ShivaniEmails are a great way to interact with your customers. Today, email has been a useful tool to inform or address your customers about companies’ actions, announcements, and decisions.
The referral program is one of those programs that require consumer attention, and since it relies on the customers, it becomes imperative that they open your mail and take action after reading it.
In this article, we will learn how to write a perfect referral email to engage your customers.
If you want results, then you must keep the following points in your mind.
Benefits of referral email.
- Referrals brought by existing customers lead to joining you better customers who stick around you for a long time and tend to spend more on products.
- The more customers open the mail, the more referrals they make, and the better your business does.
- One of the most reliable ways to ask for more referrals is by forwarding mail to existing customers about offers.
I hope this article will help you understand it better.
How can you write a perfect referral email?
- Focus on the subject line
- Keep the email simple
- Make your call-to-action challenging to ignore
- Highlight the motivation for purchase
- Highlight the advantage to Friend And Advocate
- Incorporate any additional conditions for the referral
- Focus on the subject lines
Today, People are really occupied and flooded with information. If you can’t promptly answer their queries, “Why should I get in this email?” and “What’s in it for me?”, they tend to ignore or remove it.
A higher % open rate gets you more referrals as David Ogilvy( father of advertising) stated about headlines, “When you have drafted your headline, you have paid eighty cents out of your dollar.”
The same refers to email subject lines, and now, see how we can increase the effectiveness of the subject line of the mail.
- Be clear, not clever
In 2011 a case study carried by AWeber Communications found that a ‘clear’ subject line brings 541% more click rate than one that’s ‘clever.’
Here were the examples they recommended:
Clever:
- It’s finally here!
- Fabulous gifts for your site
- ABC Associates’ Always Awesome Amber Adams
Clear:
- Ten new fonts for your marketing drives
- 15% of reviews on social media will be fake by 2014 [Gartner Study]
- Three approaches to increase email results from a committee of experts.
That means you could be getting up to 5 times more consumer referrals from your emails just by enhancing your subject lines!
- Be personal
Converse directly with your customers and prospective advocates. Try to address them by “you” or “your” over “we” or “our.”
Showing empathy towards your customers means to put yourself in their shoes.
Ask yourself what they want to know, independent of your goals and concerns?
- Keep it simple and attractive – “Give $25, Get $25” works.
The more simple you make, the more likely they can understand it. When people make a lot of effort to understand what you are trying to say, then it makes it less likely that they will do anything about it.
In general, you want to make sure that you have:
- Personalized email addresses them with the name.
- A reminder that they are using your product
- Tell them what you want them to do.
- Express its benefit
- End with a clear, solid call-to-action
- Make sure the call-to-action is difficult to ignore.
It’s self-explanatory: If you’re emailing your customers to ask them to do something, make sure that you make it super visible to them the next action they need to take!
Again, remember that people are busy. The less cognitive load, the better.
And if you want to make it really simple? Just insert the referral link in every email you send. It makes it easy to grab attention when you share the link.
- Understand the primary marketing motivation and play that up
It’s a well-established phenomenon of psychology and marketing that people act in constant ways with their identity. If you want somebody to take action, one of the most significant ways to get them to do it is to encourage them to see that it’s consistent with what they already believe. You already know about your advocate’s preferences, and why people care about your products, why it matters to them, and so on.
- Highlight the advantage to the Friend And Advocate
It’s simpler for everyone to say yes if everybody gains.
Both-sided incentives make it clear that everybody wins.
Reciprocity is at the heart of social behaviour. We’re conditioned to react, sometimes even when we don’t want to!
As such, rewarding both the advocate and the friend is often the most effective way to convince advocates to make referrals. (You could offer a huge referral prize without any friend offer, but that’ll cost you.)
- It hits into their natural desire to help their peers.
- It assures them that their self-interest isn’t entirely selfish
- It gives them an easy proposition to share with their friends. (“We both win!”).Win-win-win.
- Add any conditions that they might have (i.e., Friend has to spend $50 or more, etc.)
It is the most important factor of referral email because terms and conditions are a major aspect that customer notice while planning to participate in the program. If your referral program is ready to begin, then include minimum rules and other conditions, declare it upfront. You don’t want people to get enthusiastic about something and, later, get upset because they weren’t clear about what you meant.
It might seem like it’s a misunderstanding on their part, but it’s your duty to address it if you want to get repeat referrals from happy customers!
Wrap up
In this article, we have seen important factors that need to keep in mind while writing a perfect referral email. Email marketing is the most useful way to engage customers but if you want to take maximum advantage of it make sure that you focus on your content. Try to write such referral emails that are highly coveted by the customers because they can lead to workflow optimization. I hope this article helps you find relevant information.
Keep learning and experimenting.
