Extole vs. Referral Rock

Anyone that has a business with a high NPS score should take advantage of this acquisition channel. If your business isn't promotional in nature (i.e., doesn't offer discounts), this type of program may not be as effective. It is important for both the advocate and the recipient to get something out of it. If only the advocate gets rewarded, it will likely diminish your returns.

Referral Rock is very relevant in cases where you already use Salesforce or HubSpot and want to integrate/streamline your Referral Marketing process with your Sales Management process (which is where Salesforce and Hub Spot are mainstream). Referral Rock might be less relevant if you don’t use Salesforce or HubSpot, but in that case, the pricing is also much lower, and you still get great value for the cost.

Incentivized

• Track advocates and reward friends.
• Fraud prevention/Abuse of incentive program.
• Reporting is easy and provides good insights.

• Onboarding support
• Ease of use
• The ability to automate referral payouts.

• Lacks geo filtering capabilities (i..e, ability to serve refer a friend only to visitors from specific countries). Our team had to put that logic in place on our side instead of relying on Extole.
• Platform requires assistance from account manager for some actions/features that should be in the hand of the client.
• Quality Control has been an issue at time. Our program has gone down because a new global platform update went out and affected our implementation. Extole has been responsive in these types of incidents, but that should not happen.

• Just a few minor missing features that I have been told are on the roadmap. Certainly not blockers.
• Gift card payouts that work internationally, even if the currency selected is specific to a certain country (i.e. a $100 USD gift card payout amount should still result in the ability for the recipient to choose a gift card worth $100 USD, but available in their home country. Right now we are limited to only those gift cards available within the payout currency country).

Overall usability is solid. Their customer support and success team made it super easy for me to understand the software, how to use each feature, and how to get the most out of the product.

They are very responsive and prompt when we had questions come up. Support has been great.

More robust on fraud side. Good support.

Referral Rock is overall a better platform. It provides more and better-implemented functionalities. It also provides much better integration with Salesforce/HubSpot and better user support.

Incentivized

• It took a few months to become ROI positive with Extole, but the ROAS has been good since. It probably represents about 2% of our new customers per month.

• Helped fulfill referral rewards.
• Supported inbound and sales efforts.
• Multiple programs used by multiple teams.