Word of mouth (WOM) has always worked well and, since the advent of social networks, the power of recommendations is greater. There are many companies that use referral marketing within their overall marketing strategy and promote it by incorporating incentives.

The referral program, also called Member Get Member (MGM), refers to the method of attracting new clients (godchildren) through an invitation sent by current clients (godparents).

The main reason is that 83% of people trust the recommendations of their friends and family. On the other hand, more than half of customers say they are more likely to recommend something to a friend if they receive some tangible incentive to do so.

On the other hand is the reward the user receives by sharing, one of the most notorious success stories is the case of Dropbox, who grew 3,900% in 15 months using a referral program.

In the case of Privalia, we had been using MGM under the name “Invite and win” for 8 years and we were obtaining good results. Around 40% of new members came through this referral program, with a positive impact of more than € 1M / year. With such good data, nothing indicated that there was a reason to change it, indeed, anyone dared to question or modify it.

The operation was like most referral programs of a few years ago: where the user (or godfather) entered the email of her friends or imported her contact list (godchildren) and sent an invitation email.

However, the definitive push to change this outdated system was given by the Spanish Agency for Data Protection (AGPD) through the Organic Law for Data Protection (LOPD) and the Law of Services of the Information Society and Commerce Electronic (LSSI), which questioned the data transfer procedure, without prior consent, used in this type of system. And that, definitely, in May 2018, it was going to end.

Privalia’s Advertising Technology (AdTech) team, in which I participated as a Lead Product Designer (UX / UI), was in charge of carrying out the new referral program. My responsibility was to design a new, simpler and more intuitive experience that helps increase conversion and complies with current legislation.

We work with Scrum methodology, executing weekly sprints in a collaborative environment and in constant communication. For my part, I worked with the Design Thinking methodology, coordinating my deliveries with the team’s sprints.

I interviewed different users, who have and have not used the MGM system, to understand their current needs and problems.

• There were users who had seen it but had never used it, a large part of these users did not understand the reward system.
• The users who used it did so mainly motivated by the reward of € 10 or € 20 they got.
• Many users did not know more than three emails by heart (generally relatives or close friends), this was serious because it limited their radius of influence.

On the other hand, I observed the behavior of our users with the referral program on our platform to understand their current needs and problems.

• The invitation link that the godson received led to a registration page where he had to re-enter the sponsor’s email to validate the association. Many of them forgot to enter it and, therefore, did not receive the voucher.
• The email sent by the godfather was automatically generated by Privalia, which lost its authenticity value. Many godchildren ignored this email because it “looked like” an automated message, not to mention that some of them landed directly in the “spam” folder.

Another point that I addressed were the queries to the Customer Service (SAC), as well as the opinions in the application stores and the comments left on our website, related to MGM. Some interesting comments:

In addition, I did a deep analysis of internal data, I spoke with the different areas of business, marketing and data analysis to collect all the possible data of the current process. Some relevant data:

• Around 40% of new members came through this referral program, with a positive impact of more than € 1M / year.
• The contact import service was hardly used, the available options included outdated email services such as MSN or AOL, among others, that were not being used. What generated a feeling of antiquity and lack of maintenance of the service (nothing is further from the truth).

Finally, I did an intensive benchmarking of the multiple solutions of different platforms, best practices and market studies that helped me to acquire knowledge so as not to start from scratch.

• Similar features: an “Invite and win” section within “My account” where you can see the money accumulated together with the godchildren who have accepted the invitation and an action to share your code or link on social networks.
• Differential functionalities: Airbnb and Uber allowed you to import your contact list via mobile phonebook, that way you could select a contact and send them an SMS in a simple way.

I grouped the users by similarity in needs and objectives. Then I made a User Persona, an Empathy Map and a User Experience Map for each of them to define their main Pains and Gains during the use of our referral program.

Even with all these problems, the system worked. Since 40% of the new members came through this referral program. Which indicated that there was a significant degree of improvement.

Even with all these problems, the system worked. Since 40% of the new members came through this referral program. Which indicated that there was a significant degree of improvement.

I tried to align the proposals with the business needs and priorities by talking to the different stakeholders in each area.

We start by establishing all possible use cases:

I continued with a quick sketching of the different screens, distributing the information architecture with the main elements and establishing the navigation flows between screens.

On the main screen, the “invite and win” landing itself, I placed the value proposition “above the fold” along with the buttons to share on social networks. When the user earned vouchers, we replaced this value proposition with an animated graph with all the accumulated profit.

I proposed an experience that “hooks” the user and encourages him to use it, with some gamification techniques (such as objectives, rewards, etc). For this I proposed some motion graphics for certain screens of success and money graphics.

I chose a pie chart because it creates the illusion of a progress bar. These show users, according to numerous studies, a clear idea of the goals to achieve to reach the final objective and, therefore, they are more likely to want to complete it. Also, this need to complete releases massive amounts of endorphins.

I validate the prototypes with some of our users through usability tests to understand problems or points for improvement.

An interesting learning was that users did not usually modify the default message when they shared the link on social networks, which could affect its credibility, as it was not personalized. So we work on a message with a much more natural language, to make it appear to be written by themselves.

Finally, I documented all the specifications and design requirements from mockups, scenarios and user stories, using different types of tools to facilitate subsequent development.

The development team used the scenarios to divide the tasks by use cases. Some functionalities, such as notifications and alerts for status changes, it was decided to address them in subsequent phases.