The Anatomy of a Successful Refer-a-Friend Marketing Campaign

What Is Referral Marketing?

It is a marketing strategy that leverages people’s opinions to influence others to trust a product and services. It is often known as word of mouth, and lots of businesses are using it to grow their business. With this strategy, you can get existing customers and friends to promote your business.

Since the dawn of social media, numerous channels have opened up for marketing purposes. Here are some common channels of referral marketing.

• Family/Friends
• News publication
• Customer reviews
• Influencers’ opinions, etc.

The reality of the ordeal is that you’re asking your customers to stand in place for your salespersons or marketing departments. In that case, referrals will increase, provided the business offers value and customer satisfaction.

In this article, you’re going to learn how to build a successful refer-a-friend marketing campaign.

1. Set Your Goals

What you might consider success might not be a success in the eyes of another business. So, you need to define your success by setting goals you wish to attain. Ask yourself: what do you aim to achieve with this referral program?

It could be to add retention to that mix, or perhaps you want more revenue or a more significant customer base. Whatever be your aim, you need to identify it and work out its realization. After you have found your goal, it is time to involve the marketing or sales department.

Find out how the department has been traditionally dealing with referrals. Answer to this question will help pinpoint where you are as a business and what you need to do. To ensure you’re not running at a loss, you might need to do a little math.

What is your existing customer worth, and how much is the input? If you’re to get referrals, how many to break even? Nevertheless, a 10% conversation rate is something many consider a good starting point. To others, it is merely average.

2. Design Your Referral Campaign

After you’ve successfully covered the essential prerequisites of building a successful refer-a-friend marketing campaign, the next step is designing. You need to understand that the look and feel of your program determine the rate of conversion. Since it could be the first time for most visitors, there is a need to create an incredible impression.

When designing your landing page, ensure that you make your message very clear and easy to understand. The best practice is to adopt a minimalist feel, making it look neat and straightforward. To do this, you will need to use only essential elements. You also want to make sure that the blocks are not too close or colorful.

When it comes to design, the first order of business is your headline. It is probably what your ideal target will first see and sometimes affects conversion. If the headline is catchy, it will grab attention, which is what you need.

Keep your fonts big enough, so your visitors don’t need to strain their eyes. Also, you want to make your landing page as attractive as possible by using excellent imagery.

3. Referral Software Tools

When it comes to referral marketing, there are lots of options that you can utilize. Keep in mind that these software solutions aren’t the same. They all have their distinctive features and functionalities that make them stand out. With these tools, growing your business just got easier.

Through the aid of these tools, you can streamline customer referrals and boost word of mouth about your brand. Here are some of the software tools which you can use to skyrocket your refer-a-friend marketing campaign.

• • OSI affiliate
  • Referral Rock
  • Campaign Monitor
  • Ambassador
  • Google Analytics
  • HubSpot, etc.

With the right tool, you can achieve a tremendous result with your refer-a-friend marketing campaign. There are numerous other tools that you can use. All you need to do is discover a shortcoming and looking for a tool that ratifies it.

4. Create Resources To Alert Your Customers

When you have successfully set up a referral program, what you need to do next is to alert your customers and promote them as you’ve never done before. If possible, get numerous avenues where you can promote your program beyond the usual time-limited email campaign.

Here are a few ways you can promote your referral program and get lots of signups.

• Newsletters – If you’ve not been paying attention to email marketing, you’re losing both money and opportunities. For the best result, ensure you personalize your communication, starting from your subject line to your last paragraph.

Other ways include CTAS, Blogs, Product updates, and so many different mediums. Before you kick off your campaign, here are some resources that will help you get the most from your referral program.

Your referral page needs to have a landing page.

A workflow that helps to alerts your sales team to call. You will also need a landing page where your contacts provide their friend’s information. By making all your marketing materials available to your customers, you increase the programs’ chances of success.

5. Monitor Performance

If you want to build a successful refer-a-friend marketing campaign, you always need to monitor analytics to measure growth. By having tracking in place, you’re able to monitor progress and make the right decisions.

You should be tracking:

• Who are your referrals, and who referred them?
• Time of the referral
• Where they converted or sold
• What ways would you utilize to monitor and follow up with them, etc.?

If you have not started to invest in customer relationship management, now is the ideal time. With this impressive masterpiece, you will be able to track your customer’s relationship. When you make your customers feel like a king, they will undoubtedly feel like a part of the business.

The reason for monitoring your campaign performance is to optimize the program for the best result. When you know the nitty-gritty of the campaign, it helps you to develop even a more robust plan that performs better.

6. Create A Customer Reward Program

The only driver for a referral program is the reward that referrals get when they refer to anyone using their unique link. There are numerous ways to create an excellent customer referral program, and here are a few tips that might help you.

• Offer Rewards Users Want – These rewards could be discount on their next purchase, access to an exclusive product, gift card, or perhaps invitation to a special event or occasion. It mustn’t be a high reward, but something that your users will find very useful.
• Double The Reward – If you can offer more to the referrer and the referee, your referral program will be booming in no time. Since both parties benefit from the program, it makes it more intense as they invite more people into the program.
• Be Open About Your Offering – You don’t want your customers to feel like they are being bribed to say something beautiful about your business. So please, ensure that the terms and conditions are well spelled out and displayed prominently on your page.
• Make It Easy – If singing up takes longer than expected, you’re most likely to have a low conversion on your referral program. After running some promotion about your referral program, make the criteria to join easy to understand.

7. Leverage On Reviews

If you want to build a successful referral program, use reviews to boost your referral marketing. Think about the last time you ordered a product online. No doubt, you read a lot of reviews before finally making a decision. Since an average consumer reads about ten reviews before trusting a business, it will be paramount to incorporate this into your marketing strategy.

A referral program relies hugely on customers’ recommendations, which is why reviews are an essential aspect that you can utilize. By focusing on getting positive reviews or improving your flaws, you will be able to build a secure and reliable brand.

As a marketer who wishes to achieve impressive results from his campaign, you should consider maximizing your reviews to boost your marketing efforts. A positive review is so powerful that it can turn a stranger to a believer of your brand.

By asking your customers to drop a review, you will be able to convince others to try. Although word of mouth is an incredible marketing strategy, reviews and a good reputation will make a difference.

When someone takes time to write a review about a product or service, such a piece is considered real opinions and public markers of trust. It shows that many people have used the product, and they loved it.

With such positive reviews, you don’t have to struggle when convincing a potential customer. Besides satisfying a potential customer, reviews can also help boost your brand’s visibility.

What Makes A Successful Campaign?

In case you’re wondering about the components that make a referral campaign successful, then pay attention to this section. These components are often referred to as anatomy, but they all mean the same.

1. Campaign Visibility

To run a successful refer-a-friend marketing campaign, you must ensure that your campaign is findable. That means it should be visible for your target market to find it. You can do this by making your campaign easy to see or navigate to. Once your referral campaign is easy to understand through your beautiful landing page, you will begin to see your efforts’ positive results.

2. Adequate Rewar

When it comes to rewarding your referrals, there is no established rule to follow. However, you don’t want to cheat your customers. When they find out, they will dump your brand and do some damages you might not recover from.

It must not be monetary but could be a free product like a t-shirt, a discount, or anything that your customer will appreciate.

3. Have A Goal

Before kick-starting your referral program, you must have a goal in mind. Maybe you wanted more orders, subscribers, or perhaps visibility. Whatever it is, ensure that you set realistic goals that you can achieve.

4. Offer Options

When it comes to referral, there is a need to offer many options when sharing your program. Think about the most popular social networks for your brand and consider adding them to the list. Many of your customers might want to share on Facebook, while some prefer a tweet or LinkedIn. By offering lots of options, you make it easier for your customers to promote your business.

5. Customer Support

To build a successful referral program, you must pay attention to your customers’ feedback and attend to them. Your responsiveness often determines the experience of the customer. There are lots of tools today that allow you to talk directly to customers through a live chat. If that doesn’t sound very appealing, make it so that customers can open a ticket about whatever issue they might have.

Conclusion

The key to building a successful referral program is identifying your goals and your ideal market. When you discover these critical factors, you won’t have to struggle to amass referrals. One piece of advice that most marketers found valuable is to mimic an actual friendship.

When your customers feel like they are part of the business, it encourages them to work even more passionately. Put your best foot forward by monitoring, tracking, and rewarding these interactions. When customers are happy, it means you’re doing things right.