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Referred consumers will typically be loyal enough to be more apt to make referrals themselves, and interested in the incentives you have to offer. Target your referred customers with extra focus. Make the interaction personal: The longer your chain of referrers, the wider the reach of your brand.
Market your refer-a-friend program to your referred customers in a timely fashion:. Clients who have participated in your referral program in the past present ideal candidates to refer again. As we mentioned above, promoting your referral program regularly is key to its success.
Birds of a feather do flock together , and your higher LTV customers will tend to attract similar people to your brand. Keep it up! Megan Mosley is a writer for Referral Rock. Carpathia, Cloud Hosting Provider. Trello is a web-based project management app that makes project collaboration simple and enjoyable.
Promoting it to customers who have referred in the past is just as important, and requires a more personal touch than promoting it to non-participants. However, you have to make sure the communication is as user-friendly as possible to see results. In addition to using email to reach out to your program participants, Frensley recommends more personal strategies. Consider reaching out to them with a phone call if practical or send them a personalized card via direct mail. You might even consider texting your customer since the vast majority of texts unlike emails are opened and read.
Make your decision based upon the nature of your relationship with your customers. The people who have referred their friends to you already are people who have already gotten past the fear of reputational risk. As such, they are top candidates to refer again. One of the most prominent methods for getting customers to refer their friends and family is to engage with them. Writing for Forbes , Kimberly A. Making yourself an active participant in the online conversations that are taking place around your brand is an invaluable strategy for building trust.
Customers are far more likely to refer a friend to a brand if they feel close to that brand in a personal way, and social engagement is the perfect way to build that sense of personal connection and trust.
Health and Fitness retailer, GNC, used their social accounts to answer questions about health and GNC products and build long-term consumer relationships. If your e-commerce store asks shoppers for product reviews then you can engage with these reviewers right on your website.
These engagements can be highly effective for customer service, and they can also help drive referrals. In other words, the vast majority of online shoppers are looking for confirmation that a product is worthwhile, and they are looking for it from other shoppers. Having product reviews right on your website saves your customers from having to go elsewhere to read reviews. These reviews are also excellent opportunities to engage with customers. When you see positive reviews, though, you can use them to recruit customers for your referral program.
A consumer who writes a glowing five-star review of one of your products is essentially already referring other customers to your brand. These advocates are excellent candidates for your referral program. If your website is predominantly e-commerce based, you can get a lot of promotion for your referral program without even involving your employees. However, active promotion still matters too. If you have a brick and mortar store, for instance, it is important that your staff are consistently promoting the program for you.
If you do have a physical store location, train your cashiers to ask shoppers if they are interested in enrolling in the referral program. If your brand is entirely online-based, make sure you involve your customer service representatives in the promotion of the program. As we discussed above, there are lots of opportunities to engage customers and promote the referral marketing program while interacting with customers online. Your CSRs and other client success teams are the ones who are interfacing with your customers directly and are thus the ones best equipped to spread the word about your referral program on an individual basis.
Involving your staff in your referral program pays off in other areas as well. Shep Hyken , customer service expert and author of The Amazement Revolution , highlights the importance of earning referrals via great service, day-in and day-out. Involving the people that have the most direct contact with customers is your best bet for creating a company culture that naturally generates referrals. One of the top reasons that referral programs fail is that they just get too complicated.
Tracking all of the information, interactions, and behaviors that drive a referral program is difficult for a program of any size. Automated referral marketing systems can maintain lists of people who have signed up for your program. They can monitor referrals on social media or distribute rewards to clients who have referred friends. In short, an automated referral system can do most of the things discussed in this post. They are the ultimate way to encourage customers to refer. Consider the story of Roku Inc.
In , Roku implemented an automated referral program, offering patrons a free month of Netflix for each new customer they referred. The program was driven primarily by automated emails.
Roku sent emails to all customers in order promote the program ahead of its launch, and then once a quarter when it was operational. They also tracked referrals on their site and used automated emails to confirm referrals that had been received and distribute the rewards.
In one year alone, Roku scaled their referral program to include 40, users. The growth can be credited both to the quality of the incentive and the seamless operation of the automated process. From increased customer trust and active conversations about your brand on social media, all the way to higher sales and revenue numbers, these benefits can be enjoyed by any e-commerce brand. Thank you Ann for write this article.
Once I did, the traffic started coming in. I learned from here to include more hashtags, images, and certain words. This can reach more people, especially if I want to post something that I want to touch a lot of people. This article is a great source for me to make loads of improvements.
Great Article. The article is very useful and contains all the major aspects which are essential for eCommerce business. Keep updating us with such blogs. However, there is little empirical evidence of such impact. In this study, Raghuram Iyengar and Young-Hoon Park investigate whether firms indeed benefit from referral coupon campaigns. In three studies, they use large-scale field experimental data from a beauty company to assess whether campaign communication with regular or referral coupon is more effective.
The authors find that, surprisingly, referral coupons are, on average, less effective than regular coupons in generating sales from primary recipients. While 9. Referral coupons decreased purchases most among customers with low frequency and monetary value. They provide empirical evidence that consumer response to referral coupons is most likely the result of diminished trust and brand persuasion. An important managerial question is whether revenue from secondary recipients makes up the difference in revenue.
Iyengar and Park demonstrate that firms could target customers on the basis of easily observed characteristics, such as prior purchase behavior, to improve the performance of referral campaigns. Thus, for managers, customer segmentation is key when they assess the profitability of marketing campaigns that on the surface may seem beneficial for all customers.
Acknowledgments We thank several managers at the participating company for their efforts in making this research possible. In , wireless carrier T-Mobile decided to break the referral program mold and offer actual shares in the company in return for referrals. Referrers could earn up to shares in T-Mobile. And customers who had been with T-Mobile for more than five years were offered two T-Mobile Shares for every successful referral. Referee Rewards: The highly-differentiated program generated millions of dollars worth in free marketing as a result of the extensive press coverage.
Learning from the success stories above, here are five ways to ensure that your referral marketing program will be effective in both the short and long term. This is most likely to occur when you encourage referrals from your existing loyal, satisfied and profitable customers.
Make these customers the primary target of your program that promotes referrals. Simplicity is key and if your referral program is too complex it might falter right out of the gate. The most successful referral marketing programs include the following:. Not all businesses can afford cash rewards in return for customer referrals.
Dropbox and Evernote both offered online storage space in return for referrals: Tesla offered branded experiences and entries into competitions. If your brand has high-affinity your customers love you! Rob Wormley puts it simply in this Wise Pops post: What incentives would make them more likely to share your ecommerce store with their communities online? Take a look through your inventory to see if there are low-selling items that could be used as promotional give-aways. Not all rewards have to eat into your bottom line. Effective referral marketing programs provide a program that is easy for your best customers to find and discover.
All the key touch-points that your customers have with your brand should feature information about the referral program. Your customer-facing staff members can be the most important means to communicate the program, and effective training for these key team members is very important.
You can do this using referral coupon template. The best thing with this type of Gift Coupon Templates is that it will help your customers to look for other. Thinking of putting together a customer referral program, and need some ideas mass of early adopters they dropped the Refer-A-Friend bonus, but they kept it.
In this short post from Gillian Smith , you can learn about how a retail store in this case — a credit union can prepare its staff to ensure the greatest success for its referral program. Be sure to include information about your referral program on the following:.
Some opportunities to engage brand advocates are:. Effective referral marketing systems provide metrics throughout the lifecycle of the program.
When measuring your referral marketing program, you should look at the following:. Did we miss any of your favorite referral program examples? Let us know what you learned from the referral marketing greats.