Increase Organic Referral Program Adoption

Company
Akseleran
Project Type
UI/UX Enhancement
Duration
12 – 18 Months
Related Teams
UI/UX – Product
Engineering
Role
CMO – Project Owner

To grow in a sustainable way, we need to grow using the most cost-efficient way. By analyzing our data, we identified that our referral program can bring the most new users (around 40% of total new users) with good quality (good LTV) as well.

The problem is that, most of the referees were brought by our influencers. When we hired influencers, we asked them to promote their referral program as well. But this is not sustainable in the long run.

We needed the referral to grow organically. The problem was the visibility of the program. The referral program was hidden deeply in the “other” menu, requiring users to click 2-3 times into the app to see the program. 

How would we grow the referral program organically by increasing its visibility?

Solution

To improve the visibility of the Referral Program, I discussed it with the product and engineering team. We benchmarked several applications that have referral programs as well, especially players in the fintech industry (direct and indirect competitors). 

We found out that most of the platforms are displaying their referral program on their app’s homepage.

Referral Benchmark

This brought us to another problem. The early Akseleran app version did not have a homepage. When users logged in, they would see the list of loan funding opportunities straight away. This led us to build a homepage first before we can relocate the referral program menu.

Discussing and iterating the design of the new homepage took around 2 months, but deploying it took significantly longer time, more than a year. This is due to lack of IT resources and other priorities from other departments as well.

After continuously advocating for this UI/UX design to be implemented for around a year, finally the new homepage was deployed. The referral program section was placed on the above the fold part of the homepage screen to give maximum visibility.

Portfolio_Asset_Referral_Homepage

Benefit / Result

Users can see the referral program straight-away at the app homepage, without further clicking after logging in, which increases the likelihood of using it.

If users haven’t used the referral program, then it will display a banner showing the monetary benefit of using it and the call to action button to share the promo code. If users already have referees, then it will show the total all time profit, total current month profit, and total active referees.

Unfortunately, during the deployment of our new homepage and referral program relocation, the P2P lending industry in Indonesia faced significant reputational challenges due to performance and legal issues among some of our competitors. This eroded user trust across the sector, including among our customer base, and negatively impacted the organic adoption of our referral program.

In my perspective, it was a matter of bad timing and the execution issue. If we had deployed a year earlier, we might have seen a significant organic growth on our referral program adoption. This served as a lesson that the speed of execution can affect the momentum of a project.