Just before Christmas last year, we started giving people money as a reward for inviting their friends to join Monzo. This was incredibly successful and over the last nine months, hundreds of thousands of people have used it.
I wanted to let you know that we’re planning to move back to the original golden tickets (with no cash reward) later this week and give you an early heads up. Growth is incredibly strong right now (partly because of the TV campaign in June, as well as increasing awareness of Monzo) and running the referral program quickly gets expensive — in July and August, more than 100,000 customers came through it!
We’re very conscious that we want to grow in a controlled manner (especially so we can focus on making customer support and our product as high quality as possible) and this is one of our best tools to moderate that growth. I’m sure we’ll test out some more variations over the coming weeks and months — one idea we have is to give a reward for inviting someone who uses Monzo as their main account (or gets their salary paid in), as well as testing out giving something other than money.
I’d love to hear your ideas here — Robinhood offer people a free share which is quite fun I think. Hope that makes sense and happy to answer any questions you have about it
I think Robinhood’s free shares make sense for them because having the share; gives users a reason to keep their account open, keep checking the app to see how the investment is doing and familiarises people who haven’t invested before with the concept a little bit more.
It’d be great if Monzo could come up with something with those kinds of extra benefits, rather than just a simple cash incentive..although I’m not sure exactly what that would be.
I would like to see a points system that you get to choose a gift and can keep accruing points to get what you may want - a bit like green shield stamps for the younger generation don’t quite know how you define the new users use though - salaried or amount put through account etc
stickers
T shirt
1 Monzo share
meal for two in local restaurant up to a value when you photo receipt into app
Metal card
etc
I think this would be an interesting growth tactic. What if everyone who had done 10 or more referrals without being paid got a metal card overnight? And if you referred 10 or more people under the new scheme you would also get one. That would be a fantastic incentive for people to refer who hadn’t done so previously - assuming they want a metal card.
The problem with offering a Metal Card is the RRP for it (from testing) is circa £70-90 so if they are opposed to giving out £5 a referral I doubt they’d be willing to give a £70-90 Metal Card for 10 referrals.
They need something that they can control the relative value of, that doesn’t “cost” them to give out, but still makes the customer feel rewarded… hmmm…
Hey, we’re getting rid of any referral bonuses for you or the person you refer. If you would like to refer someone to Monzo you can do this by sending them your referral link but there will be no benefits associated with doing this. To save time tell your friend to search for Monzo on the app store and click download
