How Ava Women converts 36% of word of mouth recommendations into new customers through Referral Engineering®.
“Personal recommendations are a strong touchpoint and people are more likely to buy off the back of a recommendation,” says Isabelle Schmid, Head of Brand & Communications at Ava Women. “We wanted to leverage that with a program that made it easy to drive referrals.”
With this in mind, Ava Women turned to Mention Me in 2020. They launched campaigns in the US, UK, Switzerland and Canada a month later.
Key results:
Since launch, Ava Women has worked closely with the Mention Me team to optimize their program through strategic A/B testing.
Tests have included giving customers the chance to ‘give’ a referral reward to others, versus ‘get’ for themselves, as well as making minor design alterations to simplify the referral overlay.
Such seemingly small changes have made a big difference to the femtech brand's referral results.
One in every three recommendations now convert into new customers for Ava Women. On average, these referred customers spend 6% more and introduce 3x more new customers – creating a powerful cycle of growth.
“Referral easily ranks among our highest-performing marketing channels”, says Isabelle.
As well as driving up acquisition rates, Ava Women often gain surprising insights into their customers and how best to engage them through these strategic tests.
“It's the little things you wouldn't think about that make a difference, such as changing one word in a call-to-action,” Isabelle says.
For a data-driven brand like Ava Women, verifying assumptions through referral insights ties in perfectly with their core aim of improving women’s lives with data. These insights extend beyond referral to their entire marketing strategy.
“If we see something working well in our referral program, we apply those learnings to our other marketing activities,” says Isabelle. “Mention Me supports our other channels seamlessly.”
Referral easily ranks among our highest-performing marketing channels.
When asked about her favourite element of Mention Me, Isabelle is quick to call out the team.
“The Mention Me team regularly gives us ideas and recommendations of what’s worked for other brands. That’s really helped optimize our referral performance.”
As well as advising on effective campaigns, the Client Success team is also quick to action requests for Ava Women. When the femtech brand migrated to a new website, for example, the Mention Me team were on hand to make sure it was optimized for referral from day one.
“The team is always happy to take on special requests,” Isabelle says. “Working with Mention Me has been a really good experience so far.”
The team regularly gives us ideas and recommendations of what's worked for other brands. That's really helped optimize performance.
When it comes to using the Mention Me platform, Isabelle finds it all “very straightforward”.
“Managing our program requires almost no effort,” she says.
As Ava Women’s referral program goes from strength to strength, the team is now exploring how they can further integrate Mention Me into their martech ecosystem.
One possibility is bringing together their referral and marketing automation platforms to enhance the customer experience while driving even better results.
Following Ava Women’s recent acquisition by FemTech Health, their sights are set on an even more ambitious international growth trajectory – and they see referral playing a critical role.
“There’s a lot we want to achieve,” says Isabelle. “Having Referral Experts on hand to share advice supports that.”
As for what Isabelle would say to another marketer considering getting a referral program of their own?
I would definitely recommend Mention Me. We get a streamlined service, great expertise and powerful insights that we can apply across our entire marketing strategy. Everything is running very smoothly — it’s delivering amazing value for us.
