How to implement a referral program and why are they important?

For any business with an eCommerce presence, referral programs are a cost-effective strategy to acquire new customers.    Although word-of-mouth marketing is as old as marketing itself, it’s now easier than ever to connect your loyal customers to their friends and family network through a referral landing page on your website.   Why are referral programs important?

Referral programs provide a real-time assessment of your company’s customer satisfaction and net promoter score (NPS). NPS measures the loyalty of your customers, and is based on the simple question of how likely is it that you would recommend this product to a friend or family member? As George Silverman said, “A happy and satisfied client has the power to influence a million doubters” and here are some of the greatest benefits of this strategy:

ATTRACT NEW CLIENTS

Recent consumer polls indicate that recommendations and reviews are trusted more than conventional advertisements. Meanwhile, people are four times more likely to buy when referred by a friend.

Implementing a referral program enables the best ambassadors of your brand to help you promote and acquire new customers.  Inherently, prospective customers trust friends and family more than what you are telling them to do. Ambassadors give your brand authority without you have to spend marketing dollars to convince/convert a customer.

REWARD LOYALTY

Incentivize any success criteria you like for both referrers and referees, rewarding your most loyal customers with any point system, currency, gift, or membership benefit. But most important, reward them with incentives that make sense for both, your customers and your company, every reward is an opportunity to inspire loyalty.

GREAT ROI

While discounts and gifts will have a small cost to your company, referral marketing is a cost-effective way to advertise when compared to other modes such as traditional online ads to grow your loyal customer base. It will have a better ROI than existing campaigns because you will getter high-quality leads and is low-cost to implement.

Other benefits of having a referral program with bLoyal are that you will be able to improve customer retention and increase your brands awareness and reputation by increasing your outreach by using your customers as your company´s main advocates. And the most amazing thing of this process is that by increasing the amount of referred customers to your data base, your average Customer Lifetime Value can grow up to +25%.

And the great thing about implementing your referral program with bLoyal, is that you will gain actionable insights of your customers across channels with our 360-customer profile or Single Master Customer Record, where you will be able to see all customer interactions in one place.

How to implement a referral program with bLoyal?

Once you have connected your eCommerce and POS system to bLoyal you will need to plan and develop a call to action on your website where customers will learn all about the benefits of your referral program and will be able to join.

When choosing an incentive for both the referrer and referee.   You may need to test multiple avenues, that is why in bLoyal we support the following discount options as incentive options. As long as your referrer and referee rewards (acquisition cost) are less than your customer annual spend, you are good to go.

  • Gift Cards
  • Loyalty Dollars
  • Free Shipping
  • One time discount

  • Points

  • Experiences

Once you have established how you are going to incentivize your customers to become your ambassadors, and you know where and how they will be able to join your program, it is time to develop your marketing collateral. You can launch text, social media, and email marketing campaigns to drive traffic and to communicate the rewards of your referral program.

After launching, it is very important to watch and analyze the data of your referrals. This way you will know if your strategy is a success or if you need to make some tweaks on your strategy.

bLoyal enables you to do all of the following in a customizable format.  Schedule a demo to learn more about how you can implement a program and increase revenue today!