I’ve been emailed six separate codes by Mention-Me. Is it possible to apply all of these at once to my next order/subscription, or do I have to make six orders?
It would be really nice if I could get my next Huel for free by referring eight friends to Huel – £336 in revenue to Huel. Not a bad deal.
Hi @jamesmcaulay - I see you’re a Homesick Scotsman on your blog - be grateful you’re in London and not up here at the moment. It’s a bit windy, and that’s not the Huel!
I decided not to announce I was ‘oan the Huel’ on my social media - I set up a new IG for my own progression/sanity/motivation, and when I drop a couple of stone, I’ll splash it across my facebook and hopefully get some rotund friends/family members signed up to lose the excess stones they’re carrying.
How are you finding this week? Are you looking to lose weight or is it just the convenience of no food prep (something that’s been hugely appealing to me this past week of only having to prep a dinner!)?
Thank you so much for spreading the word James (and the awesome article)! Amazing to hear you’re getting so many referrals, thanks a lot. Unfortunately I can’t join together your referrals - this is to prevent any gaming of the system. But you now have a guaranteed discount for your next 6 orders!
Hi Tim,
Thanks for letting me know.
Can you please go into detail on why this is not allowed? How might someone “game” the system?
I’ve now referred 14 people, which amounts to £70 in discounts. I would much rather receive two free packages of Huel than be forced to apply my discount over 14 orders (which will take me about 4 years to get through).
I’ve gained this many referrals because I have a large social network and my blog post was shared by the Huel team on your social media.
I am happy to show you the emails I’ve received from mention-me relating to each referral to prove that these are legitimate referrals. Most of them are my friends, and some are people who read my blog.
Where in your original referral offer do you mention the vouchers are limited to one per order?
Please explain how someone can game this system? A referral aiui is only counted when the referred individual has actually placed an order? At this point it seems they’ve met your stated conditions. If you require the referred to become a regular customer you should have made this clear.
I’m posting as I find your reference to customers gaming your offer somewhat offensive since it seems more likely to me that you hope to benefit from making the referral offer without paying out above a certain amount (Edit: by which I mean capping loss per order). My guess would be that you simply haven’t budgeted for this situation & think it’s okay to try to spin your way out.
Apologies if I’m totally off the mark. I look forward to your explanation Tim.
Nearly, if not all, offers in the UK are “one per purchase” or “not in conjunction with other offers”, why would/should this be any different. Don’t take things personally, anyone knows that the statement regarding gaming the system was meant to protect the business and was not personal to any one person, so why should this offend? Just take the offer and be happy.
I’m not taking it personally; this doesn’t directly affect me. I am disinterested in this matter.
You seem to be making an odd assumption that to be offended one must take something personally. This is incorrect.
You’ve missed the point. Such offers give the promoter extra visibility in exchange for the promised discount. I’m assuming you don’t realise this as you talk about the offer as though it is a gift.
Yes, such offers are usually one per purchase. If Tim had said this I’d probably not have said anything, but instead he tried (in my speculative opinion to which Tim hasn’t yet had the chance to reply) to spin this into being about avoiding customers gaming “the system”.
I find spin particularly offensive as it plays on common flaws in human thinking to manipulate. I’m also not a huge fan of capitalism, so well… each to their own, eh?
We are so pleased that you’ve referred so many people, that is awesome! As I’ve mentioned we can’t stack the discounts, if someone uses your discount code you get £5 off your next order, these rewards can’t be accumulated as is stated in the terms and conditions at the bottom of our refer-a-friend guide. We can’t make exceptions for you, I’m really sorry, this is a refer-a-friend system as opposed to an affiliate system. I hope that makes sense?
Re: gaming. Perhaps this was the wrong word, sorry for any offence caused. It’s just the word used by the Mention Me team to refer to all sneaky stuff done try and get an extra discount! I did not mean that I think your referrals are somehow fake codes, clearly they are not. All I meant was that if we allowed people to accumulate discount codes it would give less honest people than yourselves much more incentive to try and get free Huel. Consider this:
We allow accumulation of discount codes
Mr/Mrs S. Neaky shares their link on a voucher codes website
It get used 10,000 times
They gain £50,000 worth of Huel credit
They order 1000+ pouches of Huel
They resell their Huel undercutting us and losing us 500 customers
OK, this is so extreme but do you see what I mean? Accumulating discount codes encourages this behaviour which clearly isn’t good for Huel.
To reiterate, I do not think you James, Michael or anyone is trying anything other than using the Refer-a-friend system exactly as it is intended but merely explain why these systems are in place and that we can’t make exceptions on a person by person basis.
Thank you for taking the time to explain this. I should have read the terms, and I understand you cannot make exceptions.
Unfortunately, this does not incentivise me to continue sharing my referral code with friends. The ideal referral program accumulates benefits for the referrer, and rewards those people who bring the most custom to Huel. I’ve generated over £500 of business for you from 12 customers in a two-week period, but it’s going to take me at least 2-3 years to receive my end of the bargain! This doesn’t feel at all fair to me.
Could you also explain why the vouchers only apply to orders over £40? I’d like to save money on flavour sachets, as these are something I imagine I’ll order more frequently than the Huel itself.
To address your scenario:
Create systems that block referrals where the referring domain is a voucher site
Monitor referrals and investigate people exceeding ‘normal’ thresholds
Place a cap on the amount of credit one can accumulate.
Also place caps on bulk buying. Surely you don’t sell Huel in such large quantities to regular consumers? The site has a coded maximum of 8 pouches per purchase.
If you do sell more than 8 pouches at a time, then surely you’re selling to a reseller?
Um, well obviously as you intend each code to be used only once you will generate unique codes for each user voucher & make each one one use only. So I repeat, how does someone game your system? I imagine one of us doesn’t understand this matter very well; usually it’s me - at least according to my wife anyway.
Glad your restriction on use is in the t&c. Apologies if I got that wrong, only I remember this coming up several times in the past & thought it had been pointed out previously. I must have been mistaken unless the t&c have been amended.
Disclaimer: Honestly Tim, I do love Huel; the product & company. I’m not trying to be awkward; it’s just in my nature
The campaign is to incentivise our existing customers to introduce their friends to our powders. £40 is so that customers can use the discount on both one-off and recurring orders. Reducing the Flavour boosts to £2.50 each wouldn’t be financially viable.
Thank you for your suggestions, we would obviously love to do many of them but that would involve building an entirely new system from scratch. Or checking through hundreds of codes and thousands of orders manually. As I said previously, what you are describing is an affiliate scheme; companies have been built on an affiliate model and employ hundreds of people to monitor them. We will not allow referrers to stack as it effectively makes it this affiliate network and encourages sneaky stuff.
If someone was really interested in this then we could talk about it on an adhoc basis if they believed they could generate a large amount of referrals, probably hundreds. But we would need to talk to them before to set it up and track it.
What we will probably do soon is increase the discount for both parties to £7.50.
In our current system one Referee’s link can be used by multiple people. So this is possible for one link to be used by 10,000 different people but the ability to stack codes incentivises the behaviour I have previously described. The discount code website was one example of multiple ways that someone could play the affiliate system being described here.
I have another question, I have also refered about 15 people in short time. Every discount is valid for 3 moths. So now the problem is I can not make 15 deliveries in that short time, I will simply not use so much huel to myself. Can you make some special offer for people that refer more people? I will lose my discount and this is not motiviation to get more people on board.
