Do you sleep well at night?

Leesa's founders didn't, and so they built a mattress company– driven by a vision to help everybody sleep better.

Their value proposition?

"A showroom quality product, in a box, days to your doorstep."

Perhaps most compellingly, Leesa offers all customers a 100 night sleep guarantee. If you sleep on your Leesa mattress for a hundred days, and aren't satisfied, you can return it.

Leesa is doing very well. At the time of this writing, 272 out of the 346 reviews on their site are rated 5-stars. That's over 78% of all reviews!

So how do you build and grow a successful business like Leesa?

We were curious to know the challenges Leesa faced, so we chatted with Matt Hayes and Ted Pfeifer from the Leesa marketing team.

As you might expect, it doesn't come easy.

Beyond the nitty-gritty scaling difficulties (hiring, logistics, back-end), Leesa had the unenviable challenge of getting qualified leads as fast as possible.

All new businesses have to do that, yes– but Leesa had to do it in a challenging market with strong, recognized competitors who were ready and willing to outspend them.

The solution? Focusing on word-of-mouth

“We knew the importance of building word-of-mouth into the product experience.”

First of all: Leesa didn't simply buy ads and hope for the best.

Instead, they solicited user-generated reviews and then strategically amplified those with their ad spend.

Just check out some of these awesome reviews on their site:

It's no accident. Leesa's team understands very well how word-of-mouth from their delighted customers helps them outshine the competition.

They also reached out to mattress industry experts and offered free trials in exchanged for unbiased reviews. This strategy has been paying off well for them, which is a testament to the quality of their product.

Leesa amplifies word-of-mouth using ReferralCandy to run their customer referral campaigns

Here's how it's working out for them:

1. ReferralCandy's automated referral detection and reward fulfillment freed up valuable time and resources for the Leesa team

ReferralCandy automates Leesa's referral campaigns, which allows them to focus on other important things like responding to customers and improving on the product experience.

“ReferralCandy has been huge for us to spread the word virally. We love that you just plug it in, set it up, and that’s it. Other that keeping an eye on it, we don’t change much. It just works.”

And its benefits go beyond the marketing team, too:

“It helps our finance guy out. A lot. Automatic payouts mean way less work for him. We’re bootstrapped. We don’t have the time to manage that.”

2. Referral rewards and ease-of-sharing allow Leesa to delight existing customers, too

Marketing is often focused on short-term growth and acquisition. Leesa knew that if they wanted to get stellar word-of-mouth, they were going to have to delight their existing customers.

“We got a couple of calls from some of our older customers about our referral program. They were amazed how easy it was to share their referral links.”

^delighted Leesa customers sharing their referral links with their friends on Twitter

These allow Leesa customers to get rewarded long after they've gotten their mattress, and the gift just keeps on giving.

3. Fully–customizable email templates allows for maximum brand recognition and recall

ReferralCandy also allows Leesa to stay true to their branding, for a fraction of what it would cost them elsewhere:

“We loved being able to totally customize our sharing page to match our brand.”

Conclusion: Leesa amplified its powerful word-of-mouth with ReferralCandy – you can do the same for your business

It's been very exciting for us at ReferralCandy to play a part in Leesa's success as they help hundreds of people get better quality sleep.

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Read this next: Learn more about how we helped Leesa set up their automated referral program.