Overview of Referral marketing program

Referral marketing is an important part of any product promotion. 6 factors form an important part of successful referral marketing. These are creating a compelling offer, referral program promotion, making sending referrals frictionless, leveraging customer social graph, keeping a customer in the loop, and monitoring and optimizing referral marketing program

1.) Creating a compelling offer.

A Compelling offer to share with friends and a Compelling offer for Customers Referring to their friends is the most critical part of referral marketing. A good incentive can increase the number of referrals sent significantly. for e-commerce companies incentive could be a discount coupon, and for event promotions incentive could be a free ticket to top referrers. The incentive should be aligned with the interest of the target customer community.

2.) Referral Marketing program promotion
The program needs to be promoted across all the customer touchpoints to get maximum engagement and program performance. This includes a website, Facebook fan page, mobile, email and post-purchase. See the detailed post here.

3.) Making it easy to refer.
The referral sending process should be very simple to maximize the number of referrals sent. InviteReferrals.com enables referrals to be sent through multiple social channels including Facebook, Twitter, email, and chat. It should be as frictionless as possible for a successful referral marketing program. One method is to pre-populate the friend list.

4.) Integration with Social Graph
The program should leverage customers Facebook social graphs to get maximum visibility and reach. There are multiple social channels like Facebook, Twitter, email and LinkedIn that can multiple the referrals and brand reach

5.) Analytics and Iteration
The data gathered through referral marketing should be continuously analyzed to iterate and maximize program performance. For example, the data may suggest that current incentives are not good enough or a key customer touch point integration might be missing. Invitereferrals.com provides in-depth referral marketing analytics.

6.) Retention and Re-marketing
The real power of the referral rewards program comes in mining the data and retargeting inactive customers with filtered marketing campaigns. You should also read our article on how to re-engage customers through referral marketing.

A Customer Referral Marketing Program designed keeping the above points into consideration covers the complete lifecycle of the customer Acquisition – Engagement – Retention