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Hey Arshness,

There isn’t a formal one at the moment. We are wanting to get something like this together.

What are you looking for in a referral program? What makes you recommending us worth your time and energy?

Thanks

Go take a look at Adagio’s Frequent cup points.
If you want my business, just copy their model wholesale.
Seriously. I will roll all over a company that gives me ways to advertise them and exchanges me points toward my tea.

I can send a friend a $5 gift cert (assuming new user!) and if they redeem it, I get 10 points. 100 points = $10 credit.
So basically I get $1 credit per referral if you want to see it that way. $10 is minimum to redeem and that’s okay to me. $5 would be better, but $10 is fine. :)

I like that I can send a gift certificate AS MANY TIMES AS I WANT. Meaning I don’t have to ever limit sending them out. The more I send out, more chances someone uses it, more sales for you, more points for me, everybody happy :D
(Not saying I spam them. I don’t! But if a friend misses the first one since those expire in 24 hours, I can resend it, no big.)
I can also get 2 points per day by sharing to facebook what I’m drinking on their site. This 1. Gets my friends interested in my tea (and I’ve gotten 8 friends to buy Adagio tea by doing this and then going “yeah you want a gift cert?”) 2. Keeps me going back to the site (where I inevitably end up browsing more tea at least once a week) and 3. Makes me feel better about my tea spending since I can almost always make sure to have a discount next time I buy some tea. I’m a very thrifty shopper and having a discount often makes the difference between me buying anything and waiting another month or two. So giving me a way to earn it through advertising for you is win-win. :) You get more sales and more advertising.

And I can get 4 points for reviewing a tea I’ve bought from them, or 6 points if I review it then share my review to facebook. Excellent way to get me to write reviews for the teas I try and it also gets my friends talking about the tea with me. Why not? Win win again.

They also let you earn points through making custom blends (10 points each time someone buys a blend you made, so basically commissions) but doing that assumes you’re set up for custom blends, which, isn’t required for the program to work otherwise. Just saying this for the sake of being complete in my description of the program I’m recommending.

So basically, yeah… $1 credit per referral roughly is great if you also include a way for me to build up points via sharing my teas to social media and writing reviews.
When I order from Adagio they also let me “Share my order to facebook” and give me a free sample (my pick!) for doing so. <This made me fall utterly in love with them when I first ordered from them.

If you don’t include a way to make referral points from social media shares/reviews, a little more credit per referral would be better. $3-5 when the referred person places a first order or something like that would be very nice.

Give me a way to get some money off my next order with you by sharing my tea addiction and I will do it happily and adore the company for giving me that chance. :) Of the 8 friends I referred to Adagio, all of them being someone who at least bought tea once as I’ve referred many more friends who didn’t ever place an order… 4 of them became regular tea drinkers, 3 of them ordered more than once, and 2 of them share their teas to Facebook and refer people now too. So you see, my referrals were worth quite a lot within the scope of my 40-person friends list.

And I’m going to keep referring Adagio for a long time because of this system. :)

Well first off, WOW!

Thank you for that awesome response. That sounds like a great rewards plan. We will have to use parts of it word for word. It has some great value to us as the business and the customers.

That is will a bit of a project to get that incorporated into our store but I think it is a project worth undertaking.

Thanks for your help.

Awesome. Glad to be helpful.

By the way, I’d say that if you offered another tier below your current ones (one that is a lower price point) you’d get more people to try it out. Even if you considered it a “trial” option.
I would go in for a $10/month package to give it a try, but current price points are a bit above what I’d like to pay just to see if the service suits me.
Just a side note while I have your attention.

By the way, attentive and interactive companies get tons of love from the internet. +1 awesome for asking for advice from your customers directly :)

As far as a referral program for a sub box I’ve seen a lot of various sub boxes do either a free month for every referral, or points that equal to about 50% to 100% of the price of a month, but that can also be applied towards products instead. A lot of beauty sub boxes are good examples of this, and ones like birchbox and ipsy have a good model to follow for points!

Yeah, I think we like the idea of offering something that gets you a free month or something. We are hoping to have a referral program up and going soon(ish).

Thanks for your thoughts. We will look very closely at what Birchbox and Ipsy do.

Arshness: I think that Adagio could do a better job at explaining the program. I had no idea about any of this, and I placed an order many months ago!

Hey Sherapop,

No offense taken. I might work on the wording of that.

On to the pricing. The office membership is a monthly plan which means it will renew each month. And if you choose the largest plan then yes it is $84.40/month. BUT that plan comes to less than $3/day and has enough tea to drown several tea drinking elephants. But really, it has enough tea for 6+ heavy tea drinkers. That is about $.50/person/day with that plan. So yeah it looks like a lot of money but when you break it down it is not that bad.

The 3 month plan is a quarterly subscription that renews after you have received 3 boxes of tea. The 6 month plan renews after you have received 6 boxes of tea. (Unless you choose the gift option and that does not renew at all.)

As for the Options. I am not sure precisely what you mean by that. Could you elaborate for me? Are you talking about the types of teas as the options? Sorry but my brain is not grasping it.

Regardless, THANK YOU for you input. It honestly means a great deal to us that you took the time to speak you mind.

Cheers,
AF

It seems like a lot of promises are being made, but you don’t really see anything until you check out—I guess (I did not check out, so I did not see what the full range of options were).

So, for example, somewhere you say that you now can choose combinations or choose your teas or take a selection, etc., but it all is left very abstract. I just think that it might more persuasive to allow people to see what exactly all of the options are in detail. It’s as though someone is talking very quickly, and you can’t really follow what they are saying.

These are only my impressions. There may be others who find the program confusing, and they might be turned away for that reason. I’m just trying to offer some constructive criticism here.

I’m sure that you are well aware that subscription plans and social shopping sites have been sporing like mushrooms, so people can navigate away from a site on the slightest pretext…

Good luck with your venture!

I think I see what you are talking about. We typically post our menu to our Facebook page and we have examples of past menus at the bottom of our homepage. And I suppose we could post an example form of how you select your teas each month.

Thanks for your input.

Speaking from past experience with Simple Loose Leaf, once you sign up, you get emails from them every month with their changing menus.

In the emails, you can see the list of teas they’re offering for the upcoming months, so in early June you’d get an email listing their July and August teas. The email contains a link to a Google form you have to fill out – they ask you to confirm your name and email address, then take you to a page where you choose what teas you want.

Using the June example, the deadline to choose for July is June 21st (which is today, actually). You confirm your name and email address, then the new page shows up asking you which teas you want to choose for July (either the sample pack or 1 or 2 specific varieties – you can choose to have 2 packages of the same variety).

Since they also have a preview of their August teas, you can also state which tea for August you’d like to sample in advance. For the advanced samples, you can choose only 1 of the 5 to sample, and that will be included in the next box. So you make your choice about your July teas and August preview sample in June, and get the box with your choices and your preview sample a few weeks later after the start of July.

We don’t have any real intent to shroud anything in mystery. We simply haven’t had any bring it up. You make some good points and we will see if we cant start working on some of the issues you have mentioned. And perhaps we will start posting our menu to Steepster.

Thanks for your thoughts.