Questions? Email the support team at hello@refer.fm.
This guide contains tips and advice for building your referral program and promoting it your listeners. We're here as a resource throughout your entire journey to ensure you are in the best position to reach your listeners in an effective way to grow your podcast with word-of-mouth.
Here's everything you need to know before launching your referral program.
Your referral reward is the incentive for sharing your podcast. While the range of possible rewards spans far and wide, your referral rewards can fall into up to three of three categories:
Your referral rewards can combine categories! For example, "Share the podcast with 5 friends and earn an ad-free version of the podcast. The top sharer each month will receive a $50 gift certificate to our store."
As you design your rewards and build your page, follow these best practices (and check out some examples for inspiration.)
Add a reward tier for signing up to share. Lowering the bar of entry for earning recognition tends to drive more listeners to take action. We’ve found that lowering the bar of referrals to attract more listeners to sign up increases referrals in the long run.
Check out Future Hindsight's referral program:
Already published your page? Email the support team at hello@refer.fm to update your reward tiers.
Create a brand for your referral program. Naming your referral program can inspire listeners to join, softening promotional language that might otherwise sound transactional.
Check out Sleep With Me's referral program, the Sleepy Referral Club:
Add video to your referral page. Draw your listeners in by adding a short video to your referral program page. You can use this video to express gratitude and describe the rewards for sharing your podcast. Check out this awesome example from Scooter of Sleep With Me.
Email an .mp4 file of your video to the support team at hello@refer.fm to add a video to your referral page.
Follow this guidance to promote your referral program to your listeners.
Your podcast is almost certainly the single loudest megaphone at your disposal to promote your referral program. See these calls-to-action from other podcasts for inspiration as you whip up your own script — and be sure to include a link to your referral page in your show notes, too.
But first, a quick announcement. You can now get paid to share The NewsWorthy with your friends, family, and coworkers. One of the best ways to support this show is to share it. So we want to pay to do that as a thank you. Get five bucks for every ten friends you refer to The NewsWorthy, up to $100. All you have to do is sign up to get your unique referral link, then share it out. Think email, text, Facebook groups, DMS, however you want to do it and tell people why they should check out the show. It could be the easiest one hundred bucks you make all year and you'll be supporting The NewsWorthy along the way. Look for the link to sign up in today's episode notes in your app, or simply go to thenewsworthy.com/share. You have now until the end of October to refer as many people as you can.
We’d love your help spreading that magic as far as possible. Please visit share.unseen.show to sign up for a unique link for sharing your favorite episode of Unseen with the people in your world. We’ll be counting each and every share, and whoever are the top 3 referrers by 11:59 ET on March 31st will receive exclusive Unseen merch. To learn more, head on over to share.unseen.show and sign up for your own unique link to your favorite episode and we’ll announce the top 3 exclusive merch winners on our upcoming April Fool’s special. One last time, that’s share.unseen.show.
This straightforward but easily overlooked step will ensure that your listeners are able to quickly find your referral page. Link to your referral page early in your show notes, and clearly.
Refer this episode of Receipts to your friends and win prizes! Share with 3 friends and get a shoutout, 5 friends and get a sticker, 15 friends and get a t-shirt, and for the top referrer each month, a panel of comedians will UPDATE YOUR DATING APP PROFILE (priceless!!). It takes less than a minute to sign-up.
Do you send a newsletter, updates when you release episodes, or something else in the form of email? Adding a section promoting your referral program to your email template is a low-lift way to consistently increase both new referrers and referrals over time.
Why email? Your email subscribers make up some of your most passionate listeners — the same ones who are apt to share your podcast with your friends.
Here are two examples:
To provide your newsletter subscribers with an even easier way to share episodes, you can now populate emails with your their unique share links by integrating Refer-O-Matic with your email automation tool like Mailchimp, Hubspot, or something else.
By integrating with Refer-O-Matic, you'll be able to automatically send new referrers and their properties — including name, email, unique share link, and login link — to any app that works with Zapier.
Email the support team at hello@refer.fm to set up an integration with Refer-O-Matic.
Like your newsletter, your website is another piece of real estate frequented by your biggest fans. Similarly, adding a link to your referral page is another low-lift way to attract new referrers over time.
Add an item to your nav bar, like on Unseen's website:
Add a section, like on KidNuz's website:
If you've already built up a following on Twitter, first of all — nice work! That is no small task. Here are some concrete ways to promote your referral program by way of Tweeting:
Tweet your leaderboard. This is an easy way to shout out your referrers on an ongoing basis while getting the word out.
Hype your referral reward.
Link to your referral page with new episodes. Do you already Tweet about new episodes when they drop? Reply to your own tweet with a link to share.
If you dig this episode, do us a favor and share it with one friend. Oh, and we'll send you some cool stuff if you do. Get your special link to share here: [Referral Link]
Use every channel available to you to tell people about your promotion, and use them often.
In each promotion, emphasize 1) the referral reward, and 2) that this is a great way to support the show.
Receipts with Jenny used Instagram to promote her podcast’s campaign with excellent imagery that aligns with her brand:
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