[August 2025] 🤘 Big Launch vs. Ongoing Campaigns + Summer Feature Recap

Hey it’s Mica,

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been diving deep into customer results. Tying to figure out why one customer gets consistent referrals month after month and another has a spike of referrals then flatlines.

There were so many businesses that should be killing it with their referral program but weren’t. It wasn’t their reward structure and all these businesses had strong organic word of mouth, so what was it?

I dug deeper looking for patterns and what surprised me most was their promotion efforts fell short. See below for my deep dive and what they should do instead. 👇👇

On the product front, our engineers have been working all summer on some great features. Here is a recap of the 3 big features we released:

• One-Off Rewards & Reward Profiles - reward anyone with a single click & new reward profiles show all details, history, status, and activity

• Referral Address Fields - dedicated address fields for both member and referral addresses (no more workarounds with custom fields)

• Activation Email Campaigns - send branded emails designed specifically to turn your contacts into active sharers

Let's dive in,

-Mica
Head of Operations

📢 Ongoing Campaigns > Big Launch

Going deep into our data and talking with our onboarding team, the same theme kept coming up …

Project Fatigue - even if customers know the right things to do, they just get tired.

If I could go back in time and encourage customers to do one thing to promote their referral program, it would be to setup ongoing promotion campaigns and skip the big launch.

Too often businesses focus on the big mass email launch. All their effort goes towards a single email blast to their entire contact list (lumping everyone together regardless of their activity).

Look, I get it. You want this project to be successful, the big number on the scoreboard, your boss to be happy, and for you to be the hero, but putting all your hope into one big campaign is the wrong approach.

It’s far better to spend that time laying the groundwork for ongoing promotion. You’ll end up with lasting referral results month over month vs a one-time pop.

One of the problems with the big launch is you’re tempted to put all your contacts into one campaign, where 80% haven’t heard from you in months.

Most of the people sitting on your list for months barely remember you. Yet the ones from the past few weeks or even months that had a great experience (excellent service, amazing results, impressed by your team, etc.) are ripe for the ask since you’re fresh in their heads. Timing matters.

Setting up ongoing campaigns nails this timing week after week, where the big launch only got the people that happened to remember you at that specific moment.

It’s not that the big launch is a bad idea, but if you are limited on time, put your effort into setting up ongoing campaigns to ensure lasting referral program success.