Financial Services

Overview

This guide covers the necessary steps for setting up a successful referral program with Extole.

• Tag your Website
• Connect Account Opening System
• Brand your Links
• Design your Experience (done by your creative team)
• Reward your Customers (done by your marketing team)

Brand your Program

Create a CNAME for your Domain

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Task Duration

This task will typically take an IT/Ops engineering team 10–15 minutes to complete.

You'll want to create a CNAME for your domain so that you can create branded Promotion Links and Share Links.

To set up your CNAME, please complete the steps outlined in Extole DNS Requirements.

Send from Your Branded Email

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Improve Email Open Rates

We see a 5–15% improvement in the open rate of emails that from your domains.

The referral program will send program emails from you to your customers:

• Welcome Email
• Advocate Stats Email
• Earned Reward Email

The from address for this will typically be something similar to [email protected]. Once this email has been identified, Extole can check if it is configured to allow Extole to send emails from this address.

For details on how to update your SPF DNS records and install Extole DKIM keys, please reference Extole DNS Requirements.

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Related Content

• Find your domain in the settings page of My Extole
• How to set up your program domain

Add CTAs to your Website with Marketing Tags

Extole displays CTAs that promote the program directly. Marketing tags tell Extole where to serve CTAs on your website. They also enable tracking, so that you can monitor which marketing placements are driving participation in the program.

The standard set of marketing tags includes:

• global_header
• global_footer
• product
• confirmation
• overlay

Extole is happy to create other tags as needed.

For inline CTAs, there is a span tag to locate it on the page:

<span id="extole_zone_global_header"></span>

Which is accompanied by a script tag to load in the content from Extole:

<script type="text/javascript">
(function(c,e,k,l,a){c[e]=c[e]||{};for(c[e].q=c[e].q||[];a<l.length;)k(l[a++],c[e])})(window,"extole",function(c,e){e[c]=e[c]||function(){e.q.push([c,arguments])}},["createZone"],0);

   extole.createZone({
     name: 'global_header',
     element_id: 'extole_zone_global_header',
     data: {
       "partner_user_id": REPLACE, // RECOMMENDED IF AVAILABLE
       "email": REPLACE,  // RECOMMENDED IF AVAILABLE
        "first_name": REPLACE,  // RECOMMENDED IF AVAILABLE
       "last_name": REPLACE  // RECOMMENDED IF AVAILABLE
     }     
  });
</script>

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Pass in customer-specific information

Marketing tags can contain information about the advocate to pre-fill the sharing experience. When you have information about a customer, if they are logged-in, you should pass that information into the tag to make sharing easier.

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More about CTAs

1. Use Extole marketing tags to place on-site CTAs. This allows you to keep your customers on your site while taking advantage of Extole segmentation and testing for the content of the CTA.

2. Place CTAs in your secure online banking site and pass your emails and user ids into the program so that your customers won’t have to. This also enables the integration where you can directly credit your customers’ accounts instead of crediting through gift cards.

Consider your Promotion Audience

Reward Everyone or Reward Members/Customers

Most banking referrals programs are focused on only allowing customers or members to participate as advocates in the referral program.

There are three approaches for this:

Option 1
Promote and market to existing customers without any technical restrictions. This is the most common setup and is straightforward. You will have some non-customers sharing and earning rewards, but they will still be bringing in net new customers. Extole will enforce reward limits so there are no tax implications for the process.

Option 2
Use Extole tags so that the experience is behind login. This process works well and is the preferred process, but requires more technical work to include the experience behind login.

Option 3
Have a process for uploading a list of existing customer emails to Extole. Users who attempt to share but do not have a matching email will be provided an error message. This process will require you to upload new member emails each day.

Connect Friends

When a friend follows an advocate’s share link from an email message, SMS, or social media post, they will be taken to a landing experience hosted through your Extole program, reinforcing they are part of a referral experience, providing any disclosures, and asking them to provide the email address they will use as part of opening their new account.

Send Events to Extole via Tags

In order to reward advocates when a friend opens an account, you need to communicate when a friend applies for an account, when the account is opened, and when the event meets any additional criteria. You can send events to Extole through a combination of on-site tags and API calls.

Track Account Applications with Registration Tags

Applications are tracked by adding the registration tag to your online application page.

The registration tag passes information about the new customer to allow Extole to attribute the account to a referral when possible, run quality rules, and run reward rules. This helps successful tracking when the lead goes on to complete the account opening process.

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Important Note

Make certain that you fire the Extole tag for all account openings so Extole will correctly attribute referrals and manage the fraud and business rules. Extole ignores account applications that are not attributed to a referral after processing rules.

<script type="text/javascript">
  /* Start Extole */
  (function(c,e,k,l,a){c[e]=c[e]||{};for(c[e].q=c[e].q||[];a<l.length;)k(l[a++],c[e])})(window,"extole",function(c,e){e[c]=e[c]||function(){e.q.push([c,arguments])}},["createZone"],0);
  /* End Extole */

   extole.createZone({
     name: 'registration',
     data: {
       "first_name":"Julio", // RECOMMENDED DYNAMIC VALUE
       "last_name":"Friend", /// RECOMMENDED DYNAMIC VALUE
       "email":"[email protected]", // REQUIRED DYNAMIC VALUE
       "partner_user_id":"00O40000004SQbO", // REQUIRED DYNAMIC VALUE
       "advocate_code":"QA754AZ" // RECOMMENDED IF AVAILABLE
     }
  });
</script>

Track Instant Account Approvals with Conversion Tags

When accounts are instantly confirmed after the online application, you can use a conversion tag on the page to instantly send the successful account opening to Extole.

<script type="text/javascript">
  /* Start Extole */
  (function(c,e,k,l,a){c[e]=c[e]||{};for(c[e].q=c[e].q||[];a<l.length;)k(l[a++],c[e])})(window,"extole",function(c,e){e[c]=e[c]||function(){e.q.push([c,arguments])}},["createZone"],0);
  /* End Extole */

   extole.createZone({
     name: 'conversion',
     data: {
       "first_name":"Julio", // RECOMMENDED DYNAMIC VALUE
       "last_name":"Friend", // RECOMMENDED DYNAMIC VALUE
       "email":"[email protected]", // REQUIRED DYNAMIC VALUE
       "partner_user_id":"00O40000004SQbO", // REQUIRED DYNAMIC VALUE
       "partner_conversion_id":"00O415320037eWy" // REQUIRED DYNAMIC VALUE
     }
  });
</script>

Send Events to Extole via APIs

Track Account Openings with Conversion API

All accounts that are successfully opened should call the Extole Conversion API. This should happen for all accounts, even ones that were instantly opened and may have fired a conversion tag on the web. Extole handles attributing referrals, removing duplicates, and discarding data that doesn't apply.

POST https://api.extole.io/v5/events
{
  "event_name":"conversion",
  "data":{
    "email":"[email protected]",
    "first_name":"julio",
    "last_name":"friend",
    "partner_user_id":"12294838abs2",
    "partner_conversion_id":"122948302lala"
  }
}

{"polling_id":"6324678551458903928"}

Track Reward Approval with Approval API

If there are additional requirements for an advocate and friend to earn reward beyond a simple account opening, such as a minimum balance or initial transactions, then it is important to send Extole a reward approval when a new account meets these requirements. Extole would be configured to automatically decline rewards for accounts that haven't met the criteria within a timeframe, typically 90-days.

The initial approval can be sent for all newly opened accounts meeting to criteria, Extole handles attributing referrals, removing duplicates, and discarding data that doesn't apply.

The approval should include a partner_conversion_id that matches the identifier provided in the conversion call.

GET https://api.extole.io/v3/events/approve?partner_conversion_id=122948302lala&event_status=approve&note=met+minimum+funding

Design your Experience

Your entire referral consumer experience can be configured in the My Extole Campaign Editor. This part of setting up the solution can be done entirely by your marketing and creative team and doesn't require technical involvement. Each template is a comprehensive guide for your designer or marketer to customize for both mobiles and desktop experiences.

Reward your Customers

After a conversion is complete, Extole will reward the advocate and friend by emailing them a digital gift card.

Your business team is in charge of setting up the gift cards in My Extole and providing funding to Extole for the cost of the gift cards.

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Alternative Rewards

If you’d like to reward your customers by crediting their accounts (instead of giving a gift card), you can do the following:

1. Use marketing tags to pass your customer identifier into the sharing experience.
2. Use the Extole Account Credit Webhook, API, or files to credit and fulfill your customer’s accounts.

Recommended Additional Steps

Uncommon Additional Steps