Features and Functions You Should Consider before Launching a Referral Program

Referral Program

“Must Haves”5

Promotion means EVERYTHING to the success of your referral program.

Promotion

Some experts call it “asking” for referrals, others call it “advertising” or “marketing” your referral opportunity. Either way, you should be doing a lot of it. Before launching your referral program you should have a referral promotion plan to grab (and keep!) the attention of your brand advocates!

Promotion

Where to Promote:

Depending on your business, you should promote your referral program where you engage with your potential advocates, including: at checkout, on your website, In-store, through email marketing, etc.

How to Promote:

Clear messaging and clean design definitely help to engage potential advocates in the referral process.

Frequency:

The average person needs to see a message 5-7 times before acting. So keep communicating!

Some things to consider

Email

Your potential advocates have hundreds, if not thousands of email addresses in the contact list of their favorite email provider. When asking a potential advocate for a referral, make sure they can quickly and easily get access to their contacts so they can send out an email referral without any added steps.

Social Media

Are your advocates on Facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn? Then so are their friends! Give them an easy way to post information about your company so everyone can see.

Tools to Refer

Consider how your potential advocates talk to their friends, colleagues and families and let your advocates use those same tools to make referrals.

SMS

Texting is the new email - and this is especially true for the younger generations. If you market to millenials, it’s crucial to give them a referral tool that uses their language - SMS is that tool.

Offline

In this digital age it’s easy to forget about what is happening offline. But 77% of all Word of Mouth still happens face-to-face. Don’t neglect this valuable channel.

Sure, referrals are the main goal of any referral program but your program can also build loyalty, company engagement, and it can reduce churn. However, this is only true when customers enjoy and remember their referral experience.

Customer Service

Customer Service

Fulfillment

Offering a great reward to your advocates for making a referral? Great! Just make sure they know when they’re eligible for the reward, when they’ll receive the reward, and make sure it gets there on time! This is the stage that can make or break your advocates’ sentiments about the program.

Advocate Dashboard

A dashboard is one way to offer your advocates a transparent referral experience. Amplifinity’s advocate dashboard allows advocates to login, check referral statuses, make more referrals and track rewards.

A few things to consider when planning your program’s customer service:

Technical Support

When advocates lose their logins, have questions about how to refer, etc. make sure they have a place they can call to get an answer.

When running a large scale referral program, you need to track every step of the process and then be able to easily report on the metrics of each of those steps.

Throughout the referral process, from the time your advocates receive a promotion about the referral opportunity until their friends make a purchase based on their recommendation, everything has to be tracked and measured.

Tracking and Reporting

• Registered Advocates• Referrals made• Leads (accepted referrals)• Conversions – Sales• Web analytics: unique visits,

bounce rates, page views

Reporting should be easy, centrally located, and customizable to reflect your business.

Tracking and Reporting

The core metrics you should be tracking in your referral program include:

• Leads and Sales from referrals should be tracked with the company’s other leads. For example, if your company uses SalesForce to track and manage client relationships, referral information should directly integrate with SF.

• Salespeople should be given tools to ask for referrals while performing the basic functions of their jobs. This can be as simple as giving them easy ways to print out referral promotion materials to hand out, or an ipad app to sign up advocates in-store in seconds.

Integration

Referral programs are great and they really do increase brand advocacy, leads, and sales, but only if they are adopted by your marketing department, sales, and management teams.

For this adoption to happen, the referral process has to integrate into the rest of the company functions.

Referral Programs can be hugely successful, but they have to be set up right and have the key features and functions that give them long term success.

Want to find out what tools Amplifinity can provide for your company’s referral program?

To find out more, see our demo:

Or you can contact us at 734.585.5684 or visit us at www.Amplifinity.com