It seems like a straightforward proposition leveraging referral marketing: reward customers – who already love you – to bring in new customers. A win-win for everyone, right?
A customer referral program can come in many shapes and sizes. As a result, there are many ways your referral program can go wrong.
Referrals are an invaluable way to advertise your business, but you must structure your program to make sure you don’t lose money, make customers mad, and inadvertently destroy the brand.
Some common Mistakes Companies make:
Avoid making these mistakes while leveraging referral marketing.
1. Choosing the wrong Incentive
It’s important to choose a reward or incentive that matches your brand, as well as what your customer needs.
“One of the most common mistakes in referral marketing from companies, whether big brands or struggling e-commerce platforms, is the attempt to save a few dollars as they try to tempt customers with poor, unrelatable incentives,” said one expert.
2. Making it too hard to leverage referral marketing
Many companies overcomplicate their customer while leveraging referral marketing. There are too many hoops to jump through and too much fine print a customer has to read to make the referral and claim their reward.
Keep your referral program intuitive and easy to follow. Provide a clear link to the referral email or website.
3. Asking the wrong way
What Worldwide101 learned was that the best referral partners aren’t (just) motivated by monetary reward.
“They recommend your products and services because they genuinely like them, they genuinely like you, and they genuinely want to help someone they know.”
4. Targeting the wrong customers for leveraging referral marketing
Most marketers know that not all customers are created equal. Referral marketing works best when you can activate people who are already big fans of your brand.
5. Forgetting to set a timeline
First, make sure your audience knows your referral program exists.
A newsletter is a great way to spread the word about your referral program – if someone is on your email list, you can bet they support your business.
Add a timeline to your campaign to create urgency.
Wrapping it up
After reading this post, you may get an idea about the referral marketing importance. Referral marketing is one of the finest and most cost-effective approaches today when it comes to attracting customers. We hope you find this post helpful.
