Tips for Building a Successful Customer Referral Program and Winning more Referrals Per Customer

When the customers are happy with your product/service, they will recommend you to their near dear ones and others. There’s this thing called ‘word of mouth’ through which these happy customers does the work of selling for you.

Customer referrals are a cost effective way of growing your customer base and your business. It is seen that customers who come to your doorstep via referral of loyal customers, tend to have a higher retention rate.

They come to you with already a certain level of trust. Purchasing decisions of the customers are affected to a large extent by the trusted sources.

People tend to purchase the products/ services which are referred to them by the ones they trust or have already used or experienced it.

The point now is, how to get the quality referrals and get more valuable leads. How to make a creative referral program that helps in growing our business.

If you want to reap the benefits of referral leads then you have to consider a few steps to build your customer referral program. These are as follows:-

They are the loyal consumers who buys your product and constantly recommend them to others out of the satisfaction they derive from it.

They don’t get paid to do so yet they do so because they trust your brand. These advocates must have a solid influence on the market. You can find these influencers on social media channels, you can be active on review site,s like Quora and Reddit where you can find people talking about brands.

Lookout for the Influential Advocates for Promoting your Referral System

 

There are tools like Net Promoter Score with the help of which you can add people talking positively about you and giving good ratings to your business.

Similarly you can even use hubspot‘s social inbox tool for tweeting as it will also help you reach out to people talking nice about you. In general you can have conversation with your colleagues and make use of others sources to find these advocates offline as well.

➤ Free advertising sites to promote your referral program

This is one important step before you get into anything new. How many referrals you are able to get organically without putting in any efforts from your end is what needs to be looked at first.

Set Goals and Put Active Efforts for the real success of your Referral System

There will be referrals taking place outside the business about which you might not be aware. Thing is to take note of how many times you are being referred by someone.

You can take account of this from your marketing team and by reviewing your sales by talking to your sales and accounts team. How many referrals are needed by you to reach the break even point at least, figure it out.

Put your efforts in the right direction, set goals and measure your performance in sink with the time and efforts you are putting in.

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You can’t buy the brand advocates for your business as this could incur a lot of cost and get expensive for you.

Secondly this won’t work in the long run because this relation between a business and brand advocate is developed out of trust. Paid advocates can be inefficient.

It would be better if you reward your brand advocates that are doing organic promotion for your brand out of trust. You can offer great incentives to these and appreciate them but don’t limit yourself to cash and discounts. Think beyond that. Give them free gifts and do stuff that can move them emotionally.

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[ Banner advertising to promote your referral system online ]

You can run referral contests for example:- Earn $10 on inviting friends to sign up/ Register on website. Earn further $20 on purchase of the product from their end and likewise.

Launch Referral Contests frequently to grow the members in your referral program

This way you can attract bran advocates to your business who are interested in doing promotion  work for you to avail the offer and win the contest.

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➤ A Special Guide on How to run your Referral Contest to get the lead results fastest

How you are going to promote your program is another concern. Find your promotional mediums which does not annoy your audience like email campaign can be a good option to kick start but you must not spam the receivers inbox.

Use Effective Promotional Methods to Get the Right Members Quickly for your Referral Program

Be creative, make use of blog writing, product & service updates, social media posting (unique/ creative again), newsletters, CTA Locations, etc. Look at what kind of business you are into and accordingly decide what medium would serve best for you to promote your business. Launch a successful digital marketing campaign for your referral program

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➤ Be in touch with your operations team. Take timely updates on how new leads are taken up. Talk to your sales representative on speaking in the correct way when following up with the leads. Keep track of your data and maintain backup in case you lose.

➤ Keep track of who is referring who?

➤ Did the referral become a customer? If yes. then when?

➤ What promotional tools are working best and worst?

➤ What are the incentive plans for various advocates? etc, and all such questions must be taken into consideration.

➤ And most important of all, do not take your tech for granted as the management of your referrals are dependent on it.

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