We all know that successful relationships are built on a foundation of trust, and this applies not only to friends, family and our spouses, but also to the brands we choose to buy from. This is why happy customers who spread the word about your brand will always bring better results than an elite sales team in terms of business growth.
With ecommerce booming and technology constantly developing innovative ways to get products to the customer, there has never been so much noise in the marketplace. Banners, videos, pop-ups, messages, emails, sponsorships, it doesn’t matter where we look, someone is trying to sell us something.
But they can’t all be “the best” and what works for you might not work for someone else, so how is a customer supposed to navigate this marketing minefield?
Depend on Friends for Business Growth
You can make the most expensive, genius branded content in the world, but it’s still branded content. You will always have an incentive to sell. Your customers, on the other hand, have opinions that are generally independent. Their salary doesn’t rely on their best friend shopping at the same place as them, so when they recommend something, it is assumed to be based on a genuine positive experience.
Your potential customers are looking for information that they believe to be true, and 83% of them trust the opinion of friends and family when deciding where to buy. But customer referrals are notoriously difficult to pin down, which is why customer referral marketing is fast becoming the new frontier of organic growth.
What Is Customer Referral Marketing?
Customer referral marketing involves including campaigns in your strategy that actively encourage your customers to talk about you, as opposed to just hoping they do. These can range from incentivised shares, like discount codes, cash, or merchandise, to influencer campaigns, loyalty programs, and more.
Having a strong referral program that makes it easy and rewarding for the customer to talk about you is also a great way to make your budget go further. It can be expensive to target specific markets, but with referral marketing, your customers are doing the targeting for you. After all, they’re not going to recommend a product to a friend unless they are sure it will be of interest to them based on their interests. Your current customers have the kind of access to high-quality, relevant customers that you can only dream of.
Referral Marketing In An Instant
With a tech roadmap that goes for miles, budget cuts, and insufficient resources, developing a referral marketing tool could be the last thing on your mind. That’s why, at Harviist, we’ve developed a simple referral software package that plugs straight into your current campaign platform, No messing about, just turn it on and let it do its thing.
From campaign creation, to tracking, data analysis and report production, it’s all there in an instant. Our simple, intuitive dashboard gives you all the information you need at a glance with no complication integration, so you have the time to focus on your business.
If your product is good enough, your customers will sell it for you. If you’d like to harness the power of word of mouth, talk to us at [email protected] to find out how we can get them talking.