Referral programs

Qualify the channel first

Referral programs amplify existing word of mouth. They do not create it.

If customers are not already recommending you unprompted, a program will not produce them — it will produce incentive-motivated signups that churn. Check first: is anyone referring today, and what do they say when they do?

Incentive design

• Two-sided beats one-sided in most cases. It gives the referrer something to offer rather than something to gain, which removes the awkwardness that stops most referrals.
• Match the reward to the product's value, not to a round number. Account credit usually outperforms cash, and costs less.
• Reward the outcome you want. Paying on signup buys signups; paying on a retained, activated customer buys customers.
• Cash rewards attract fraud, and fraud scales faster than the program does. Budget for detection before launch, not after.

Mechanics

The referral has to be effortless at the moment of enthusiasm, which means the ask must appear right after a success moment — not in a settings page nobody visits.

• One-click share with pre-written text the referrer can edit.
• A link that works everywhere and survives being pasted into any app.
• Visible status: who was invited, what stage they reached, what has been earned. Ambiguity kills repeat referrals.
• The referred person's experience must be better than a normal signup. Landing them on the generic homepage wastes the introduction.

Fraud control

Self-referral, disposable accounts, and coordinated rings. Minimum viable controls: reward only on a qualifying event well past signup, hold a payout window, deduplicate on payment method and device, and cap per-referrer volume pending review.

Affiliates are a different program

Affiliates are a paid channel with commercial terms, not enthusiastic customers. They need attribution rules, cookie windows, prohibited-methods terms — brand bidding and coupon-site behavior in particular — and monitoring. Run without terms and you will pay commission on customers you already had.

Measuring

Track referred-customer retention against baseline. If referred customers retain worse, the incentive is buying the wrong behavior and the program is losing money while appearing to work.

Sources

references/sources.md in this skill lists the outside authorities that settle the questions here — what each one is authoritative for, and what you may do with it. Check them before answering on anything they cover, and cite what you used. Most are free to read and not free to reproduce; the use note on each is binding.

Never

• Launch referrals before the product retains. A referral program amplifies whatever is already there, churn included.
• Pay a reward before the referred account is real — activated, paid, and past the refund window.
• Ask for a referral in the same breath as an apology or an open support escalation.
• Run affiliates and customer referrals on the same terms. They attract different people and need different controls.