Every businessman wants to achieve massive growth in his respective business. One of the basic requirements to get higher sales in business is proper marketing. Marketing is considered one of the priorities of businesses when it comes to sales. There are several ways of marketing businesses opt for to give a boost in sales. Referral marketing is one of them.
Referral marketing is one of the most popular ways among marketers as it takes less effort. People tend to believe more in word of mouth rather than flashy advertisements. Referral marketing is a marketing technique that uses recommendations from existing customers on various promotional platforms. In simple words, referral marketing works as your salesman or advocate for the brand.
Why referral marketing?
Most of the businesses tend to spend heavily on the traditional way of promotions. Since digital marketing has planted its roots, it has become easy for everyone to promote business to a vast audience. According to recent research, referral marketing tends to fetch five times more conversion as compared to the other techniques. No matter how much time people spend watching your commercials or offers, they tend to buy it when they see the recommendation. Referral marketing is considered one of the cost-effective ways of promoting the business. Your one satisfied customer can turn into a convincing cheerleader for your brand.
What are the types of referral marketing?
Now that you are aware of why referral marketing is essential for your business let’s understand our different types of it.
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Reputation Based Referrals
The reputation Based referral technique refers to getting associated with professionals who can help you spread word of mouth for your business. This type of referral technique is also referred to as influencer marketing. Here the professionals promote your product and brand on their platform and create awareness. Here they charge a certain amount as a promotion fee. An influencer marketing technique is quite trending on some of the popular social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram.
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Experienced Based Referrals
This type of referral tends to work best since the testimonial is coming directly from the end-user. Here you can encourage the existing customers and share their experience on various platforms in return for a specific incentive. This type of technique may require more effort and a little bit of investment, but it is certainly known as a high conversion-driven one.
What are the best strategies to gain the maximum from referral marketing?
Here are the varied strategies that you should know about. Then only it is possible to use them for maximum benefit. The best part about referral marketing is that businesses and firms of all industries can use it to gain the attention of new customers. It always works whether a finance company offers debt consolidation loans for bad credit people by direct lender or a fashion brand, it always works.
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Always be the best at your customer service
Your existing customers will only recommend the brand if they are satisfied with the services. Hence the first focus should be on improving the customer service experience. If word of mouth can increase brand awareness, it can also degrade the brand if the customer’s experience is not good. There might be few issues with the product or service, but if highly skilled customer service professionals back the business, things become easy. A good customer service agent can retain the existing customer by providing them with great satisfaction. Hence the customer will still recommend the product due to your customer service even though there is an issue with the product.
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Monitor the data
The numbers never lie. Your data helps to show the actual numbers of conversions from various sources and platforms. Here the referrals can be a customer or website. If the marketing team is working on search engine optimization, then the data also shows the traffic or the visits from other websites. Make sure to focus more on these websites to drive higher traffic. All these can be done easily only by looking after your data frequently. The tools that are used for monitoring purposes are the inbuilt CRM and google analytics.
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Create a sharable experience for the product
Do you think product packaging or presentation makes any difference in getting the referral conversions? Yes, it does! How? Let’s get to know. Being a customer, you might have seen many companies selling the products with beautiful packaging along with a cute thank you note. This generally influences the customers to share this with their friends or families. Now, did you understand why do we see so many products promoting videos on several platforms? This strategy looks simple but plays a huge role and brings maximum referral conversions.
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Make the referral process easy
This is another effective strategy that helps to fetch the maximum referral sales. If promoting or selling the product through the website, then make sure to add the feature for a referral. You can add a simple button or a tab to refer the product to others. On the same page, make sure to describe the benefit that one can get after referring the product. This can be a discount or a freebie in a future purchase.
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Implementation of the referral program
You must have seen various salons, hotels, or other service providers promoting the membership programs for their services. The purpose of implementing this concept is to keep the customers attached to your brand for future services. Here you can offer them certain rewards for opting for the membership and specific benefits to get the referrals to join it. Some of the organizations provide such memberships to their employees free and ask them to share their experiences with others. This strategy may require a good amount of investment at the initial stage, but one can certainly expect good returns in the long run.
Conclusion
No strategy works if you are not grateful to your customers. Hence make sure always to keep a space of tiny thank you notes in promotional materials or packaging. These small efforts play a huge role in keeping the customers happy and sharing good things about your brand.