What is the struggle of a startup?
Getting customer to know your presence…
Assuming you’re not an influencer, one of the “secret” for your small business growth is word-of-mouth aka referral marketing.
No matter what your business is all about, you would struggle to land that first handful of clients. When you start building a client base, you have a steady stream of clients to cater to, you don’t have the resources to continue that level of marketing effort you did at the beginning. But with all this popularity, it’s easy to assume referral programs need to be something really different to stand out. Something with several reward tiers and various rules. Launching a referral program requires a lot of time and effort and can be quite complex. It can also be difficult to maintain alongside all your other priorities. Between choosing different rewards and figuring out how to track all the data, complex referral programs take a while to put together.
Build your customer fan base:
Assuming your existing customers are delighted in doing business with you and ensuring your business is actually worth recommending if you wish to leverage on word-of-mouth. Ensure that your customer experience, starting from the product quality to website navigation and customer support, should be sublime.
Think about the best incentive that could motivate your loyal customer:
With having the right incentive, not only will you gain a new clients, but also your existing clients will more likely to make more purchases and talk about your brand. Just make sure to decide an incentive that your customers would actually want and also cost-effective for you.
There are many types of incentives but keep it simple:
Make your process of sign ups, referrals, and claiming rewards as easy as possible. After all, your have great incentives but actual referral process is tedious will turn your loyal clients away.
Create your delivery method:
Once your incentives program for referrals and claiming process are in place, it’s time to inform your clients in the best possible way. Be it social media, email, landing pages, texts, call or whatever you choose.
Track your client and the effectiveness of your referral program:
Try to put as much as you can on autopilot. Because once your referral program starts to take flight, you’ll want to scale it up and let it thrive without much of your resources. Hence, where Machine Learning and AI comes into play. Last but not least, track things like who referred to who, how much customers spent, how many referrals are happening each day, and the overall effectiveness of the program. Ensure to set up analytics for accurate tracking of all these key performance indicators to improve your referral program.
