Designing a referral flow for Papa Beer 🍺

About the project

The goal of this project is to create a referral flow for papa beer an ed-tech app that enables its users to learn everything there is to learn about beer right from brewing any kind of beer to setting up their own brewery or establishing their brand.

Papa Beer lets a user buy each course individually or lets them opt for a subscription if they want to take multiple courses. It also offers the user to buy the equipment recommended for the course if they want to follow along and brew as they learn.

Research

The main goal of the referral system is to increase the discoverability of the product and onboard new users while incentivizing existing users to keep them motivated to invite their friends.

I explored the referral flows of a few apps to understand what kind of referral systems are being used and came up with a few potential ideas that could be used.

Offer monetary credits to both the involved parties to be used for in-app purchases.

👍🏻 Simple for the user to understand.

👎🏻 Can become a financial burden to the company if not structured properly.

Give free trial to the referred person and if they convert, incentivize the referee.

👍🏻 New users experience what they’ll be paying for.

👎🏻 Long wait time for the existing user to receive their reward.

Give free subscription or extension to the existing users for a certain period of time per successful referral.

👍🏻 Familiarises the new user with all the premium features as soon as they sign up.

👎🏻 Unequal incentives.

Give the referee points per successful referral which can be used to unlock rewards.

👍🏻 If implemented properly, the user can be engaged for a long time.

👎🏻 No Immediate reward and can get complex at times.

Enter both parties into a giveaway for every successful referral.

👍🏻 Great source of dopamine as soon as a new user signs up.

👎🏻 No immediate and confirmed reward.

Give tickets to spin the rewards wheel.

👍🏻 Keeps the user excited about what they might win.

👎🏻 Highly uncertain rewards.

Maintain a referral leaderboard where the top referee gets a prize.

👍🏻 Keeps the existing users motivated to keep inviting more people.

👎🏻 New users might initially feel left out and intimidated looking at the existing leaderboard.

Donate an amount on behalf of the both the parties fo a charity on every successful referral.

👍🏻 Can be a great social initiative and marketing tactic.

👎🏻 Hard to gain the users trust about the donation being done properly.

Non incentivised referrals.

👍🏻 The product growth will solely be based on the experience of users.

👎🏻 Hard to get users to start referring, growth might be slow comparatively .

Going through all these referral flows was overwhelming because all of them were well thought out and go well with their respective apps. Now the main question I was asking myself was what would be a great referral flow for Papa Beer? To answer this it is very important to define what makes a referral flow good.

What makes a referral good?

• Offer incentives to both the involved parties.
• Offer valuable rewards.
• Make the whole referring process easy to understand and use.
• Make sure that it is easy to find the referral program.
• When using a referral code, keep it simple.
• Make the messaging exciting and enticing.

At this point it made sense to use a “Give ₹X and Get ₹X” model because this can allow me to give the user flexibility of using the credits as per their need i.e. they can use the credits towards buying a course, a subscription, or even for the purchases in the shop and this model is straightforward the user doesn’t have to learn new jargons or a structure just to be able to get a reward and it has the same reward system for both the subscribing customer and the ones just buying a single course at a time.

Information Architecture

Now that I figured out what referral system to use. It is important to define the touchpoints for it because if you have a great referral system but don’t have the correct touchpoints it is highly unlikely that the referral flow would work as intended.

89% of people are likely to recommend a brand after a positive brand experience on mobile.

Source: Google

Defining the touch points for an existing user

1. It is important to consider the existing mental models which are why I decided to have a touchpoint in the profile section.
2. After the user finishes watching three sessions. At this point, the user gets a good idea about what the app has to offer and its value..
3. In the shop section. When shopping, a user has an eye out for any discounts that they might avail which is a good point to engage them in the referral flow.
4. When their subscription renewal is due. Users are likely to renew their subscriptions if they are offered a discount hence this is also a good touchpoint to get the user to refer friends

Defining the touch points for a new user

If the user has downloaded the app using an affiliate link, the credit is automatically applied.

For the users that haven’t downloaded the app using an affiliate link. The touch-points are:

1. During Onboarding, they can enter the referral flow.
2. If they skip the onboarding, they have a second chance to avail the credits in the profile section.

Results

Flow for existing users

Flow for new users

Insights and Learnings

💡 Referral flow is one of the most important parts of product growth. It can either make or break the growth.

💡 If not structured properly referral flow might become a financial burden to the company.

🧠 Every referral flow has advantages and disadvantages to them, but it’s all about figuring out which will fit both your app experience and business strategy.

🧠 What makes a referral system good and what users look to get from the referral system.

🧠 The importance of integrating the referral flow into the app and not making it feel like an unrelated feature.

This project was done as a part of the 10k designers masterclass. I would like to thank Abhinav Chhikara for this great opportunity and support. I would also like to extend my gratitude to all the Industry mentors and Alumni mentors of the 10k designers cohort.

Special thanks to Divya Bhatia for giving me feedback throughout the process 🥂

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