galera
00:01:31 – 00:01:32
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Jeff Bullas
00:01:33 – 00:02:15
So Raul is actually in Mexico at the moment because he can, because as we know in the more digital and virtual world we live in, you can almost work from anywhere. So if you notice the lovely white sort of whitewashed walls behind that doesn’t look like a corporate office, it isn’t, it’s in Mexico somewhere.
So Raul, what got you into this type of work with ReferralCandy and then we’ll talk more about what ReferralCandy does. So how did you get into ReferralCandy and get this role?
Raul Galera
00:02:16 – 00:04:12
Yeah, I was also in, I’m from Spain and after I finished college I went to work for a French startup in Santiago in Chile, so I moved across the Atlantic and I moved to Chile and I worked for this company for a couple of years. And that was kind of like my first, you know, kind of work experience after college headed sales was a little bit of business development, but it was mostly a sales position. And I guess that’s going towards what I decided that that’s gonna be my background and that’s what I like doing and that’s what I wanted to kind of specialize in. And then, so I worked at this company, we did recruiting for other startups but then after actually from being exposed to other startups that obviously were my clients and you know, kind of like learning what other tech companies were doing. I decided that I wanted to be involved in the, tech world. I wanted to work for a software company. And so after I left Chile in 2016, I went on AngelList and I started looking because I knew the AngelList was pretty much the only place to find back then, at least to find a remote job or at least to find companies that were open to hire people remotely because it wasn’t that coming back then in 2016 was only five years ago, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t really not coming.
And I saw the ReferralCandy had a sales position and I started looking into the company and what they did. I particularly loved the fact that it was a pretty kind of like honest way of doing marketing. It’s basically like turning your customer base into your marketing people. So I thought, you know, it must be pretty easy to sell this product, right? Um and so instead of applying through AngelList, I sent a cold email to the CEO, to Dinesh, he replied, we had a couple of interviews and the rest is history.
Jeff Bullas
00:04:13 – 00:04:25
Yes. And you’ve been working virtually ever since in other words. But there’s a ReferralCandy, you actually have to have an office or they don’t, essentially just are all virtual or remote.
Raul Galera
00:04:26 – 00:05:37
Yeah, so we’re obviously all remote now since March 2020, but we had an office actually before then and I used to go to Singapore. Um, at least I don’t know if I mentioned it, but ReferralCandy is in Singapore and I used to go to Singapore a couple of times a year to, you know, to get to meet people in person and like, you know, hang out at the office and work from there. And, you know, it’s always, it’s always good to meet your colleagues in person. It actually took me, I think it was like a year and a half before I actually met my boss in person. So yeah, it was, it was a while. Um but yeah, we had an office. We’re actually lucky that we are at least ended like right before, like actually right after covid. So when we’re all remote and I don’t know exactly what we’re gonna do after because we’ve started to hire people, you know, that are also working remotely like myself and and also some of our our colleagues are starting to also kind of like travel and experience a little bit of this kind of like digital nomad type of set up. So we wouldn’t know exactly what’s going to look like in terms of having a physical office, we might have some sort of hybrid between in person and remote. But yeah, we don’t really know yet.
Jeff Bullas
00:05:37 – 00:05:39
Yeah. Well I think a lot of companies don’t know.
Raul Galera
00:05:39 – 00:05:40
Yeah.
Jeff Bullas
00:05:40 – 00:05:48
And some are going to go totally remote, some are going to be hybrid and some are going to suppose dragged people kicking and screaming back into the office.
Raul Galera
00:05:48 – 00:06:14
Exactly. Oh, I think I read somewhere that I forget which company was, I think it was like there were a couple of financial companies that this summer, they announced that they were going to force everybody to go back to the office in September and I think like 30% of the workforce threatened to quit and I don’t think they actually end up quitting. I think also because they reversed the decision. But yeah, a lot of people are not are not willing to go back to an office at all.
Jeff Bullas
00:06:14 – 00:07:27
Yeah, it’s a very interesting time and I think we’re basically accelerated remote or virtual work by maybe 10 years is my sort of what I think happened. So we basically moved 10 years into the future because COVID basically accelerated the evolution of how we communicate and work.
Before we get into what ReferralCandy does and a bit more about what you do apart from travel and just have fun. We know you’re working really hard, the boss might be watching this. So in fact by watching this, he’s actually seeing you are working because you’re being here. So look, you’re already good.
So how do you maintain company culture and communication at ReferralCandy because it’s very interesting in the way different companies do it. So what is like a typical week look like from team meetings, in individual work and recording asynchronous videos, which is the latest thing about asynchronous communication, which anyone can view at any time because it’s recorded. What’s a typical week look like for ReferralCandy in a virtual office world?
Raul Galera
00:07:28 – 00:10:20
That’s a really good question. So we’ve, so before covid we were mostly kind of like a traditional company in the sense of working from an office. It’s true that even my colleagues that they had to work from the office, they still had a pre flexible schedule in the sense that, you know, you don’t have to come in at a certain time and leave at another time and you can work from home if you want to. Um you know, nobody’s going to ask questions, you know, just because you stand up and leave, right? Like it’s it’s it’s really, I was really, really flexible and like we’ve always had a company, we’ve had the culture of, you know, we’re hiring you because you are a professional in your field and you know how to do your job. So, you know, we’re not here to tell you when or how you have to work, you’re just here to deliver. And so that worked really well for people that like going to an office, like our colleagues in Singapore and people like myself that from the very beginning, I was looking for a remote position in which I have kind of like a little more freedom in terms of where I work from, right. Um and so one of the things, so the reason why I started mentioning this is because one of the main, kind of like, I’ll say like cultural aspects that or something that we did at ReferralCandycan that unfortunately didn’t get to participate that much for when I actually went to Singapore, what we’re having team lunches, so we will have lunch counter to the office every day. And the reason for that was to be able to have kind of like conversations away from computers, you know, get to talk to people that are from different departments and like, you know, kind of create this sense of camaraderie um that actually state after we all went remote. Um and so in terms of how to build this kind of company culture, I think it’s more, it’s more about kind of like how do you organize your company in my opinion and kind of like that, that motto of “You’re a professional, we’re hiring you for a reason.” We’re hiring you because you know how to do your job and we don’t need to tell you how to do it. That’s that’s the reason why for us it was super easy to transition from physical to online and we didn’t really see any sort of, you know, kind of like downtime in terms of performance or in terms of how our teams were organizing themselves, because we have the structure in place on top of that, obviously we still try to have like online events within the company uh either on a weekly basis or a monthly basis, in which we might do kind of like an online game type of, you know, type of event for a couple hours or team meetings in which, you know, the whole company kind of meets together and we share updates about what different teams are working. But yeah, it’s I think it’s the fact that we had kind of like that strong culture of, you know, how we organize ourselves as a company that has allowed us to move into a virtual world without really seeing any sort of hiccup.
Jeff Bullas
00:10:21 – 00:11:25
It’s true. So in other words, the company culture was essentially to hire the right attitude at number one and that means higher grownups actually. So that’s really good because the old culture was management by walking around, in other words, the boss is gonna see you otherwise you’re not gonna do work, you’re just gonna be on Facebook all the time. So in terms of team meetings, I just want to because I think it’s important that I think entrepreneurs are either starting or already out there growing their business but there’s different ways to work and there’s not one size fits all. So how many team meetings like would you have a week for example? And how’s that broken up in terms of organization? Like overall one company meeting maybe. Is there a recorded videos sent out once a week by the boss, CEO, and founder? And then do you have individual sort of smaller team meetings? What’s that look like in a week?
Raul Galera
00:11:26 – 00:13:31
Yeah so I can speak from some, I run partnerships but that’s part of the marketing department and so I can speak for the marketing department, other kind of like engineering and product and support, they have kind of different setups but from my personal experience with my week looks like we usually start the week with a marketing meeting in which we have, again we kinda like update ourselves into what we worked on the past week, what we’re intending to work on this week. Any blockers, anything we might need from other coworkers, that’s gonna like the right time to bring it up. And that is what happens on Mondays. And then I typically have one on one with the marketing director, with the CEO, with the co founders. That’s either on a weekly basis or on a bi weekly basis. And then on a monthly basis we have one kind of like the all-hands meeting in which the whole company cannot share updates. Obviously on top of that, there’s always, you know, ad-hoc meetings that pop up, but that’s kind of like the main structure.
And another thing is that since we have colleagues working in many different time zones, we try to keep communication as a synchronized as possible in the sense that, you know, unless something it’s truly urgent, you know, if you get a message from somebody on Slack, that doesn’t mean that, you know, they’re expecting you to reply right away. It’s just kind of like the, the easiest way to communicate. That’s something that a lot of companies have apparently struggled with is that they kind of understood that Slack was like immediate kind of like a text message, you know, you’re, you’re supposed to reply right away. Otherwise they would use email and so that I know that created a lot of fiction, friction, sorry, in some companies. But yeah, I think that especially if you have a distributed team having that sense of uh kind of like, you know, a synchronous work and your team is remote to your team is also working from multiple times since, you know, exactly what what what I’m referring to. I think that’s a key, like knowing that, you know, that people are working from different places and they have different schedules and respecting that.
Jeff Bullas
00:13:31 – 00:13:58
Yeah, it’s right. You just got to work out a way in which it works with company and so you can maintain company culture and that’s really important as well. And you know, feeling of belonging as well, that you’re involved, that you’re contributing all that. So you mentioned some talks, you mentioned a Slack. So in terms of the key tools that you guys used to facilitate and collaborate with, what are some of the key tools that you guys are found useful for your work?
Raul Galera
00:13:59 – 00:14:26
Um yeah, I would say number one is Slack. And then on top of that, for project management, we either use, I was gonna say Clubhouse, now it’s called Shortcut, or Trello. Those are the kind of like the two main tools that we use for kind of like coordinating projects. Um I think the engineering and product, they might use other kind of tech stuff, but for the marketing department, that’s what we work with.
Jeff Bullas
00:14:26 – 00:16:21
Yeah, we used Trello and as I said to my team about a year ago, I said it has changed my life. Um and of course then you’ve got Zoom, which is, you may be a video channel. But yeah, Trello for me has just been this tool that you don’t, you can track and due processes you can keep, it doesn’t turn into an email thread, you know nightmare. And the team basically had to drag me a little bit kicking and screaming into Trello. My marketing manager said to me, when are you gonna use it, Jeff? I went, ‘Just be patient, I’m working on it.’ And so, because I may be the least technical out of all.
Look, look, I started my own WordPress blog in 2009 so I can do stuff except my team to do it much faster than me whereas I’m sort of wrestling, I’m wrestling and wrangling the software. And um, so, and one little thing happened before we even started here. I had a virtual background I didn’t want to use and had to remove it. So, my team would have fixed it in about 10 seconds, took me about 10 minutes. No, no, it didn’t take me 10 minutes, it took me a couple minutes. But yeah, so it’s uh and that’s the thing too, isn’t that virtual work, is that a lot of the older generation would struggle a bit more of that? And I’ve seen that. Is there going, where’s the button to join or how do I actually and where’s and why’s my sound not working on Zoom. Um yeah, and yeah, it’s really cool. So it’s great to hear what, how you work now.
Let’s get on to the main topic of what is a ReferralCandy and what do they do? And the third question which we can answer in sequence if you like is how does it work? So yeah, so let’s dive into what’s ReferralCandy Yes. Tell us what it is.
Raul Galera
00:16:21 – 00:17:01
So ReferralCandy is an app for e-commerce stores and we basically allow them to set up and run customer referral programs on autopilot. So it’s, you know, if you have an online store and it’s been operating for a while and you have, you know, a number of customers, there’s always gonna be that factor of water mouth. That’s potentially going to play out naturally just because your customers are going to talk to their friends and family about the product that they bought from your store. And so what we do is just to put that on steroids, just like make it easy for everybody, make it easy for the store to set it up and make it easy for customers to refer their friends.
Jeff Bullas
00:17:02 – 00:17:35
Okay, so now where did the idea come from ReferralCandy? Do you know that? Because part of my curiosity is what I love with the interviews with senior management of companies and also the founders of companies is where did your idea come from? Because people are full of ideas. Some people, some people just have ideas and don’t act on them. Some people have ideas and act on them all the time. So where did the idea for ReferralCandy come from?
Raul Galera
00:17:36 – 00:18:34
Yeah, that’s a really good question. So I was obviously not part of the company. I was I was actually in college, but by the time that this idea came up that our founders came up with the idea, so I was still pretty far from from joining the company, but in 2009 both of the founders who are both from Singapore, but they met in the US because they were attending Carnegie Mellon and kind of one of the top Nigerian schools over there. And when they got back to Singapore, they were having lunch with a friend that had just started an online store, but only in 2009 was, you know, a lot different than what it is right now, but they started this online store. I forget exactly what product this person was selling but the kind of like the conversation came about the fact that he, so social media was on I guess on the rise back then. I mean I kind of remember my college days, that’s when Facebook started to get really popular.
Jeff Bullas
00:18:34 – 00:18:37
So what year was that basically?
Raul Galera
00:18:37 – 00:20:01
2009, 2010. Yeah I mean I was on Facebook all day, you know in in class, I always had my Facebook tab open, you know it’s I remember that was exactly the kind of like the boom of Facebook and so this this uh this entrepreneur that was friend with our co founders, he had this online store and he knew that his customers were talking to their friends and family about it, but he didn’t have a way of tracking that down, he didn’t have a way of encouraging them to keep referring. And he also wanted to leverage social media, right? This thing where you know everybody’s hanging out and we’re all sharing links that we’re enjoying, and he said, well there’s gotta be a way that we can large leverage social media to encourage people to refer. And that’s how the idea came about. Obviously that went through several kind of a process of iteration processes as a product and eventually became what ReferralCandy is today. Uh kind of fun fact, we um last year was our 10 year anniversary because the product actually launched in 2010, so 2020 was our 10-year anniversary. And uh one of the things that I managed to find on internet archive, a screenshot from the Shopify app store in 2010 with our, with our app in there, there were only a handful of apps in the app store. Uh and uh yeah, we had our logo with a different name back then, but it was there.
Jeff Bullas
00:20:03 – 00:20:10
Yeah, it’s fascinating. I started my online brand in 2009 as well.
Raul Galera
00:20:10 – 00:20:11
Oh well yeah.
Jeff Bullas
00:20:11 – 00:20:55
I started writing about social media and started a blog as everyone did back in 2009, right? So blogging was at its peak and for me social media, but the other thing that obviously I think ReferralCandy timing was mostly good because social media back then was very organic before the algorithms crept in to stop people talking to their tribe unless you paid for it. So obviously the timing for ReferralCandy would have been quite good. So tell us how simply, how would an online store e-commerce to or implement ReferralCandy just in a simple thumbnail sketch and what it does?
Raul Galera
00:20:55 – 00:22:59
Yeah. Absolutely. So setting it up, it’s fairly simple if you’re on one of the kind of the main uh e commerce platforms. So if you are on Shopify and BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magenta. The integration, it’s either, you know, just kind of like a one click or you know that requires just a couple of steps. So um integration is fairly simple just to get started. Even if you have your own kind of custom stores set up and you’re not in one of these platforms, you can still integrate with ReferralCandy, we have an API and we also have a couple of other ways that you can integrate ReferralCandy with your store. And so after you set it up, after you integrate, the first step that you need to take is to decide what are going to be the rewards. So how are you going to reward your customers to encourage them to refer their friends? And also how are you going to encourage their friends to make that first purchase? So you can either do that. So you can either encourage customers to refer by giving them discount or cash if you want. You can do that as well or some sort of like custom gift, like a free product or something like that. And then for the friend, we also give the option of offering a coupon code that the friend can use on the first purchase. And in my opinion sometimes it’s that it’s even more important than the reward for the advocate, giving a higher reward to the friend sometimes pays off even better than giving a higher reward to to the customer. Um and then after they set it up, obviously ReferralCandy comes with a set of email templates and pages. So you can kind of promote your referral program on autopilot. So after you launch, ReferralCandy automatically invites new customers to join the program. It gives them a unique referral link so they can start referring their friends. Um and then once the friend completes the purchase, the customer that made the recommendation gets the reward and the friend who is not a new customer gets an invite to join the referral program and the cycle starts all over again,
Jeff Bullas
00:23:00 – 00:23:07
So it’s pretty simple really. So you, how many platforms, e-commerce platforms do you integrate into? Pretty well, every, every one of them?
Raul Galera
00:23:08 – 00:23:27
Yeah, pretty much everyone. Yeah, so Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magenta, Volusion, 3D Cart and yeah and then uh like three additional integration options if your stores are not in one of those platforms, there’s still three other ways that you can integrate with us.
Jeff Bullas
00:23:27 – 00:23:44
So um what else I was going to say about asking about this. So in terms of some of the case studies you mentioned, so basically Morning Brew, can you tell us a little bit about how Morning Brew have used it and what success they’ve had with it?
Raul Galera
00:23:45 – 00:25:57
Yeah, so I believe Morning Brew uh it’s running their own referral program, they’re not using ReferralCandy, they have the builders, they’re either either build their own platform um or there might be using some sort of solution, but it’s true that Morning Brew, it’s definitely one of those um referral program examples that we all have in mind. You know, everybody that’s working in the referral marketing industry remembers, well I would say remembers because I was going to talk about previous referral programs like Dropbox and Airbnb and Uber and you know PayPal, all these referral programs that help companies grow pretty much from scratch and more the Morning Brew examples, it’s one of them. Uh I think what all these referral programs have in common it’s the fact that they had a pretty interesting set of rewards that they were really simple for people to understand. So for example in the Uber, example it was around $5 or $10 and it was very fairly simple to pitch and see there, you know, I get $10 you get $10 you know, simple as that. Used my referral link, sign up, sign up for Uber and we both get something out of it. Same for Airbnb, right? Um and so obviously something else that unifies all of these referral programs that they have really good products. So Morning Brew, Paypal, Dropbox, social products that were disruptive and really good and people enjoy using those products, so referrals were probably coming organically anyway, so putting a referral to program on top of that, it was just a very easy way to scale it up and turn it into a customer acquisition monster like it did for for all of them.
Jeff Bullas
00:25:27 – 00:25:32
So you said to me before was basically we put your referral program on steroids.
Raul Galera
00:25:32 – 00:25:34
Yeah, exactly.
Jeff Bullas
00:25:34 – 00:25:59
So okay so let’s say you’re not an online store per say in other words you’re not a Shopify, you’re not a BigCommerce but maybe you’re selling a product or a service, you might be selling content. Okay, it might be some training. Maybe it’s hosted on WordPress for example and there’s plugins for WordPress. So essentially referral program could help people build an email list out of that, is that correct? Something like that.
Raul Galera
00:26:00 – 00:26:34
Yeah. I mean so the referral program, the goal is to generate purchases at the end of the day. So we’re actually, the number one metric that we show merchants is its revenue. It’s how much revenue is your referral program generating uml from your customer referrals. So I mean yeah you’re requiring email addresses as well, you’re requiring customer information and you can use that to kind of continue growing your referral program. But the number one thing that you’re going to acquire from your program is revenue. It’s new revenue actually from customers that weren’t aware of your store before.
Jeff Bullas
00:26:34 – 00:26:41
So does ReferralCandy plug into WordPress sort of stores and so on? Does it do that?
Raul Galera
00:26:41 – 00:26:42
WooCommerce. Yeah.
Jeff Bullas
00:26:42 – 00:26:44
Okay. Through WooCommerce.
Raul Galera
00:26:44 – 00:26:45
Yeah.
Jeff Bullas
00:26:45 – 00:26:51
Okay. Right. Are there any other platforms beyond WooCommerce that, you said it’s different ways to actually do it?
Raul Galera
00:26:52 – 00:28:18
Yeah. So we have three other integration options. So we have a like a fairly simple email or javascript integration that, so I guess the easiest one that’s not a native integration, it’s the email integration which basically means that uh we need the store to insert a piece of code on the Thank You page which is the page that the customers land after they go through the checkout. Um and then either forward or BCC us the emails so we can see who is the customer that made the recommendation, the timestamp, the amount and all that. We can use it to make sure that the person that clicked on the referral link is the same person that went through the store and made the purchase and we can verify the whole referral transaction.
The second way of integrating with the ReferralCandy if you’re not a native integration, it’s the javascript integration. It’s a little bit more complex than the email integration but for a developer it’s you know they can get it done in just a couple of hours and then for stores that want maybe something a little more complex. We have the API which allows them to do a lot more stuff in terms of creating kind of custom pages, custom emails for their referral program. So those are kind of like the three uh guess standalone ways of integrating with referral candy if you’re not on a supported platform or or a platform that we have an integration with.
Jeff Bullas
00:28:18 – 00:28:35
Okay so the idea is that you’re trying to be as open as possible to almost any platform that a purchase happens that you can then send them a message. An automated message for them to actually for them to share or get a reward for joining.
Raul Galera
00:28:35 – 00:28:49
Yeah exactly. I mean we try to be kind of platform agnostic in the sense that at the end of the day anybody that has a checkout can integrate with ReferralCandy. So you know we’re trying to make it as simple as possible.
Jeff Bullas
00:28:49 – 00:29:24
Alright. That’s very cool because a lot of our listeners are trying to grow a side hustle for example or want to start a business and they’re going ‘okay I’m going to sell something but it’s not gonna be an online store.’ So you’re saying ‘yes, ReferralCandy can use for something where you actually just purchasing a product or a service of some type.’
Okay cool. That’s really good. So what’s the next sort of is there any evolving products coming out of ReferralCandy that moving into new markets or products with ReferralCandy or is it just basically trying to make a better product and grow it?
Raul Galera
00:29:24 – 00:31:03
Yeah I mean yeah that’s kind of always been our focus is to make it make it better. It’s true that there’s still a lot of room to grow within referral marketing itself. It’s right now because I mean obviously there’s the affiliate side which we have a lot of customers using ReferralCandy to run affiliate program which are slightly different than referral programs. We also have merchants using ReferralCandy to work with influencers. So we’re trying to, you know, kind of like grow our product in a way that we can capture all these different forms of water mouth on top of that. We also, we also, you know, we’re always trying to experiment before Covid, we had a product called Candy Bar that was trying to help brick and mortar stores to run loyalty programs. So kind of like change the physical uh kinda like punch cards for digital ones. Obviously with Covid that got a little upside down and on the other side, referral candidate was working on e commerce, it’s what experience a lot of growth after March 2020. So right now all of our focus on ReferralCandy like you said, making the product better. Um which obviously, you know, any product, there’s always a lot of room to grow and especially now there’s a lot of competition uh in the e-commerce space. So we, you know, we’re one of the leaders in the space but we gotta fight for it, right? You can’t really, you can, you can never relax. But at the same time we’re also looking at experiments on how we can uh still in the referral marketing space, how we can add additional products for features for all these different ways, all these different forms of water mouth that currently exist.
Jeff Bullas
00:31:04 – 00:31:25
So what is um so what is some of your best, like what sort of revenue growth percent? What some of your best case studies or you don’t have to name it necessarily, but what sort of uplift in sales as a percentage that have you achieved for some of your customers?
Raul Galera
00:31:25 – 00:33:37
Yeah. So some of our customers are being able to see a 30 over 30% increase in revenue and by increasing revenue. I mean, new revenue from new customers on a monthly basis from these ReferralCandy. So this is revenue that again, new revenue. Its customers are buying from you for the first time that it’s likely they’re going to continue doing so because they’re not familiar with your brand. And one thing in particular that referred customers have it’s the fact that they, this is uh this is research behind it. I am not making it up, but there is uh there’s research that shows that referred customers tend to spend more than customers acquired through other channels and also stick around for longer. So this is new revenue that you’re getting from new customers that have been referred by their friends for the first time. But you need to keep in mind that their lifetime value is gonna be a lot bigger than that customers have been acquired through other channels. That also might stick around for a lot longer, but that’s probably one of the best case studies that we have. It’s not unusual for merchants to have maybe not 30% but 10% monthly increase with new revenue from new customer, which it can really make an impact on your, on your bottom line, especially when you consider that referral marketing, it’s a performance based marketing channel. So you’re basically paying only when you are generating revenue, you don’t have to worry about a budget for an ad campaign that may or may not perform well here. They’re only paying or you’re only giving discounts when your customers are referring friends and those friends are making purchases. So, that’s kind of the uh, like I said, it’s not unusual for customers to get to that 10%. In fact, um, we we typically tell merchants and that’s actually something they can see on, on our website, on on our ROI page is that if you kind of like follow the recommended steps that we lay out on how to how to launch a successful referral program, Uh, it shouldn’t be difficult to get at least a 2% increase in in, in your revenue from, from your program.
Jeff Bullas
00:33:39 – 00:34:16
That’s really good because everyone, especially in a world where social media has become less organic and basically the platform is trying to push you into page. This is in essence, it’s a natural organic way of growing your customer and revenue because you’re the old word of mouth and of course it’s digital word of mouth that we’re talking about here. So yeah, so, um, just to wrap it up, so how can people find you guys, ReferralCandy, what is the best way to contact ReferralCandy, social media or email, whatever. What’s the best way to contact you guys?
Raul Galera
00:34:17 – 00:34:41
Yeah. So, uh, will be our website, ReferralCandy.com. On social media we’re ReferralCandy (@ReferralCandy) on pretty much any platform, except for TikTok. We’re not there yet, but we might be there as soon. Who knows? Um, and then if they want to contact me directly, that will be, uh, Raul G. So raulg@referralcandy.com. I’m always happy to, uh, to start a conversation there.
Jeff Bullas
00:34:43 – 00:35:07
Thanks Raul for fabulous conversation. I think the platform sounds very cool and we might have implemented ourselves actually. I’ll speak to the team, um, and we’ll share this with our audience. So thank you very much for your time. Has been a pleasure and great to chat to, from me in Sydney and you in Mexico and look forward to maybe bumping you in real life somewhere in one corner of this big planet.
Raul Galera
00:35:08 – 00:35:10
Absolutely, yeah. Thanks for having me. It was my pleasure.
Jeff Bullas
00:35:10 – 00:35:12
Thanks Raul. It’s been a pleasure to.