Developing a Custom Referral Marketing App – Shopify

Businesses strive for larger market acquisition. They look out for every possible move to convert more visitors to recurring customers.

Marketers know this is never easy. Businesses spend a fortune on their marketing effort ranging from rigorous email campaigns, third-party advertisements, Social media promotions, and whatnot. 

All these efforts just to find one more customer. Customer Acquisition Cost is the term that speaks of the success and failure of marketing efforts pulled by an organization.

According to Hubspot,

In the last 5 years, the CAC has increased by over 50%.

The marketing costs are increased, so is the challenge to survive the competition.

At this, business owners can convince their existing customers that they are the sellers. Owners can reward customers every time they generate a new lead in form of commissions, very much like they had incentivized their sales team, only with lesser marketing inputs.

Referral Marketing in Ecommerce

Does your e-commerce store really need a Shopify referral program app? Why not?

Referral marketing entails some hardcore benefits for the merchants:

1. Precision Targeting: 

The best part about your new sellers is, they know the new audience in-person. They know how to convince them to buy your product. That makes referral marketing beneficial for both the merchants and the buyers.

2. Trust Factor:

When a family member or a friend recommends something, they have most likely tried the product and had an excellent experience with the same. At least your friends ensure that only the best products reach you. Word of mouth definitely has an impact on e-commerce sales.

3. Accelerated Reach:

Bigcommerce confirms that while landing pages convert 2-3% of the visitors, the referral pages offer up to 14% conversion rates. With a Referral program, your brand can reach more people with enhanced chances for conversion.

Setting up a referral program in Shopify gets easier with numerous pre-designed applications in the app store. The business owners can readily install any to their Shopify stores to make the best of referral marketing.

The Shopify development team at The Brihaspati Infotech recently had the opportunity to build a referral app for Shopify stores with the tailored needs of a client. The app boasts some serious features for the new-age merchants allowing them to create and manage group shops with ease.

At the same time, customers can have their private shops, shareable among their friends, as shown in the following picture. As it depicts, the referrer is the first member in the chain, followed by the rest of the referred customers: 

The eCommerce referral marketing game only gets more exciting!!

Our Custom Shopify Referral Program App

Planning out a bespoke referral program for Shopify is easier said than done. The first challenge was to understand the client’s exact ideas, the commissioning chain, and the available assistance from Shopify platform. 

As the Shopify referral app came with unique features, there was no immediate reference to the execution. Every logic was supposed to be designed by us. However, it’s the ability to design tailored solutions from scratch that makes experienced eCommerce development agencies special.

Custom Shopify Referral: The Workflow

Once the referral app for Shopify is installed, the eCommerce store is ready to serve referral program features for merchants and the end-users alike. The app initiates a referral link as soon as a customer makes a purchase. The customers can find a custom message on their checkout page regarding their chance of earning commissions.

The link forwards the users to a private shop created for the referrers and the new customers. The shopping page is valid for up to 6 customers(including the referrer) where each user is offered the products at discounted rates. 

The app uniquely manages the commission. The 6 customers are staged in a three-tier commissioning platform. 

The first customer gets no discount at the time of purchase. Commissions are automated to the referrer based on the tiers they cover:

Level 1: First referral purchase

Level 2: Third Referral purchase

Level 3: Fifth Referral purchase

The referrer receives the commissions in the form of refunds. The app is designed to effectively manage the refunds to ensure that the entire referral system is in order. In the following picture, we can find that the app automates the 10% discount to the referrer.

The referrer will receive more refunds every time the referral link claims a new milestone.

In a world of referral applications that limit referral programs with a one-time commission, your users can now get commissioned every time they reach a new milestone. This will encourage them to find more customers for your store.

Custom Admin Dashboard for Shopify Referrals

The app empowers the Shopify admins with custom referral management software. The owners have the desired freedom to create innumerable group purchase campaigns for Shopify store customers. 

The dashboard offers easy options to select their campaign name, the products, and the discount milestones of their choice. The dashboard automatically fetches products and collections from your Shopify store, making it easier for you to manage the product groupings.

The custom shopping page offered to the customer only has the products added in the campaign, allowing you to sell products of your choice.

The best part, the admins can take insights about the campaigns. They can find the campaigns that have performed the best, the products that have led to the most conversions in a graphical based interface.

Shop owners can thus optimize their campaigns clubbing the best products by their side, and the best discount margins that will eventually find them more customers.

Sharing referrals with custom Shopify Referral app

What is a referral without the right medium to share them? The customers should be given the freedom to find their contacts in every possible means.

Our Shopify referral program app development lets the customers choose a variety of mediums to share the Shopify group purchase link. They can select popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit along with direct channels like Whatsapp and Email.

If that was not enough, the referrers can directly copy-paste the link generated by the referral app.

Mobile optimized Shopify Referral app

This is no more hidden that a majority of the customers prefer mobile phones over desktop during e-commerce purchases. At this, it turns imperative that your Shopify app is ready for mobile screens.

The custom Shopify referral marketing app is designed keeping in the eye that it finds a perfect fit even on the smaller screens. It is highly mobile-responsive allowing the referrers and the end-users to access it even when they are not shopping on their desktops.

With that, the referral program app fulfills every need of the client and the Shopify stores that have been longing for a great referral program app by their side. Now that our Shopify experts have developed every feature from scratch, it gets easier for us to customize them for you. With the basic layout at its place, we can offer a similar Shopify app for referral programs in a snap, saving you precious time and money.

Our Experience with custom Shopify app development

The Brihaspati Infotech is a pioneer when it comes to third-party eCommerce development. The team has received appreciation for its quality service across several platforms like Clutch. 

In the past 10+ years in the industry, we have been approached for developing some excellent out-of-box solutions across the leading e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and a few others. Our experts have helped the clients initiating the organizational reforms they’ve always longed for.

In one of our recent blogs, we have discussed how we developed a custom Loyalty Program for Shopify for one of our clients. The blog discusses the benefits of a loyalty program and how we transformed the client’s ideas into a full-fledged Shopify application.

Summing up with custom Shopify referral app development

E-commerce is changing, every week, every day opening gates for parallel businesses. We have seen some crucial business solutions that didn’t exist 5 years back. And the initiative to find a solution only comes when you have spent some years in the industry, experienced the drawback of the infrastructure, and felt the urge to replace it.

You can Contact Us directly to book a consultation with our industry experts. We will tailor the solution perfectly to your needs.