Card Nest deliver beautiful, hand-picked greeting cards through your letter box every month. The business has enjoyed great success through their attention to detail and the delight that customers feel when receiving a Card Nest delivery.

It’s no great secret, subscription services are big business in the UK right now. There’s certainly no sign of this trend slowing down. So as Card Nest are operating in an increasingly competitive market, they have to be very efficient when it comes to customer acquisition, retention and constantly testing channel performance.

Identifying objectives

Card Nest have built up a number of loyal subscribers since their launch back in 2014. However, they were now ready to take their marketing to the next level. Having worked with them to launch their new store earlier this year, Card Nest approached us to help. Their objectives were to increase their user base and reward the loyalty of their current customers. Ultimately, we needed to establish incentives for signing up and sharing the love.

After looking closer at their sales, the Card Nest team realised that they could tap into the organic word-of-mouth sales they were already getting. Studies have consistently proven that referrals are one of the best forms of marketing when it comes to conversions. It’s a powerful channel because people trust the opinions of others in their lives and those they respect; whether it’s family, friends or social media influencers.

Adding a referral program to the mix was the natural next step in getting those enthusiasts and influencers to tell their friends about Card Nest. However, they can contain a lot of moving parts and developing a system that handles referrals can often be complex and costly. So in order to validate the idea before building an extensive referral system, we worked closely with Card Nest to identify essential features for a simplified MVP version.

The MVP

The process is simple. Subscribers are given a personalised code and can share it easily to recruit friends and family. When a new customer uses the code, they receive money off their first subscription and the original customer earns credits for money off future store purchases. The cost of these rewards is minimal for Card Nest, but the reward is huge. Win-win!

We understand that features aren’t worth building if we can’t determine whether they benefit the business in some way. In Card Nest’s case, success would result in seeing an increase in conversions and revenue. For this reason, we built a specific referral section within their admin so the team can track redemption data and validate the success of the scheme.

Referrals were officially launched this week and have been really well received by the Card Nest team. It’s still early days so time will tell the impact it has on sign ups, but overall, the feedback has been positive.

If you want to discover Card Nest for yourself, we have our very own referral code for you! COOKIES6YN will save you a cool £5 on your first subscription.