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?
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!
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.
“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.
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.
Here's how it's working out for them:
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
Visa is ReferralCandy's former Blog Editor [2013–2018]. He also co-founded Statement.sg, a fashion ecommerce label selling witty t-shirts. He's mildly Internet-famous for his elaborate Twitter threads. He hopes to enjoy a glass of scotch onboard a commercial space flight someday.
Grow your sales at a ridiculously
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