Do you want to get more traffic and sales to your business? The best way to do this is through referrals. You can get this by having a referral program where your website visitors and customers can refer people to your site.

What’s Referral Marketing?

Referral marketing is a system where you allow your customers to refer people to your website. This requires a referral page where your prospects can input the contact information of their family and friends. When they do this, one prospect can get more even more prospects to the website granting it more traffic and eventually some sales.

But there’s more to referrals than that. Here are ten specific ways on how customer referrals can grow your business.

Give Referrals a Reason to Share

Referral programs work because you give referrers a reason to share your program with other people. You see, your referrers will not go out of their way to share something if they don’t get anything in return. This is the reason why rewards play a vital role in referral programs. They act as baits and encourage prospects to share the program or business with other people. Rewards can also come in different forms. It doesn’t need to be expensive. It doesn’t have to be cash either. You can come up with simple rewards that resonate with the needs of your target market, and that is often enough to get them to promote you. Other forms are often discount codes or cards, or it can also be a freebie. Some businesses even let their prospects work for a reward. They implement this as a loyalty system. But more than that, you should always reward when your customers or website visitors work for referrals. The reward doesn’t need to be complicated. The key is to have a reward. You should think about this before you even create your referral program.

Make Your Program Easy to Share

When a business owner creates a program, they usually think that their customers, subscribers, and website visitors will automatically share their program. But that is not the case. As with new products and services, your prospects need to get used to the idea that it exists. They will not share it right away unless they have a compelling reason to. Usually, this ‘reason’ refers to the reward. But there’s more to it than that. It also depends on the complexity of the sharing process. Some business owners think that they can be creative with the mechanics of their referral program that they have no limits on how it is implemented. They usually make the customer or the referrer to jump through hoops to get them to earn the reward. While this may be beneficial to the business because the referrer will take multiple actions to earn the reward, it discourages referrers from promoting the program. So if you want them to take action, you have to make the action of sharing easy for them. Aside from having the sharing buttons prominent. You should also ensure that the process only requires them to share the contact information of their family and friends. The referral page must be straightforward, and it should show them what they will get when they complete the process.

Always Reward Your Referrers on Time

Forgetting to pay your referrers their due reward is a recipe for referral program failure. While referrers will often promote your business for free, it doesn’t mean that you should not reward them. You should ensure that all rewards are distributed on time. This can be quite tricky if you are giving away cash or product freebies. This is because you have to track everything and distribute the rewards based on their performance. Fortunately, there is a referral marketing software that can track all of these for you. There is software for every platform. So you don’t have to worry if your website runs on Wordpress or Shopify. It also doesn’t matter if you run a blog or an e-commerce website. Referral software can help you keep track of your referrers. It will show you the amount that you have to pay and how your referrers are earning their rewards. This is a trick that online stores like Best Hunting Bow Labs have implemented. This helped them grow their business at a faster pace.

Make Your Program Interesting

A classic referral program looks simple. It has a reward, and it indicates who it is rewarding, and it indicates the mechanics. However, it can get quite dull. When your customers are used to seeing referral programs, and it got too boring for them, they will not participate. So it is important to learn to think outside of the box to keep the program interesting for your prospects. For example, you can reward them for referring people to the site. But they can also unlock a milestone when they reach a particular threshold. When they manage to refer a certain number of people, they can also unlock a reward. This will make your referral program more interesting than the ordinary refer-reward combination. Another way to do this is to have a contest. When you do this, your referrers will do their best to refer more people to your website. They will not be contented with just one. But this will only be effective if the prize is attractive to begin with. So be sure to offer a prize that is 10x the value of the reward. These are just some interesting ways to spice up your referral program.

Enlist the Power of Influencers

Another way to make your referral program interesting is to enlist the power of influencers. Influencers are social media celebrities. They have a significant amount of targeted followers who are willing to follow their lifestyle and listen to what they have to say. They do this by inspiring their followers with their lifestyle or through direct requests. They keep their followers stimulated by producing regular content for them. When you get these people on your team, it will be easier to get more referrers in your program, but help build brand awareness and retention. This will also increase granting your business more traffic and sales. This is one way to grow your business with customer referrals. You can get several influencers to promote you at the same time. When you choose to do this, you should not go for just one big influencer. It is recommended that you target multiple micro-influencers at the same time. They may have a smaller follower count, but their followers are usually highly targeted that they convert quite well.

Finding a target influencer is the hard part. This will require some research. First, you should take an honest look at your niche and look for influencers in your niche. You may need to narrow down your niche if it is too broad. This will help you uncover micro-influencers in your niche. Once you have a list, you can now look for their contact details. For this, outreach software is useful. This will help you uncover and confirm emails before you even send one. Email is the best form of communication for influencer marketing. But you do need to take some time to get to know the influencer before you attempt to send them an outreach email.

Have a Solid Product or Service

You may promote your business and get as many referrals as you can. But all of these will be in vain if you don’t have a solid product or service. By ‘solid,’ it means that the product should exceed expectations. It should also be a product that is worth sharing. Uniqueness also plays a role on whether or not a product or service gets shared. In this world of commercialization, where there are so many product sellers. It is important to stand out with a reliable product or service that is worthy of your target market’s attention. So what can you do if you are already promoting a particular product or service? Well, you should create a twist. This twist will help your customers to remember you even if you have a similar product or service with other brands.

Go Another Mile with Your Customer Service

If you cannot blow your customers away with a unique product or service, you can always get their attention with a customer service that exceeds expectations. Therefore if you are always there to assist your customers, and you are also proactive in assisting, you will win some points in terms of referrals. You see, it is in human nature to return favors. So when your customers feel valued for their purchase, they also value you in return. When this happens, they will most likely refer your business to their family and friends. It would help to have more than customer service representatives. Your business should also have a customer-centric and caring culture. It is one thing to address customer concerns because of your business protocols. But it is another topic if the customer service representative authentically cares about the needs of the customers. It is important to train your representatives in a caring way. This way, your customers will refer your business to their family and friends.

Promote Your Program Across Networks

The reason why referral marketing works is because it leverages relationships. While marketing may seem like the act of convincing another person to buy, it is also about creating and maintaining relationships. Once you launch your program, you should promote it across your networks. This means that if you have a list, you should promote it there. You should also promote it to your existing social media followers. You should announce it on your website. If you have family and friends as well as suppliers and other business owners, then they are perfect networks for your referral program. Also, you should leverage your referrers as well. This is because each referrer has its own network. And the promotions are incremental. Every referrer can get more people into the website because of their own inner circle.

Promote Your Program Offline

Another creative way to get referrals is to host offline events. You can create a meetup for influencers, or you can host a product launch party. This is great for getting real customers to sign up to your referral program, and it will help you meet influencers. Plus, it is a creative way to get people’s attention and to convince people to join your referral program. The good thing with promoting your program offline is it is hard to refuse. This is because you show the referral program to the target market through a laptop or mobile phone. Then, you can ask them to sign up right there.

Track Your Referrals and Tweak Your Ads

The great thing about having a referral program is you get to understand your customers a bit more. After a while, you’ll get to see and understand that your business attracts certain types of people. These people have certain characteristics that you can use to edit your ads. In today’s social media advertisements, there is a way to tweak your target market by tweaking the demographic characteristics and interests. You can get to know your referrals by asking for more information about them, and you can use it for your ads.

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As you can see, it is all about being creative in promoting your program. It is about knowing how to utilize the referrals so that your business can get more traffic and sales. There is a reason why big companies have used customer referrals to improve their business. It is because it works. It utilizes networks, so it allows businesses to grow at a rapid pace. If you want the same results for your business, then referral marketing may be the method that you like to try.