Everywhere you go, you see an advertisement for some product or service. With every brand pushing them as the option put there, more and more people are making buying decisions based on recommendations from friends or family.
Brands are now looking to earn recommendations or referrals to grow their sales. It has now become standard for brands to offer incentives to their customers to give a positive review or testimonial. Such reviews help the product gain a favorable status among customers.
Referral marketing works best when there is a strategy behind it. Here are a few steps that will help you devise a winning referral marketing strategy:
Designing the Referral Marketing Program
To design the referral marketing strategy, you’ll need to put together some data:
- the customer base
- the goal of the referral program
- types of products or services you wish to promote
Once you have these parameters in place, you are ready to set up a referral program.
Referral Call-to-Action and Reward
Now that you know what you want from your referral program, you can introduce referral actions like incentive matching.
In this referral program, you incentivize your existing customers to invite their friends to try your product or service. Your current customers get a chance to earn cashback, discounts, or other complimentary items for free. An offer gets extended to the referred customers as well.
Timing Your Referral Requests – Pre- and Post-Purchase Referrals
Customers are most engaged with an offering before purchase or immediately after it. Prompting your customers to share the news of their latest acquisition is always a good referral strategy.
Similarly, asking them to invite friends to try out the products they are considering also leads to suitable references.
Use Multiple Channels
Today’s customers are incredibly savvy and use multiple channels to check out offerings of interest. Ensure that you can track them across channels and allow them to pick up where they left off.
Track Success
Always use techniques like A/B testing or split testing to measure the success of your referral marketing program. The results will help you tweak and improve your strategy.
Place Measures to Avoid Referral Fraud
Use technology like IP address tracking to ensure referral frauds do not occur. Duplicate profiles, use of bots, and self-referrals are some of the ways referral frauds can occur.
