Rebuilding CAFU's referral program to cut acquisition cost
A previously failed referral program rebuilt by splitting fraud prevention from customer experience with Growth, cutting acquisition cost 40% below paid media.
CAFU had already tried to fix its referral program once. That first attempt was vulnerable to fraud, had limited entry points across the app, gave customers little reason to stay engaged after their first referral, and never delivered sustainable growth. The brief the second time round was to get it right: drive growth without inflating acquisition cost or reopening the same fraud vectors.
The approach
I partnered with the Growth PM to split ownership of the rebuild: he owned the fraud and guardrail logic, I owned the customer experience.
The first attempt had gotten the guardrail logic wrong. Within those constraints, I designed the customer experience to make sure the safeguards didn't get in the way of a program people actually wanted to use.
From there, I mapped the customer lifecycle to find where a referral prompt would actually land: new customers, returning customers, and retained customers each needed a different message and a different moment.
That led to three parallel workstreams:
Dynamic content by customer state
New, returning, and retained customers saw different referral messaging and incentives, rather than one generic prompt.
Messaging tests
Three approaches were tested against each other: self-interested ("get AED X"), altruistic ("give a friend AED X"), and a combined framing. The results shaped the final copy and incentive structure.
Expanded access points
Referral was surfaced in more places throughout the app, most notably a redesigned home screen entry point that became the dominant traffic source.
Outcome
The rebuilt program acquired over 1,500 new customers, with referred customers retaining 9% better than non-referred customers over the same period. Cost per acquisition landed at 59 AED, 40% below CAFU's paid media channels, and 70% of all referral traffic came through the improved home screen placement alone.
- Year
- 2024
- Team
- Pilots & Operations, CAFU