Summary
With our help, this client has come up with an innovative way to create viral growth for their platform. The idea behind is simple: reward their user-base. But how? We brainstormed ideas, researched them thoroughly and designed them to deliver what they needed most: growth!
A screen from the client's platform
Initial situation & issue
Our client CareerFairy, a streaming platform connecting students to companies, needed a way to generate viral growth through referral. The main issue has been to find the right incentive to do that. What is the best reward to offer to users who create a referral? How to make sure it’s something they care enough about? And last, how to provide great value also to the users who don’t use the feature? Let’s have a look at it!
How to create a successful framework
Based on previous experience, we’ve started with the idea that a successful referral framework is never only about the reward.
For referrals to be successful, users have to first like your product! This is the first step. Then you want to introduce a mechanism based on 3 elements:
- Trigger
- Behaviour
- Reward
Only one of these elements is not enough to create a self-sustaining referral mechanism. Once this has been defined we then moved to research them. The behaviour was given (share a link to the platform). The rest had to be discovered and validated.
Research
Since we needed to start from users who already loved the product, we selected a group of users who had already used it and was satisfied about their experience. Then we moved to asked them what they cared about and what they were still missing.
The research showed that users would have loved to recommend the platform to their peers. What they were missing were ways to make their experience more interactive. Since CareerFairy is a streaming platform connecting students to companies, what students cared about the most is to ask questions during the live events. This way they can get the most out of their participation.
This gave us a few ideas for interesting features to test. So we’ve launched a survey to validate and prioritize them.
This was a great starting point: obviously users were already enthusiastic about the platform. They would have appreciated ways to share their experience!
More personalization
Based on what we’d heard, the first necessary step was to introduce more personalization. As humans, we’re happy to commit time and resources only to things we care for.
We have introduced more personalization. Users have their own avatar and a more immersive experience within the platform. This means they see their participation not as a one-off, but as a journey. As a result, they’re more likely to commit to improve this journey.
Screens from the redesigned platform
Incentive and reward
Once that we’ve designed a more immersive experience, we have created a flow where users can unlock bonuses in exchange for the referral. The incentive for users to do so is the desire for completeness: referring someone makes their profile more complete.
We also leveraged something users care about: the chance to have their questions been displayed higher during the events.
Lastly, we’ve gone back to users to validate our ideas. The results have been simply amazing. 4/5 users interviewed said they were enthusiastic about the new feature and would have used it as soon as released.
Final result
The final result has been a radical shift for the platform. While personalisation has created more long-term engagement, the referral framework has provided a valuable way to drive viral growth.
75% of users have shown a positive sentiment towards the new feature.
Key data
- Ed-tech
- Platform
Activities
- Product strategy
- UX and behavioural research
- Visual design