What's referral marketing? It can be described as spreading information about a product or service via the business' customers. In other words, it's making a brand go viral to promote it.
Think about referral campaigns in online businesses. They're among the best marketing tactics to increasing your company's productivity through customers as brand promoters. Referral marketing is effective in gaining more profit and building a company's customer base. However, you should do it properly, failure to which it may turn against you, resulting in even losing the existing customers.
4 Reasons Why Referral Marketing Works for Online Businesses
1. For more exposure
Referral marketing is great for creating massive awareness of your product. Friends and family alone may not be enough to spread the word and get more people. Using celebrities such as You tubers, great social media influencer can make an extensive reach through their followers.
Even most business owners would easily approach them to have their brand posted on their accounts in whatever attractive form to have more views. Additionally, customers' reviews, testimonials, recommendations, and comments can be a channel for getting new buyers.
2. Easier target market reach
Most business owners understand target marketing effectiveness. That's why they use segmentation tools for categorizing their customers based on various aspects. Marketing a product to the right audience gives more opportunities for winning them. The vice versa may lead to a lack of expanding your customer base.
Another thing is precision targeting whereby, customers would primarily refer to the people they know require your product. They understand their friends better, therefore, having to convince them would be more straightforward that the owner would. It's an excellent way of attracting more clients and increasing product popularity.
3. Accelerated growth
Can referrals spread your product's gospel as first as a desert fire? How? Well, social networks can be very quick spreaders - thanks to technology. A video post on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and others can entice millions of potential customers in a few days. It all depends on the number of followers, retweets, reposts, and backlinks. Besides, the content of the ad should be very appealing to influence more buyers.
4. Trust
Did you know that a good relationship is based on trust? Yes, it's very essential in strengthening the bond with your customers. Clients will, without a doubt, refer their loved ones to you if they trust you. Furthermore, who'd want to invest their money to someone they don't trust? It's the reason the first time shoppers find it a bit challenging because they don't know much. But, when referred by a friend, they'll be at ease of shopping with no or fewer restrictions.
Is Referral Marketing Important in Dropshipping? And Why?
If you've just opened an online store to resell dropshipping products and want to as many customers as you want fast, referral marketing is one of the best ways. Just think about it. After you successfully attract a customer who finds your offers great, he/she will be excited to let friends and family members know your online store, which means win-win. It’s great to have more visits and potential customers instantly to achieve hot sales.
6 Best Referral Programs for Inspiration
The following are among the six best referral program examples. Have a look.
1. Dropbox
Dropbox is popular for having one of the best referral programs. It's an online storage company that offered 500MB space to the referrer and the referred. The method excellently worked, resulting in a 60% rise in new sign-ups.
2. Airbnb
Among the best referral program ideas in the world, Airbnb's takes the lead. The company offers its customers a two-way incentive plan. Both the referrer and recipient get $25 credit after the recipient gets done with the first trip. Moreover, the referrer receives an additional $75 if the recipient has a friend or someone extra.
3. Uber
The Uber Company has its unique growth narrative. They incorporate referral marketing through its mobile app. Their referral idea mainly bases on free trips, which lead to many ride orders. More other upcoming companies offering the same service are doing the same.
4. Amazon
Amazon uses pictures in the company's post referral program. It has written details asking users to share their experiences with other people using the Amazon prime. Through that, they achieved great success.
5. PayPal
PayPal's referral program is what inspired Dropbox's success. PayPal really tried because it launched its campaign when social media was still lowly grown. For instance, they worked with emails, IMs, and blogs, and received seven to ten percent of daily growth. It then started paying individuals for referring friends.
6. Google-For-Work
Simplicity works well for Google-For-Work Company. It gives a one-way referral plan, for example, a referrer gets $15 for every recommendation.
How to Implement a Referral Marketing Program?
1. Be keen to analytics
Are you getting a referral source marketing you've zero knowledge about? Use Google analytics to determine the sites linking and referring others to you. It'll help you to understand the best and qualified websites. Have a look and see how profitable you can become by referring to others.
2. Offer unique customer experience and service
It's vital to ensure you provide exceptional customer experience, service with a good product. By doing this, customers will comfortably trickle into your store. Start by examining their purchasing experience and listening to their opinion about your product. Is your product really worth it?
3. Make it simpler for referrals
You can successfully make it possible for your product to be shared by studying and benchmarking with what successful companies are doing and add to your strategies.
4. Treat reviews as referrals
Other people's words about your business are trusted more than the owner's. You should, therefore, encourage your customers to rate your product and leave reviews for other potential buyers to see. Growth hacking tools can help build a strong referral marketing campaign with minimal effort. Find out and give it a try.
5. Maximum use of influencers
Find the most followed influencers in your niche. Approach them with your product and make a deal to better your product in the eyes of viewers. Chose ones that can reach your target audience for quicker sales.
6. Materialize referral programs
Given a prize for effort input, most people would strive to make it happen. For this reason, you need to reward individuals who recommend your product to other people. To illustrate, we've got companies offering rewards for having customers share their pre-sign-up website. Why can't you try the same if you need more sales?
saleyee.com showcases tens of thousands of top-selling products on Amazon, eBay, and Wish in "Platform Top Sellers," making it easier for you to determine the right products to offer. The dedicated section of "Monthly Best Sellers" provides you with more choices.
Bottom Line
Using word of mouth tool, especially in digital marketing, can be great for making your business go viral. Consequently, you'll get more viewers, most of which will buy the idea after learning the product's benefits. Use the above article to learn more about referral marketing for the better growth of your company.
