Automated Referral Rewards

Incentivize your customers to refer their friends to your business through the Occasion platform by offering customers a reward if they refer a friend who books an order through you.

In this article:

1. Enabling Referral Rewards
2. How it works!
3. Emails associated with referral rewards
4. Redeeming Rewards
5. Deciding on Rewards amount
6. Disable Rewards

Enable Referral Rewards

• From your Occasion account, go to Settings > My account > Marketing Channels.
• Scroll to find "Promote Word-of-Mouth Referrals" and turn the toggle on.
• You can then set the amount of the reward.
  
  

All Done! You can disable or update rewards anytime from this page. 

How does it work? 

From the customers' perspective, referring a friend is simple.

1. After booking an order, your customer will be receive an email requesting them to refer his or her friends (see below).
2. The customer can invite their friends via text, email, Facebook among many other channels.
3. Once the friend books, your customer will receive an email containing the gift card, which can be redeemed at your business.

When is the rewards prompt sent to a customer?

The referral rewards prompt is only sent to a customer, when the booking meets the following criteria:

1. The booking was completed by the customer on a booking page, and not by the merchant using QuickOrder.
2. The event booked was marked as a "Public" event, and not a "Private" event or a Gift Certificate.
3. The amount paid for the booking was greater than 0 (not free).

Emails associated with referral rewards

When the feature is enabled, the first email is sent to the customer 2 hours after booking - prompting them to refer your business to their friends.

The second email is sent to the friend, when the friend is referred via email.

When a referral was successful i.e. someone books, the original customer will receive a reward in the form of this third email.

If referral rewards are set to expire, then the fourth email sent to the Customer is to remind them to redeem their redeem their earned reward.

Redeeming Rewards

The rewards are similar to "Gift Cards" on Occasion. All issued, unused rewards are visible on your " Gift Cards" page in your Occasion account.

The customer, when rewarded, receives a unique code that they can use to redeem online or in-store.

Deciding on Rewards amount

We know this can be tricky for everyone -- so we recommend setting the rewards as 25% of your average order value. If your average sales per transaction is $40, then set the referral rewards at $10. If you have history with Occasion, you see what your average order value is on your sales analytics page.

Disabling Rewards

To disable rewards, go to the " Referral Rewards" page, and click "Disable" button.

Setting Expiration Date for Rewards

You can set the number of days after which a reward expires in your Account Settings.