Tips to Maximize Your Referral "Hit Rate"

Have you visited your “Invite and Earn” tab in your Maven profile recently? At Maven, we recognize that our best resource for growth is our own Members, so we provide you with the opportunity to earn Referral Commissions for inviting other great people to join the network. We say this a lot, but it bears repeating: anytime someone you introduced to Maven interacts with one of our Clients during the first year of their Membership, we will give you a bonus equal to 10% of whatever they make! This is not drawn from your friend’s earnings, but rather a commission paid directly by Maven to thank you for helping us grow.

We have worked with thousands of Members to help them “Invite and Earn,” and we’d like to share a few tips and best practices to help you make your recruiting efforts as fruitful as possible.

• Relationships Matter– You will have a much more rewarding experience with Maven if  start by introducing Maven to people you know well and whose value to the network you understand. Be thoughtful about who you invite. Don’t just upload a list of everyone you’ve ever met and blindly blast away- if you do, many of the people on your list may not remember every meeting you and might not appreciate your unsolicited message. While we encourage you to spread the word about Maven, thoughtful, targeted invitations are much more likely to be received favorably and help you earn commissions. Think about who you know that is a real expert in their field/trade, and who would be receptive to your message.




• A Little Cleanup Goes a Long Way– If you are uploading a large list or importing your contacts from Linkedin or other websites, take some time to clean it up before sending. Personal contact lists frequently include notes about the person (nicknames etc), or are written quickly in lower case or all caps. Be mindful that whatever is listed in the First Name field will included in your invitation (Dear “First Name”). Moreover, on professional networking sites like LinkedIn, people sometimes include more in their titles than their name (“Open Networker,” “Marketing Guru,” etc). Rather than send messages to “John with blue eyes” and “Dave Open Networker,” do a quick scan and fix these formatting artifacts. This will help make your message more effective and convince John and Dave to pay attention to your invitation and join Maven.




• Get Personal– At the bottom of the invitation page we provide space to include a personal message with your invite. The default message we include (“Come check out Maven. I think you would make a great addition to the Maven network.”) gets the point across well enough, but it isn’t really your “voice,” is it? You’ve already made the effort to think about some good people to invite and do some cleanup of your contacts list- so take 30 more seconds to write a couple sentences of your own explaining to your invitees why you think they should join Maven. A well-written custom message goes a long way in making bulk invites appear personalized. Think about what made you excited about Maven and share why you chose this group to invite. Here are some real examples that we have seen:
  • “Maven is growing at an explosive rate and I want to be the first one to bring it to your attention…”
  • “I  just got paid $300 to help explain web analytics to a Maven Client…”
  • “I have used Maven to speak with knowledgeable professionals and compensate them for their time, and I thought you would the kind of person other Maven Clients would like to speak with…”




• Avoid Double Vision– Do you have more than one email address? Have you ever received exactly the same message from the same person on two different email accounts at the same time? Annoying, isn’t it? Well, the same thing can happen to the people you invite to Maven if you’re not careful. Check to make sure you didn’t import more than one email address for the same person. Our system checks to prevent duplicate invitations being sent to the same email address, but there is no reliable way to check by name. If you have multiple email addresses for a person, select whichever one you think is most appropriate and leave the other one off.




• Timing isn’t Everything… but it Sure Counts for Something– When are you more responsive to email… at 8am on Tuesday or at 4pm on Friday? Perhaps not surprisingly, we find that sending invitations to join Maven before Noon in the sender’s local time zone earlier in the week (Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays) yields a higher acceptance rate than those sent later in the day or week. Does this mean you shouldn’t send invitations on Saturday afternoon? No, of course not- every invite has a chance of success, no matter when it is sent. But, generally speaking, the best time to send invitations is before Noon early in the work week.




• Big List? Let Us Help– Our system makes it rather cumbersome to send more than few hundred (maybe a thousand at the high end) invitations at a time. This is actually by design. Although we want our network to continue growing very quickly, we also want our Members to slow down a bit when it comes to “blasting” large lists. Limiting invitations to 250 at a time with a long pause between batches helps to “throttle” email volume and hopefully gives them a bit more time to think about about the quality and effectiveness of their invitations. Nevertheless, we recognize that there are highly connected people out there who can legitimately invite thousands- even tens of thousands- of very qualified people to join Maven. If sounds like you, contact us for assistance with your list. We will help you to “scrub” your list and craft a good personalized message, and we will manage the invitation process for you to ensure the best possible results.




Follow these tips to maximize the effectiveness of your invitations, and vastly improve your chances of earning Referral Commissions from Maven.