Referral programs are one of the primary methods of driving growth for your product or company. Many recent dotcoms like Dropbox used referral programs for rapid growth. Referral programs are also the best bet when it comes to achieving viral growth.

Here is a list of things you should consider for your referral program:

Measure satisfaction
Before allowing your customers to tell friends about your product. Measure and make sure they are happy and satisfied.

Social sharing

Provide direct methods for users to share on each social network. This will allow you to track your performance and optimize for each individual social network.

Shareable link

The first step in a referral program is to record the inviter when an invitee signs up. This is easy to do and involves an id added to the referral program url.

Invite Status

Users of referral programs will want to know whether an invitee signed up. This data is easy to generate and should be provided to all users as part of their dashboard. They can then follow up with people they have sent mails to.

Avoid money

Never use actual money as incentives for referral programs. To use Dropbox as an example again, provided additional storage as the incentive. This ultimately cost far less than providing money

Use the inviters image

Airbnb provided to credit to anyone referred to the site. The onboarding page actually presented the referrer face. This increased signups considerably.