"Friendbuy collaborated with us to develop stackable credits on Shopify Plus. It’s really exciting and the results have been astounding—our referral program has already doubled in size."
Brendan Hastings
SVP Engineering and Digital Product at Thinx
The vast majority of people who try Thinx love the product so much that even new customers often can’t wait to tell a friend.
To reward their customers for friend referrals, Thinx partnered with Friendbuy. The initial referral offer was a basic “give $10, get $10”—your friends receive $10 off their first order and you receive a $10 referral code toward your next order after they buy.
But as the company’s popularity exploded, some referral code limitations were beginning to frustrate users. For example, if a user loved Thinx and introduced five new people to the brand, they’d receive five separate referral codes that had to be redeemed via five distinct orders.
“What we were running into is that our super users were referring dozens, if not hundreds, of people, and stacking up coupon codes that they could only use once per order.”
The Friendbuy + Thinx collaboration resulted in a major set of new features, including the ability for Advocates to accumulate and stack account credit that they earn through referrals leveraging Friendbuy’s Shopify Plus integration.
The Shopify integration also enables automated referral code generation for referred friends and out-of-the-box reward validation (accounting for returns and cancellations). This new functionality shifts the burden of program maintenance off of Brendan and his team, giving them more time to focus on customers’ experiences.
Friendbuy gives Thinx’s customer experience specialists more control, such as the ability to manually adjust account credit as needed and report on referral activity in granular detail.
Finally, Friendbuy improves the referral experience for Thinx’s customers. Through a customizable referral dashboard located on their customer account page, Thinx’s customers can now view their rewards, track the status of their referral invitations and send reminder emails to friends that have not completed their purchase. This has helped dramatically reduce customer service inquiries.
“To me, customer service is one of the most important things behind building a great product. Friendbuy does both. Their team does a great job communicating, troubleshooting, listening to our feedback, iterating, and building out the feature sets that our customers care about.”
According to Brendan, referrals have always been important to Thinx’s growth model, but with Friendbuy’s Shopify Plus integration, it’s now the most efficient acquisition channel. Cost per acquisition is under $1, significantly lower than other channels.
Stackable account credits have also greatly encouraged ongoing referrals, which increased 114% within one month. Instead of hoarding single-use referral discount codes, brand advocates can now accumulate credit to spend on larger purchases.
Thinx’s referral program has doubled in size with the Friendbuy platform. Between the increased user engagement and the steady rise in referral revenue, Brendan calls it a “very efficient channel.”
“Compared against other acquisition channels, Friendbuy is extremely cost-effective. The amount of revenue we’re driving through Friendbuy is huge and the cost per acquisition is very low—less than a dollar.”
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