Referral program mechanics in Digital Marketing - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Referral Program Mechanics

📖 Scenario: You work for a company launching a new referral program to encourage customers to invite friends. The program rewards both the referrer and the friend with discounts.Your task is to build a simple step-by-step plan that outlines how the referral program works, including tracking referrals, setting reward thresholds, and finalizing the reward distribution.

🎯 Goal: Create a clear, structured outline of the referral program mechanics that can be used by the marketing team to implement and explain the program.

📋 What You'll Learn

Define the initial data structure to hold customer referrals

Add a configuration variable for the minimum number of referrals needed for a reward

Apply the core logic to identify customers who qualify for rewards

Complete the plan by specifying how rewards are assigned

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Referral programs are common marketing strategies to grow customer base by rewarding existing customers for bringing in new ones.

💼 Career

Understanding referral program mechanics helps marketing professionals design effective campaigns and track their success.

1

DATA SETUP: Create the referral data structure

Create a dictionary called referrals with these exact entries: 'Alice': 3, 'Bob': 1, 'Charlie': 5, representing the number of friends each customer referred.

Digital Marketing

# Create the referrals dictionary with exact entries
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a Python dictionary with customer names as keys and referral counts as values.

2

CONFIGURATION: Set the referral reward threshold

Create a variable called reward_threshold and set it to 3, representing the minimum referrals needed to earn a reward.

Digital Marketing

referrals = {'Alice': 3, 'Bob': 1, 'Charlie': 5}
# Set the reward threshold to 3
# Your code here

Need a hint?

This variable helps decide who qualifies for rewards.

3

CORE LOGIC: Identify customers who qualify for rewards

Create a list called qualified_customers that includes the names of customers from referrals who have referred at least reward_threshold friends. Use a for loop with variables customer and count to iterate over referrals.items().

Digital Marketing

referrals = {'Alice': 3, 'Bob': 1, 'Charlie': 5}
reward_threshold = 3
# Create the qualified_customers list using a for loop
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a for loop to check each customer's referral count against the threshold.

4

COMPLETION: Define the reward assignment

Create a dictionary called rewards where each key is a customer from qualified_customers and the value is the string 'Discount Voucher' to represent the reward assigned.

Digital Marketing

referrals = {'Alice': 3, 'Bob': 1, 'Charlie': 5}
reward_threshold = 3
qualified_customers = []
for customer, count in referrals.items():
    if count >= reward_threshold:
        qualified_customers.append(customer)
# Assign 'Discount Voucher' reward to each qualified customer
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a dictionary comprehension to assign rewards to qualified customers.