Interview with Friendbuy

We talk about the inspiration behind the company and why companies should consider referral programs

Growing your customer base is of the utmost importance. More customers equals more work which equals more money and, at the end of the day, that's pretty much the end goal for every company. There are plenty of ways of going about customer acquisition, but one of the easiest, and most interesting ways is through referral programs.

Referral programs are a beautiful thing, your current customers who (hopefully) aleady love you, do you marketing for you by enticing friends and family to also check out your business. Friendbuy realized how important referral programs could be for e-commerce companies and their company helps almost anyone set up wonderful referral programs for their e-commerce business.

We had a chance to talk with Manish Goyal of Friendbuy to find out what inspired the creation of the company, what they actually do, and how to set up a referral program. Check it out below!

Care to introduce yourself and your role at Friendbuy?

I’m Manish Goyal, founder & CEO of Friendbuy.

I’ve always been fascinated by the machinery of audience aggregation / customer acquisition. I am even more intrigued by “movements” -- i.e. the forces that drive ideas to become movements, or content to go viral, or social causes to go from local impact to change on a national or global scale.

Friendbuy evolved out of this curiosity. As my career ventured into e-commerce technologies, I saw parallels between audience aggregation and customer acquisition. The opportunity for Friendbuy is to help our marketers achieve massive, scalable growth at a fraction of the cost and in far less time than they would be able to achieve without our platform and our expertise.

My role at Friendbuy is typical of any founder - fundraising, hiring talent, sales, etc. But I try to make sure that every day I’m thinking about innovation and implementing strategies to provide the most compelling solution to our clients to help them grow through referral marketing. The best part of my day is anytime that my team feels empowered to innovate and to serve our clients well.

In just a couple sentences, what is Friendbuy?

Friendbuy powers referral programs for e-commerce companies. Your customers can invite their friends to check out your website or mobile app, or even your physical store location.  If the friend make a purchase, you can reward the original customer for bringing you a new customer.  In a nutshell, Friendbuy powers modern day word of mouth for your business.

Why should companies look into Refer-a-Friend programs?

No business ever succeeded without word of mouth.  A well executed referral program can change the economics of your acquisition and growth strategy, and make the difference between success and failure.  We routinely see clients achieve double-digit growth attributable to their Friendbuy powered referral programs.  

Word of mouth has transformed into a measurable acquisition channel that combines organic with outbound, where your customers are doing the outbound on your behalf.  In contrast to any paid channel where your competition can bid against you, this is a channel that you can own.

For your customers, sharing is a form of personal expression, and so much of our identity is reflected in our consumer choices.  Not to mention, everyone likes to be one of the first to tell their friends about something new and interesting that has value.

I truly believe referral programs are now table stakes for every business.

Is it easy to setup programs with Friendbuy?

To implement an optimal execution as fast as possible, you can work with our experienced Customer Success team. We even provide full creative services, and we routinely get our clients live within a matter of days. Once implemented, the marketer has complete control to edit offers, update creative and A/B test at will.  

 Smaller sites can choose to sign up on their own and implement one of our DIY plans.  High performance templates, a simple user interface and in-depth analytics make Friendbuy the perfect platform to implement your referral program quickly and easily.

What kind of tools do you offer to your customers for tracking the success of their refer-a-friend program? Are there targeting options?

Comprehensive analytics are at the core of Friendbuy’s performance measurement. We provide topline summaries and actionable insights into sharing rates, referral visits, referral conversions and revenue.

Friendbuy detailed analysis offers clarity into the metrics of each individual invitation channel. We also provide industry benchmarks to show how you’re doing relative to your peers. Our clients are thus able to make data driven decisions for increasing performance through A/B testing and other forms of optimization.

What kind of customization options are available? Is it just templates and whatnot, or can users get more control through the use of APIs and webhooks?

We offer a variety of high performance templates that can be easily customized, and we offer enterprise clients fully custom assets which are proprietary to your account.  We collaborate with your engineering and product teams to implement custom integrations for modified use cases via APIs and Webhooks.

For example, clients often design programs with custom conversion events.  Sometimes reward fulfillment incorporates custom logic for unique business processes.  We recently integrated with several providers of Net Promoter Surveys to enable referral campaigns after your customers complete an NPS survey on one of these 3rd party hosted solutions.

Anything exciting coming to Friendbuy?

It’s an exciting time for Friendbuy - we’re growing and emerging as the clear market leader. We’ve always had success with innovative e-commerce disruptors like Glossier, Dollar Shave Club, ModCloth and ClassPass. Now we’re seeing quite a bit of adoption with major enterprises who are prioritizing direct-to- consumer, such as Intuit, Lucky Brand, Walmart and Zalando (the largest e-com site in Europe, behind Amazon).  We have an exciting roadmap for 2017. Watch this space!

Thanks for taking the time to answer some of our questions, anything you’d like to close with?

Sustained growth can be a defining challenge for marketers. Friendbuy gives you the edge to accelerate customer acquisition and increase revenue. Referral Marketing is compelling because it achieves acquisition at a much lower Cost Per Acquisition and with higher Customer Lifetime Value.