What If Heart Up My Sleeves Had a Referral Program?
Updated: Jul 2
Say you’re standing in front of a mirror, admiring a top that you’re wearing. But then suddenly you swirl to your left, then a bit to the right.
You pause for a moment, and say, “Naah! This looks too basic”. Now you take out a jacket from your wardrobe, put it on, roll up its sleeves, and bingo!
You can’t help but gaze at a completely new you.
Been there? Well, I have and it’s so convenient how I can entirely change the look of my existing clothes by adding a style element.
You see, styling up is a fashion statement in itself and Riya Khattar, founder of Heart Up My Sleeves stepped up this game in February 2021.
Heart Up My Sleeves is a homegrown luxury fashion label that helps keep outfits fresh with detachable statement sleeves and accessories.
“Wait, I’ve heard of this brand somewhere”. If you said this, it’s only natural for the brand name to ring a bell from Shark Tank India Season 1.
Heart Up My Sleeves
Yes, Riya had bagged ₹25 lakh investment in exchange for 30% equity from Vineeta Singh and Anupam Mittal.
After this, this fashion brand got quite popular with 44.5k followers on Instagram and 24.5k total website visits in January 2023.
Seeing a product that has such a wow factor and receives good interest on social media, I immediately wondered what their referral program would look like but guess what?
To my surprise, the brand isn’t running any referral program and as the flag bearer of referral programs, I knew what I had to do next.
So here I am, starting another series, called — What-if such Shopify brands had a referral program?
Herein, I will discuss if brands that should totally have a referral program were to design one, and how it’d look based on the main referral program components.
Would People Refer?
Yes and that’s because data and product popularity don’t lie. Here’s why I think what I think.
Heart Up My Sleeves saw 7x growth after their Shark Tank India episode. This makes it so clear that people showed interest in their product.
Their total website traffic has increased from 4.7k in November 2022 to 24.2k in January 2023. So clearly, there’s customer curiosity.
The bounce rate, however, is 91% and that could be due to higher pricing. This can be solved by offering referral rewards.
Their audience is 58.53% male and 41.47% female which shows gifting potential via referrals. We’ll talk about it more.
The brand already has many fashion bloggers and influencers onboard such as Komal Pandey, Roshni Bhatia, and more who currently share only website links and not brand advocate codes.
Heart Up My Sleeves Referral Program
Let’s now divide up their referral program into 4 aspects based on the possibilities of a Shopify referral program.
1. Referral Rewards
Heart Up My Sleeves currently sells 3 types of products.
Statement Sleeves: Starts from ₹900 and goes up to ₹4800
Capes: Around ₹3400
Brooches: Starts from ₹650 and goes up to ₹3300.
I also noticed that they are offering a 5% discount code (EXTRA5) on all products. So I picked out my statement sleeves and added them to the cart only to see the discount code get nullified by shipping charges.
That brought me to a couple of referral reward types that Heart Up My Sleeves could definitely look at. Free Shipping: They could offer a free shipping discount code that both the advocate and friend could claim and use at the checkout. Percentage Discount: A 5% discount code for order values of 1000 and above isn’t enticing. Instead, referred friends could get 20% off on their first order above ₹1000.
Advocates could get 20% off on statement sleeves that cost above ₹3000.
Free Product: Both advocate and a referred friend could get a free product like a Brooch worth ₹650 on a minimum purchase of ₹4000.
Heart Up My Sleeves could play around with such referral cases easily with a Shopify referral program app that offers various reward types.
2. Referral Program Appearance
Heart Up My Sleeves could have a referral program widget that goes with its brand theme and content. They could choose a theme from various options that revolve around color, shape, banner, text, icon, and more. Here’s how I’m imagining their referral program widget.
Upon launching their Shopify store referral program, their referral and earn panel could look like this, aligning with their brand theme, mentioning rewards with a referral link and shareability.
3. Refer and Earn Communication
Heart Up My Sleeves could communicate its referral program in a way that nudges their customer at the right time of their journey.
This can be done in several ways but the first step is choosing the right referral message. Speaking of it, a good referral message must talk about
Why an advocate or referrer is referring the brand to a friend
How the referred friend will benefit from it
Mention referee reward and referral link
Once a referral message is in place, the same can be communicated by adding the —
A referral program launcher on the home page
A refer and earn nudge at thank you page
Setting up emails for the referred friend
Going by Heart Up My Sleeves brand theme and messaging, below is a sample of how their referral program nudges for thank you page will look.
Once an advocate or referrer shares their referral link, it will be followed by an email communication to the referred friends which can also be customized by Heart Up My Sleeves as per their preference.
4. Referral Program Visibility
We now arrive at the last but the most powerful component of a good referral program and that is, visibility because a referral program isn’t promoted well pointless.
So in addition to mentioning their refer and earn program under Menu and Footer, Heart Up My Sleeves can also add it in
Order confirmation email: All they have to do is show a simple banner at the bottom.
Welcome email: They can add a hyperlinked text to not seem too pushy but subtle since a customer has just signed up
Check-out page pop-up: This is also a good stage to trigger their refer and earn nudge at the checkout page.
Social media: With 44.7K followers on Instagram, this is the right place for them to add a link to their referral program in their bio along with other links using a link in bio tool like Linktree.
Influencers: Heart Up My Sleeves has some great influencers that have over 1M followers on Instagram. They could create unique referral offers on their referral code and ask them to share.
Back to You
I strongly feel that a Shopify store that has a following and existing customers (Heart Up My Sleeves dispatched 1003 orders in their first 9 months) must be leveraging the power of a referral program.
If you’re still wondering why you can read my article on why you must have a referral program for your Shopify store here.
If you understand the importance but don’t have one yet, what are you waiting for? Set up a referral program for your Shopify store today with Flyy.
