About a year ago, I gave
this update on the number of imutual members we have. Here are updated figures (with last year's in brackets for comparison):
Registered and verified email address
8177 (3210)
Clicked out on a merchant link
6495 (2359)
Earned some cashback
4431 (1433)
Completed their shareholder registration
4866 (1624)
As you can see, we've more than doubled our active membership over the past 12 months which is really pleasing. However, a lot of members were attracted by one-off offers. As we don't/can't spend large amounts on advertising, in the future it's essential that our existing members help with recruitment, which is why recently we've been focussed on tell-a-friend initiatives such as the
invitations screen and the
10% revenue share offer
The table below shows tell-a-friend activity over recent months, and it really is a lot lower than we'd like it to be
For instance, out of 101 new members who registered and verified their email address during October, only 11 resulted from
Tell-a-friend links. Given that the Christmas shopping period is the ideal time to get someone interested in a cashback site, the low level of activity is something of a puzzle.
While there will always be things that imutual HQ can do to make the site more appealing (design improvements, new features, more offers etc), it's a fact that a cashback website's members are the most effective advocates. An offer of "Free cashback and shares", however well we present it, can be confusing and potentially too-good-to-be-true to a prospective member. Nothing can trump a genuine recommendation from a friend or trusted contact.
I did start this
suggestions topic a little while back and, as always, I'm keen to hear your ideas as to how we can work together to help increase the number of imutual members