CRED Referral Program Case Study: How they Make it a Success.

CRED is a Bangalore-based transparent digital platform of highly authorized individuals, brands, and organizations. With its wonderful strategy to design, CRED makes users’ financial decisions visible, delightful, and rewarding for its members, enabling access to a better life in the form of exclusive rewards and experiences. Let’s see how the CRED referral program set a great example of referral marketing.

Challenge

CRED is required to grow faster in today’s highly competitive fintech market, relying on an influential referral program to increase its user base. This program lets marketers effectively make use of word of mouth and virality while ensuring and validating user quality.

The product and marketing teams required a scalable and stable way to reward both referrers and users to their app. However, several challenges stood in the way.

First, how could referrers be rewarded depending on the in-app actions of the referred users and not merely on their installation?

Second, CRED needed to launch referral codes altogether to provide its users a seamless experience while bypassing the overhead of reconciling referral codes for rewarding users.

Ultimately, CRED needed a platform-agnostic mechanism to attribute referrals across Android and iOS.

Solution

CRED uses a referral program, where referrers can invite their contacts in-app instead of utilizing referral codes. The app produces shortened and customized URLs that referred users can download the app directly. CRED then gets attribution data in near real-time through webhooks and APIs. CRED referral program employed double-sided gratification where both the user and their referrer upon completing the required in-app actions.

Results

Cred results were outstanding. In March 2020 alone, referred users made up the highest ratio of successfully gated users, based on CRED’s eligibility criteria – 50% higher than average. They also showed the highest rate of first payments – 44% higher than average.

Utilizing referrals had made a precise impact on the long-term success of the referral program, setting CRED at the crest of India’s FinTech wave.