When you have thousands of customers, you need a way to manage all of the related data across multiple platforms and channels. Individual customers interact with your business in multiple ways, including through your website, email, phone calls to customer service, social media, native mobile apps, third-party partnerships, and more. When you add a referral program to the mix, there is yet another layer of potential customer interactions and events such as views, shares, clicks, and referral purchases.
Getting a clear understanding of each customer’s interactions with your business helps both marketing and product teams make more informed decisions about providing their customers with the best experience. You can do this through unwieldy and error-prone methods such as spreadsheets compiled from multiple sources, or you can let Segment do it for you.
How Segment Works
Segment is a customer data platform that allows companies to collect, unify, and connect customer data to more than 200 marketing, analytics, and data warehouse tools. With software and APIs, Segment collects user events from web and mobile apps and provides a complete data toolkit to every team in the company. Companies use data from Segment to:
- Refine targeted ad campaigns to improve conversion costs.
- Understand how customers use products and services.
- Understand the connection between online and offline behavior.
Without Segment, teams have to collate data from multiple sources and find ways to link actions and events to individual customers or groups of customers. This isn’t always possible, which results in data gaps that force teams to make assumptions. By getting the full picture with Segment, teams can make informed decisions about which products to develop, who to market which products to, and which customers to cultivate into loyal brand advocates.
How Friendbuy Works
Friendbuy is a referral platform that helps companies launch and optimize referral programs that enable advocates to refer friends through email, text, personal links, and social media. The platform allows brands to seamlessly integrate referral marketing into every step of the customer journey to increase new customer acquisitions and generate repeat sales.
Marketers choose Friendbuy because of its robust features that allow marketers to:
- Perform A/B testing of creative, copy, and rewards for each campaign so marketers can select the top-performing variation.
- Track and attribute referral activity—including shares, clicks, and purchase events—to individual customers.
- Measure program and campaign performance across the conversion funnel.
- Automate the reward fulfillment process.
Integrating Friendbuy with your site is most commonly done through our JavaScript library; however, you can also integrate via APIs. By integrating with Friendbuy, you can load referral widgets, track purchases, and add email addresses and phone numbers to your CRM or ESP for more automation.
How Friendbuy and Segment Work Together
The Friendbuy and Segment integration creates two-way communication, both as a destination and as a source. Friendbuy's destination integration with Segment automatically:
- Loads Friendbuy's JavaScript
- Enables referral tracking and attribution
- Enables customer-facing referral widgets
- Notifies Friendbuy about customers and purchase events
As a destination, Friendbuy’s JavaScript snippets are automatically loaded and executed via Segment’s analytics.js library. This eliminates the need to have your developer manually add and manage Friendbuy’s code directly on your site. Enabling the integration will automatically:
- Map your existing Segment page calls to facilitate loading Friendbuy’s widgets.
- Map your existing Segment identify calls to facilitate Friendbuy tracking a customer.
- Map your existing Segment track calls to facilitate Friendbuy tracking orders.
Friendbuy's source integration with Segment sends referral program event data to Segment, so you can view this data in your data warehouse and take action. Whenever an advocate shares, a friend converts, or a referral reward is evaluated, Friendbuy will automatically let Segment know in real time. Segment can then forward those events along to other connected destinations, including your data warehouse. This means you can join your referral data with all your other marketing event data to tell a more complete story of a user’s journey.
How to Leverage Our Integration to Optimize Your Referral Program
For marketers, data is power. The more you know about how a customer behaves, the better you are able to serve up the campaigns that are most likely to resonate with them. By using Friendbuy and Segment together, you can target different referral offers based on customer data (such as location, member tier, and so on) that is being passed to Friendbuy via Segment’s Personas product. For example, if you notice that certain customers are likely to respond to SMS notifications, you can create a targeted campaign for that group.
Segment will also notify Friendbuy when a referred friend converts, so Friendbuy can attribute the conversion to the advocate and reward them accordingly. This eliminates the burden on your team to track conversions and rewards because it all happens automatically behind the scenes. This is critical for companies that experience exponential growth as a result of a successful referral program.
Marketers know that the approach that works today might not be the most successful strategy tomorrow. Friendbuy’s integration with Segment allows you to take action on real-time referral event data that is being passed to Segment to your data warehouse. This way, you can identify trends that help optimize and automate your referral program to continually refine your strategy.
Get Started with Segment and Friendbuy
Segment is a trusted tool that more than 20,000 companies across 71 countries use. Successful businesses such as Intuit, Bonobos, Toggle (a Farmers Insurance company), MUD\WTR, Milk Bar, and Tonal use Segment to learn about their users and capitalize on their own data to refine the customer experience. These companies also work with Friendbuy to scale the power of word-of-mouth marketing. With the powerful integration of Segment and Friendbuy, you can optimize your referral program and use data gathered by Friendbuy to inform marketing strategies for other channels and create a truly well-rounded marketing strategy.
If you’re new to referral marketing, we recommend taking a deeper dive with Referral Marketing: The Essential Guide. This free resource covers all the basics of how to get your referral program off the ground with proven best practices and what it looks like to work with a referral partner.
