Word of mouth marketing is considered by many to be the most desired form of marketing. The trust, referrals, and overall brand-building buzz that’s garnered by customers spreading the good word to prospects are worth its weight in gold. Some products, services, and experiences naturally produce chatter, but there are certain things that any company can do to stimulate word of mouth and cash in on the buzz.

Here are six ways to get your customers talking about you and your organization:

1) Ask them – The best word of mouth starts with “word of listen.” Call your customers up and ask them why they buy, why they stick around, and why they tell their friends about you. You might be a bit surprised by their answers. Hint: it’s usually not the stuff you have in your new marketing brochure. You stand a far greater chance of attracting the right customers and the right buzz if you really understand what your current customers value about doing business with you. This goes for online and social media listening as well – what are they saying in Slack channels, blog comments, on LinkedIn, or Twitter?

2) Teach them – Sometimes great word of mouth just happens, but sometimes you’ve got to help it along. One way to do this is to make sure you are teaching your customers how to spot an ideal client, what a prospect in need might say when looking for your products, and how to properly and concisely describe how your company is different. Of course, in today’s hyper-social media world you should also be teaching your happiest customers how to write reviews on Yelp, Google My Business, Facebook Ratings and Reviews, Insider Pages, and CitySearch-type rating sites.

3) Star them – Letting a customer testimonial or success story go uncaptured or untold is downright criminal in WOM circles. Today you can easily record customer testimonials on an iPhone or Android or you can start doing video interviews over Zoom to record their success stories. These “real life” bits of content are gold and turn your featured customers into talking referral billboards for your brand. Want to take this idea up a notch? Hold a customer party and film a dozen or so at one time in a great atmosphere – this alone will get your customers talking.

4) Include them – People like to be asked what they think, it’s just human nature, but it’s also a great way to get some sound advice. Create a round table discussion group made up of select customers and charge them with advising you once a quarter or so on new marketing and business initiatives. (Reward them for this in some way as well.) This can include advising on everything from a product extension to the look and feel of your website redesign. Members of your marketing round table will become natural ambassadors for the brand. (You can do this with simple video chat meetings – Zoom or GoogleMeet)

5) Video them – People are more likely to respond t0 a personalized video over a generic one any day. People’s email inboxes and newsfeeds are flooded with businesses trying to sell to them so much so that it’s hard to stand out in all of the noise today. One-to-one video is a highly effective way to stand out in the crowd. You can use a tool like Loom to send a prospect a quick personalized message about something you saw on their website, invite a lead to sign up for an event you’re having that you think would be valuable to them, or follow up with a potential client with a personalized video instead of an email.

6) Surprise them – I like to think I saved the best for last – few things get people talking faster than surprising them. This can include doing something that was out of the blue and much appreciated to just giving them more than they bargained for. I remember a PR firm that was pitching me some business and the account rep showed up to meet with an apple pie (I’m still talking about it.) I once worked with a financial planner that hired a mobile auto detail firm to detail his customer’s cars during their annual review – that created some buzz.

The bottom line of course is that you’ve got to do good work, do something that somebody appreciates, and create an experience worth talking about, but then, prime the pump and leverage all that greatness.

Many businesses have been displaced during this game-changing pandemic. I hope that you are not one of them.

One of the things, however, that few people are talking about is that the massive changes being experienced by businesses are also being experienced by customers.

In other words, buyers are being displaced from long-time providers or simply choosing this disruption as a time to rethink how to find, choose, buy from, and remain loyal to the businesses they patronize.

There has rarely been an environment in which more customers were forced into changing their purchase behaviors.

So while some businesses are still struggling with how to remake themselves, I want to suggest that right now is the time to look inward and seek referrals from your existing customers and partners as a primary lead generation initiative.

Ask your customers

First and foremost, communicate with your existing customers. Chances are they are being asked by friends, neighbors, and colleagues for new resources. (I belong to a couple of Facebook Groups where this has become common.)

Ask them to keep you in mind for referrals. Maybe even run a campaign offering bonuses for referrals.

Tell them why now

People need what you do, so if you’re confident you can help, you are doing a disservice if you don’t offer to help. All that to say, you should tell people you know many folks have been disrupted and find themselves looking to make a change – you could be that change. Own it!

Seek new partners

Strategic partners – businesses that also know lots of your ideal customers can be an excellent resource for spreading the word about how awesome you are.

Make a list of other businesses you admire who might serve your same kind of customer and start having conversations about working together. You can refer each other, make intros, or even find a way to co-market to each other’s customers.

Make it valuable for them

As you begin to reach out to potential strategic partners, think first about ways you can make the relationship valuable to them. Can you offer to write a guest blog or let them do the same, can you interview them, can you allow them to co-brand a great piece of content you have, can you do a free webinar for their audience? Can you refer a customer now?

This is how you get a potential partner’s attention.

Teach referrals

Lastly, if your ideal customers are businesses, then consider creating a campaign where you actively take some of what I’ve shared today to teach them how to get more referrals. Imagine how valuable you’ll become if you help them achieve the goal of getting more business – no matter what you sell to them currently?

Create a networking group of your current clients with the primary purpose of teaching referrals and I can assure you, you’ll start getting more referrals.

I wrote a book on this topic. If you want to get a bunch of ideas on referrals and teaching referrals, it’s the cheapest way I know – check it out The Referral Engine.

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Today’s customer journey is more complex than ever. From social media to paid search to offline marketing, there are dozens of ways someone can discover your company. The main role of your website in this twisting journey is to be a solid central point.

While prospects may discover your brand anywhere, you want to be driving that traffic from those disparate points back to your website. Your website is the one online asset that you have complete control over, and a well-designed website is the key to taking the reins on guiding the customer journey.

Let me walk you through the role that your website can and should play at each stage of the customer journey.

Know and Like

Prospects discover brands through all sorts of channels, and it’s entirely possible that your website is not the first place they’ll encounter you. It might be through a local listing service like Yelp, or on social media, or maybe they see a truck with your logo driving around town—who knows! But every other channel where you are present should include your website’s URL, so that it’s easy for prospects to go there and learn more.

Additionally, there are steps you can take to give your website the best shot at being the first point of contact with your brand. Undertaking keyword research allows you to see the real terms that searchers use when looking for the solution your business offers. Once you know that information, you can optimize your website so that it ranks for those terms. Couple keyword research with some effective, descriptive metadata, and you’ll be well on your way to generating more website traffic through organic search results.

Once prospects land on your website, you want to greet them with messaging and design that helps them come to further know and like your brand. Your homepage should include a promise to visitors, front and center. The promise should demonstrate that you understand their pain points and know how to solve them. Follow that up with a call to action; something that drives them to take a logical next step with your brand. This can be something like signing up for your newsletter or a free trial—nothing that includes too big a commitment. They did just meet you, after all! You wouldn’t ask someone to marry you at the end of your first date.

There are a number of other elements I recommend including on a homepage, but what’s most important is that you share what it is that you solve for your customers and how you can help others solve those same problems, too.

Trust and Try

Once a prospect has your brand on their radar screen, your website can help to strengthen their trust in you, until they finally decide to give you a try.

There are many trust-building elements that you can and should include in your website. Testimonials and case studies are a great way to demonstrate the value you’ve brought to other customers. They help to build an emotional connection with the prospect, who can see themselves reflected in the needs and struggles of your existing customer.

Content is also a critical element in building trust. Blogs, podcasts, and videos are all ways to share meaningful content with your audience. Your website should be the central location where all of your content lives, so that anyone interested in learning more about what you do can discover the wealth of knowledge you bring to the table. I also strongly advocate for the creation of hub pages. These pages bring all of your content on a centralized topic together on one page. They establish you as an authority on the subject (and they’re great for boosting your SEO, too!).

Once those trust elements have won over your audience and they’re ready to give you a try, you want to greet them with an appropriate call to action (CTA) that guides them to the next phase of the customer journey. Include relevant CTAs on your trust-building pages. At the bottom of your hub page, offer free access to a paid report. At the bottom of your testimonials page, include a CTA to schedule a free consultation.

Buy

You’ve reached the moment of truth! Your prospect is ready to become a first-time customer, and it’s again up to your website to help you make it happen.

At this stage, it’s about reducing friction in the purchasing process as much as possible, to ensure that you don’t lose any interested prospects at the last minute because of a frustratingly complex purchasing process. If you have an e-commerce shop, reduce the number of clicks it takes to add items to a cart and to complete check-out. Ask for as little information as possible to complete the sale. When customers feel bogged down with long forms or a circuitous route to check-out, it’s possible you can lose them at the moment of truth.

If yours is a service business, create a simple online sign-up form, so that prospects can easily make an appointment. Use a platform that doesn’t require them to register for an outside app or service to schedule. And including thoughtful touches, like a system that automatically adds the confirmed appointment to your customer’s calendar app of choice, is a nice way to make the buying process as seamless as possible.

Repeat and Refer

Once you’ve won over a new customer, your website’s work isn’t over! There are opportunities to turn that one-time customer into a lifelong one—someone who refers friends and family along the way.

A well-designed sitemap can help to encourage repeat purchases. When you’re building your website, think about the best way to showcase related product and services. Driving customers who have already made a purchase to another area of your website that covers a complementary offering is a smart way to drive upsells and repeat business. A CRM tool that’s synced up with your website is also a great way to keep track of past purchases so that you can use email marketing to send related offerings to interested customers straight to their inbox.

Your website can help you to collect feedback and reviews, which can in turn generate referral business. Through your site, you can link out to your profiles on Yelp, Google My Business, and Facebook, making it easy for your existing happy customers to share positive feedback about your business on these other platforms. You can also solicit testimonials from your existing customers, which you can feature on your website.

Your website is the heart of your online presence. It needs to be ready to work for you and your customers at any stage along their journey. Whether they’ve just discovered you via a new search or are coming back to make their 100th purchase, your website should make it easy for them to find all of the information and support they need.

If you liked this post, check out our Small Business Guide to Website Design and the Small Business Guide to Shaping the Customer Journey.

You spend a lot of time and energy winning over new business, and once you’ve gotten that prospect to convert, you work hard to create a positive customer experience.

Rather than going out and trying to find brand new customers all over again, it’s much more time- and cost-effective to turn to the customers you already have, not only for repeat business, but to create a steady stream of referrals when they pass you name along to their friends.

It helps to establish a concrete plan for generating these referrals from your existing customers. This is why establishing an effective referral program is so important. We’ll take a look at what a referral program is, why you need one, and how to get the most out of the program you create.

What is a Referral Program?

A referral program is a systematic approach to generating referrals. This is a broad term that can encompass any number of tactics that you use to encourage and gather referrals, either from existing customers or partner businesses.

Know Your Customer

The first step to creating an effective referral program is really understanding your existing customer. What do they like about your business? What keeps them coming back? When you understand their wants, needs, and behaviors, you can create a referral program that draws them in and encourages them to refer their friends.

Fortunately for you, today’s tech-filled world provides marketers and business owners with a myriad of tools to track customers’ behaviors and solicit input through various online channels. The first step is to decide what you’re hoping to get out of your referral program, and the next step is to turn to the data.

Data can help you see what’s really important to your existing customers and who your best customers are. You should create a referral program that’s centered around what your best customers want. Once you’ve identified these best customers through your data analysis, don’t be afraid to reach out to them with a survey to get their input on how you plan to structure your referral program. After all, if they’re your top customers they’ll likely be the ones who are taking advantage of the program by sharing your name with their friends!

Create a Customer Reward Program

An often-used technique in building a referral program is offering a reward to customers who refer your business. There are a number of different ways to go about creating a customer referral program, but all good programs have some key elements.

• Offer a reward your users want. This might be a discount on their next purchase, a gift card, or access to a special good or service that other users don’t get. It doesn’t have to be an expensive offer, but it does have to be something that your customers will find useful.
• Double the reward. Customer referral programs are even more effective when you make an offer both to the referrer and referee. Dropbox very famously did this, offering additional free storage to anyone who referred them and to their friends who signed up as a result of the referral, and this approach led to exponential growth for the company.
• Be transparent about your offering. Customers don’t want to feel like they’re being bribed into saying something nice about you or passing your name along. Make sure that the terms and conditions of participation are clear and simple, and display them prominently on your website. Not only will this likely lead to customers you hadn’t expected participating in the program, it also gives customers a sense of ease.
• Make it easy. If your rewards program is hard to find out about or difficult to sign up for, then what good is it to you or your customers? Trumpet your referral program on your website, via email, and on social media, and be sure you’re up front about the terms of participating. Make the criteria for joining the program easy to understand, and make the sign up process as simple as possible.

When you create an effective customer referral program, you can more easily create referral champions: enthusiastic customers who will refer your business over and over again!

Encourage Online Reviews

When you think of online reviews, you may feel that it only applies to businesses in certain industries, particularly those businesses that are B2C. The fact is, though, that in today’s online world every business should be concerned with gathering reviews online.

More than 90 percent of consumers look to online reviews for guidance before making a purchase. If you’re not being reviewed online prospects might not even know you exist, or they might write you off as illegitimate because of a scant online presence. Not only that, but your online reviews factor into your SEO ranking, so if you’re not gathering reviews, then Google doesn’t notice you, either.

Include links to your online review pages in follow-up emails to customers, asking them for feedback on their purchase. Of course, part of soliciting reviews is knowing how to deal with unfavorable ones. It’s actually okay to have a few bad reviews—otherwise prospects begin to worry that your “reviews” are all from shills—but you do need to directly address complaints in a timely, considerate, and appropriate manner.

Engage Other Business Owners

The only thing better than building a referral program on your own is building a referral program with another small business owner. As a fellow entrepreneur, they face the same challenges and have the same goals. Why not team up to divide and conquer in your efforts to build a referral base? Finding business owners who have a similar customer profile to yours allows you to tap into their existing network—and vice versa—so that you can double your pool of prospects overnight.

These strategic partnerships work best when the business owner is someone you yourself know and trust; you’ll be recommending their business to your valued customers, so you want to be sure they’ll be providing the same excellent level of service your clients have come to expect from you.

Reevaluate Your Approach

It’s no small feat to get a referral program up and running, but once you’ve established your program your work is far from over! You want to track the results of your program and make changes as appropriate.

Keep track of where your prospects are coming from. Are they finding you through online reviews on Facebook or Yelp? Are they coming directly through your customer referral program? Did a current customer forward them your email newsletter? Has your partnership with another local business resulted in conversions? Understanding how people are finding you allows you to adjust your program accordingly.

If your customer referral program hasn’t taken off, maybe it means you need to market it more effectively. Send an email blast out to existing customers letting them know about it, and include a link in your email signature for people to refer a friend. Or perhaps it’s an issue with the reward; try making a different offer in the coming months and see if your numbers pick up.

You’ll also want to monitor your customer acquisition costs. Hopefully your referral program is driving those costs downward; it should be costing you less to acquire customers via referrals than it would be to go out and approach an entirely new cohort through outbound marketing tactics. If you’re seeing your costs rise or stagnate, that’s another sign that you need to revisit your approach. Perhaps the reward that you’re offering is too costly for you to take on, or maybe your strategic partner’s business is not as well aligned with your business as you had hoped, and you’re not getting the proper number of referrals from that relationship.

Building an effective referral program doesn’t happen overnight. You first have to understand your existing customers—what they want and need—and then build a program that encourages them to spread the good word about your products or services. And then there’s the work of maintaining the program, checking in on your results and making changes along the way. It take some effort, but when you land on an approach that’s effective and generates repeat results, you’ll feel a great sense of accomplishment and see the benefits in your bottom line.

Generating referrals is the key to securing your business’s long-term success, and it can feel like a pretty massive undertaking. One way to lighten the load and help you to create a more sustainable stream of referrals is to build partnerships.

Why go it alone when you could instead join forces with other business owners and make the referral process easier for both of you?

Types of Partnerships

When you’re thinking about establishing partnerships for your business, there are a few different types of relationships to consider.

• Strategic partners. These are businesses or individuals who provide a good or service that is directly tied to your business’s product offering. If you’re a graphic designer, you want to have a trustworthy copywriter who you can suggest to your clients.
• Content partners. A network of publishers, bloggers, and those in need of content for their own sites can help you to spread your business’s name, mission, and unique point of view to a whole new audience of people.
• Co-marketing partners. These are business owners whose business models have some sort of synergy with your own company. If you’re a plumber, this person might be an electrician or contractor. If you own a wine shop, this might be the owner of the cheese store down the street. As a fellow business owner who’s not in direct competition with you, but does business with a subset of the population who might also have an interest in and need for your business’s offerings, these relationships offer easy cross-promotion opportunities.

Bonus points if you can create partnerships that are unexpected like the ones I outline here; unique partnerships can generate even more marketing buzz!

There are a variety of reasons to consider each type of partnership, and there’s a different value-add that comes from each one. That’s why it’s important to focus on building up a comprehensive network of partners, with different partners from each type of group.

Become a Trustworthy Guide for Your Customers

No matter what business you’re in, there are a lot of other businesses out there that do what you do. While a key part of standing out from the crowd is making sure you have a clearly defined value proposition, another thing that will keep customers coming back again and again is that they see you as more than just a provider of a good or service—they see you as a trustworthy partner and advisor.

One way to become a trusted partner is to tap into your network of fellow business owners who you yourself know and trust. When you’re able to suggest other service providers to your customers, it makes you seem like someone who’s in the know and who truly has your customers’ best interests at heart.

Let’s say, for example, that you own a rare used bookstore. A customer comes in and buys a first edition of a work by their favorite author, but then they want to be sure they’re going to be able to care for their new, beloved purchase. You should be able to provide them with a list of trusted partners—a bookbinder who can help restore the original leather cover, a vendor of special boxes for book storage, or an appraiser who can help set the sale price for another rare book in their collection.

These partners need to be people that you know and trust; you’ll do more harm than good if you suggest another business who does not do right by your customer. But if you do have a strong network of other worthy businesses who can provide a service that’s of real value to your existing customers, then you establish yourself as a trusted source of knowledge in your industry, and the next time your customer is looking for advice or to do business, they’ll be coming back to you.

Move Up the Hourglass

There is a lot of work that goes into winning over new business, particularly if you’re starting from scratch. For someone to decide to go with your company, there are four steps in the marketing hourglass before a new customer even makes their first purchase. And there is a tremendous amount of effort and money that can go into those first four steps.

For someone to come to know and like your business, there are marketing and advertising dollars to be spent. To establish trust, you need testimonials. For the trial phase, you need to create products or services that you’re willing to give away for free in hopes that it converts your prospect into an actual customer.

Establishing partnerships, however, allows you to leap over the heavy lifting associated with these steps. You don’t need to spend excessive amounts of money on advertising and marketing to prospects when you have a solid partnership network who will refer their customers to your business.

A prospect who has been referred to you by a business owner they already know, like, and trust, will have an inherent level of trust in your business. This allows you to jump ahead and move right to the try and buy portion of the hourglass.

Double Your Network Overnight

As the old saying goes, two heads are better than one, and that’s particularly true when building up referrals. You’ve worked hard to create repeat customers, and new customer acquisition is a costly endeavor. You know that other small business owners have put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into creating their own roster of return clients. Why not come together with a fellow entrepreneur to double your network overnight?

When you establish a strategic or co-marketing partnership, suddenly you have access to another business owner’s entire rolodex. There’s no competitiveness there, because you offer products that are related but different, and so you’re willing and able to share your existing network with this other business owner.

Additionally, you can consider creating new marketing campaigns that are a joint effort. While you double your reach, you can also halve your costs by splitting advertising fees with your new partner. Running joint promotions for your business can allow you to catch the eye of your established customer base, their established customer base, plus those who are new prospects for both of you.

Referrals are the lifeblood of any business. Why go it alone on this important road to generating referrals when you could join forces with another like-minded business owner? Together, you can help each other to create a sustainable referral engine that will continue to benefit you both in the long term.

If you liked this post, check out our Small Business Guide to Referrals.

Asking for referrals can be tough. It can feel like you’re being pushy or imposing on someone’s time. But in reality, the majority of happy customers are more than willing to give a referral when asked.

While the first hurdle in asking for referrals is getting over your own insecurities or mental blocks associated with the process, here are five additional tips that make asking for referrals less intimidating.

1. Provide Great Service

This one might seem obvious, but the first step to feeling good about asking for a referral is providing the best service possible. Of course you’re going to feel sheepish approaching a customer who had a less-than-stellar experience with your company. But if you are honest, responsive, and helpful from start to finish, then why shouldn’t your customer be excited to pass your name along to others?

We’re all human and mistakes do happen. There will be times when a customer has a sub-par interaction with your business. That doesn’t mean that you should run away and consider that customer a lost cause. If you are proactive about reaching out, apologizing, and asking for a second chance to wow them (and then delivering on your promise the next time), you might just create an even more loyal customer. People appreciate honesty and businesses who are willing to go the extra mile, so when you make that effort—even if it’s after an initial mess-up—you should feel confident asking for a referral after you’ve proven your mettle the second time.

2. Start a Conversation

Sometimes it can feel difficult to ask for a referral because it feels like you’re selfishly asking for a favor out of the blue. One way to mitigate this feeling is to establish a meaningful conversation with someone before you ask them for a referral. Send them a congratulatory note when you see on LinkedIn that they reached a milestone in their career. Forward them an article that you think would be of interest to them. Donate to a Kickstarter related to their business’s newest product launch. There are lots of simple ways that you can show support for someone that will make asking them for a referral further down the line feel like more of a part of a conversation rather than a demand coming out of nowhere.

Of course, there is an art to doing this. You don’t want to make a grand gesture of kindness and then turn right around and ask for a referral. No one wants to feel like they’re being bribed into saying something nice about you and your business. But if you show a genuine interest in what someone is doing in their business life, they’ll feel even more open to saying something genuinely kind about you when you ask.

3. Provide Various Ways to Gather the Referral

It’s always best to ask someone for a referral directly; people are far more likely to refer when they’re asked than they are to go out of their way to do it on their own (even if they had a positive experience with your company). However, you want to be sure you’re making it easy for customers to refer you, whether you’re asking them directly or not.

Include a link to sites where customers can provide a review (whether that’s Yelp, Facebook, or a tool like Grade.us) in your email signature. Customers who see this reminder each time they communicate with you might be more likely to review you when they have a spare minute if they’re presented with the opportunity to do so on more than one occasion. You can also create a “refer a friend” button or page on your website. This makes it easy for you to collect referrals from customers by sending them a link to the page, while it also allows customers you haven’t reached out to directly to still submit a referral if they feel so inclined.

4. Create Partnerships

One of the best ways to generate referrals is by creating partnerships with other business owners. They’re facing the same struggles as you when it comes to generating referrals, so it’s easier to ask them for referrals. They understand how intimidating it can be to ask customers to pass your name along, and so they’ll be all the more willing to do so for you and your business (and you will be willing to do the same for them).

Work to find businesses that are providing a good or service that makes sense with the work your company does. If you own a shoe store, talk to the cobbler down the street. If you’re a DJ for weddings and events, speak with the local party equipment rental company.

Asking a fellow business owner for referrals is not only a bit less intimidating than asking a customer, it also establishes a steady flow of referrals. Business owners will continue to come across prospects who are in need of your services, whereas past customers might only meet someone every once in a while who’s looking for the good or service you provide.

5. Be Specific In Your Ask

Some people are hesitant to ask for referrals when it seems like a broad ask: “If you know anyone who needs what I do, let me know!” One way to counter this is to do a little research.

Let’s say you’re a website designer who already has a list of local businesses you’d like to target. You’ve looked at their sites and have some specific thoughts on how to strengthen each of their designs to help them grow their business.

Go onto LinkedIn and see if any of your current clients have connections at these businesses. If so, you then have a specific referral ask that you can make. Reach out to your current client and say, “I see that you know the marketing manager at Company X. I’ve been wanting to get in touch with someone over there about their website design; I’ve got some concrete ideas about how to organize their site that could help grow their sales. Would you be willing to put me in touch with your connection?”

This serves a few purposes. It shows to your current client that you’re serious about your business, know your stuff, and do your research. This makes them feel more at ease in referring you to their connection. It also makes you feel more empowered in your ask. You know exactly what you want, and you’re confident enough in the services you provide to be unafraid to ask for that referral.

Asking for referrals can be scary. But if you provide excellent service to your customers, there’s no need for you to feel shy. People are excited to spread the word about a great business, and if you’re able to drum up the courage to ask for referrals, you’ll be sure to get great new leads for your efforts.

If you liked this post, check out our Small Business Guide to Referrals.

Every business owner knows that the key to generating referrals is creating a positive customer experience. When someone has a great interaction with your brand, they’re more likely to go and recommend you to their friends or colleagues.

One recommendation can mean a lot to your business, but what if you could turn that happy customer into a referral champion: someone who refers your business again and again?

It is possible to foster relationships with clients so that they become referral champions. Read on as I take a look at the steps to nurture these relationships and keep customers referring your business for years to come.

What is a Referral Champion?

Simply put, a referral champion is a happy customer who refers your business to more and more friends. Of course, there’s a bit more to it than that. A referral champion is likely someone who’s had more than one interaction with your business. A customer wouldn’t necessarily recommend a dry cleaner after visiting the shop just once, but if they take their shirts there each week to be cleaned and are consistently happy with the results, they’ll be more likely to suggest the business to a neighbor.

The other alternative is that it’s someone who had a truly remarkable experience with your business. Back to the dry cleaning example: a woman has a formal event this evening. She’s gotten a black ink stain on her cream wool dress, and it needs to be cleaned by that night! Her regular dry cleaner is way across town—she doesn’t have time to get there—so she turns to you. You’re able to remove the stain and have the dress ready to go by 5pm. That’s the kind of exceptional experience that may lead her to refer you based solely on that one interaction.

This is why you often hear me talk about the importance of creating an amazing customer experience. Whether someone is going to use your business just once or come back again and again, the experience must be high each time. It can be the first step to establishing a great referral champion relationship.

How Do You Find Them?

So now we understand what a great referral champion looks like, but how do you identify your potential referral champions from amongst all your customers? This is where calculating Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) comes in. The CLV represents what a customer will be worth to you over the entire lifetime of your interactions; this takes you beyond looking at a single transaction and helps you to see the bigger picture.

We’re able to take that formula a step further to include a customer’s referral value (CRV) as well. V. Kumar, a professor at Georgia State University’s J. Mack Robinson College of Business, and his colleagues offer a comprehensive approach to calculating CRV, which allows you to identify the number of referrals you can expect to get from each customer based on their prior behavior.

The formula also takes into account whether or not those referrals would have found you on their own without their friend’s recommendation. If that customer would have done business with your company anyway (which surveys showed was the case about half of the time), then the overall value of the referral is lessened.

Make it Easy to Become a Champion

Now that you understand the nature of your relationship with each customer, you can begin to get strategic about how to create the strongest referral champions possible. Some of your customers have a high CLV—they’re doing a lot of business with your company—but they haven’t yet become strong referral champions. Most happy customers say that they’d be willing to put in a good word for a business, but not all of them follow through.

In order to create referral champions, you want to make the referral process as simple as possible. Your customers are busy people and don’t have time to search for ways to refer you. You need to put that information front and center. Call to action buttons on your website, links to your Yelp or Facebook profiles in your email signature, and simple forms that ask for as little information as possible will all reduce friction in the referral and review capturing process and will drive your happy customers to share their positive feelings toward your brand.

Take Care of Your Existing Champions

There are some customers that already have a high CLV and CRV—they’re giving you a lot of their own business and are consistently referring you to friends. For customers like this, you want to be showing your appreciation for both their return business and steady referral stream.

There are a number of things you can do to thank them. Consider hosting an exclusive event for your best customers. Present them with a coupon to use on their next purchase, or with a gift card to their favorite local shop. Send them a free copy of your latest white paper or eBook on a topic they’d be interested in. Even a personalized phone call or email can go a long way.

The important thing here is to make sure you’re keeping the customer experience highly personalized. Your best customers don’t want to feel like they’re getting generic communications—they went out of their way to refer you, so you should go out of your way to send them a meaningful thank you.

Incentivize the Process

Whether someone is already a strong referral champion or is a happy customer with the potential to become one, instituting a referral program can be a good way to ensure that your customers continue referring your business well into the future.

There are a few tricks to creating an effective referral program. Make sure that the offer you’re making is one that customers will actually find beneficial, and create incentives for both the person doing the referring and for their friend. This will make it all the more likely that once that friend becomes one of your customers, they will turn around and refer one or two of their friends.

Referral champions are invaluable to your business. Each and every referral counts, so when you’re able to create a customer that generates multiple referrals over the years, that’s like striking gold. Keeping the customer experience high, making it easy to refer their friends, and going the extra mile to provide personalized service are the hallmarks of an effective referral champion program that will keep you in business for many, many years.

If you liked this post, check out our Small Business Guide to Referrals.

When you think of your business’s sales strategy, you may be tempted to think of it as only relating to the actual transaction where a customer pays for the good or service you offer.

However, businesses today can’t think of their relationship with their customers as a linear one. Instead, people have the opportunity to interact with your brand in a wide variety of ways: on your website, in-person, over the phone, via email, in Google search, or on social media. And they go through different phases, from just coming to know of your product to (hopefully, eventually) being a return customer who refers others to your business. The sum of all these interactions with your brand is what we call the customer journey.

Because this journey is not a straight road, your sales team can play a role in each phase of the journey. As you think about building an hourglass that addresses marketing needs for prospects and customers at each phase, you should also consider how your sales team fits into the hourglass model. Whether someone is hearing about your brand for the first time or is making their 50th purchase, your sales team has something to offer them.

We’ll take a look at the stages a customer goes through on their journey of interacting with a brand, and how sales can play a role in each phase.

Getting to Know You

When someone is just encountering a brand for the first time, you have a tremendous opportunity but also a great responsibility. They know nothing about your business, so it’s up to you to create a cohesive image that quickly, easily, and clearly communicates who you are, what you do, and why you do it better than anyone else in the game.

These early stages of brand discovery—the know and like phases of the hourglass—are often thought of as the territory of the marketing team. Creating advertising campaigns, compelling calls to action, and social media profiles fall under their purview, but sales has a role to play even this early on in the customer journey.

Outbound marketing efforts may well include your sales team. If you undertake telemarketing or cold calling, have a booth at a trade show, or have a giveaway of branded items at a community event, these are opportunities for your sales team to be the first point of contact with prospects.

While outbound marketing techniques have become less popular in recent years, if it’s done correctly, it can help you to create positive associations with your brand in the minds of prospects. The key here is in making sure that you have a sales team that’s comfortable with having a conversation that touches on the important differentiators for your brand, but at the same time doesn’t feel scripted. With the right sales team in place, it’s possible to create positive personal connections with prospects immediately, and that really allows you to stand out from your competition that’s relying solely on inbound techniques.

Coming to Trust You

A recent survey from Wantedness.com found that, in the U.S., 79 percent of consumers said they would only do business with brands that show they understand and care about “me.”

The trust and try areas of the hourglass are where there’s the greatest crossover between your marketing and sales teams, and so they should be working in tandem to create that highly personalized approach. In order to be most effective, they need to have access to each other’s information: sales needs to share their CRM data, while marketing should provide a window into their analytics.

While some prospects will react well to personalized email campaigns and targeted paid advertising on Facebook, all managed by the marketing team, others will need a bit more hand-holding from someone in sales.

Having a call to action button on your website that makes it easy for prospects to request a demo and get in touch with a member of your sales team can help funnel those prospects that need a little extra attention to the appropriate salesperson. Additionally, creating a shared inbox for your marketing and sales teams will allow your marketing folks to easily hand off prospects that would like more, detailed information to the sales team.

The Moment of Truth: The Purchase

This is what the sales team has been waiting for. After playing a role in introducing prospects to the brand and being responsive to their questions in the trust and try phases, the prospect is finally ready to convert.

Of course, the buying phase of the customer journey where the sales team plays the most obvious role. It’s also a point that some business owners take for granted. Just because someone has become a customer does not mean they can now be forgotten.

As Joey Coleman and I discussed in a podcast episode, creating a standout customer experience is an important part of taking people from one-time customer to repeat client. The sales team needs to make sure that the first time someone buys from you, they have an optimized experience. That means automated updates on their purchase, an easy way to get in touch if there’s an issue, and a proactive approach from you.

If your sales team is able to provide a stellar experience for a customer’s first time buying from your company, they’re a lot more likely to come back again. The trick here, of course, is that the stellar experience needs to be repeated on each subsequent interaction. Your sales team can never take a customer for granted, because if they do, that customer will eventually drift away to a competitor.

Part of the trick here is to establish crystal clear processes for your sales team’s interactions with customers. Make sure you have a customer service platform in place to ensure that any issues are being addressed in a timely manner and that efforts are not being duplicated (which wastes your team’s time and frustrates and confuses your customer). Consider a platform like ZenDesk, which allows you to track customer support requests across channels.

Building a Referral Engine

The final stage of the hourglass gives your customers the opportunity to generate new leads for you. When you empower your sales team to effectively generate referrals, you can build an engine that fuels your business growth for years to come.

Encourage your sales team to be proactive about gathering referrals. If they have a positive interaction with a customer, have a formalized process in place for getting a written review from that person.

Customers will also be more likely to refer you if you remain top of mind. Your sales team should be using a customer data platform to track interactions with customers. If you haven’t spoken to one in a while, have your sales team reach out. A personalized email or phone call might not only bring them back to make another purchase themselves, it will also position you to be the business they recommend later in the week when their friend happens to ask if they know a company that does exactly what you do.

If you think of your sales team as a group that only springs into action the moment someone wants to make a purchase, you’re missing out on the enormous potential that they have to support your business throughout the customer journey. When deployed correctly, your sales team can be by your customers’ sides each step of the way, which only serves to strengthen their relationship with your brand and makes them more likely to establish long-term connections with your business.

If you liked this post, check out our Small Business Guide to Sales and the Small Business Guide to Shaping the Customer Journey.

I’ve written about this topic many times, but it just never get’s old! (Check out the referral marketing archive on Duct Tape Marketing) The fact is, although I’ve been writing about the idea of referral generation for years, it always remains relevant, no matter what marketing trends and technologies come and go.

Getting referrals can often seem like a daunting task for marketers, but it doesn’t have to be. I’ve put together a list of recommendations you can use to teach your clients how to build referrals (not to mention teach yourself a thing or two).

Teach referral generation

It’s imperative that you teach people the best way to refer you and that you teach your clients how to build referrals (hint: showing them this blog post may be a good place to start). You need to make it easy for people to refer you. If there is any ambiguity, your chances of losing a referral drop significantly.

Let your customers know exactly what your marketing action steps will be if they refer a lead to you. In some cases, your lead sources will be motivated by rewards, but mostly they want to know you appreciate their efforts.

Build a team of champions

I’ve found that the greatest source of lead generation is a happy customer. A happy customer is much easier to turn into a referral champion than an unhappy one.

As your champions refer your business, be sure to do something that makes them feel special, such as a referral appreciation event, or sending a referral source a gift card to their favorite coffee shop. When it comes to showing your champions you care, a little bit can go a long way.

Look for moments of truth

Any time you get a review, testimonial, or compliment, get a referral out of it. Keep in mind that once you’ve set the referral expectation, you still have to deliver the goods and delight the customer.

Make sure you build and document your process for actually collecting these leads.

Create a review funnel

As mentioned earlier, it’s important that you make it as easy as possible for customers to refer your business. Consider using a tool, such as Grade.us, that makes it simple for customers to write reviews for 3rd party sites, like Yelp (see Grade.Us example below). A review funnel takes the guesswork out of giving a referral and just naturally takes your customer to a place where giving a referral is simply just the next step in the process.

Stay top of mind

Once you have a happy customer, it doesn’t stop there. It’s important to stay top of mind with your customers and delight them. Finding ways to do more business or get more referrals from your existing customers is a smart way to build a business.

To make sure you don’t ignore your customers, which unfortunately happens more often than not, consider creating a calendar of contacts and finding a way to make certain that your customers, referral sources, and hot prospects never go more than a month without some form of contact.

Stay top of mind by sending emails with referral incentives, holding referral-based contests for people – the sky’s the limit. Be creative with how you want to engage your contacts to get those referrals.

Additionally, it’s amazing how far a simple phone call can go. If you haven’t spoken to a valuable contact for over a month, call them to check in and see how they’re doing. A personal touch like that can go a long way and can help to bring in referrals organically.

Use content for referrals

Great content not only helps people find you and buy from you, it’s also a great tool when it comes to establishing strategic referral relationships. Everyone needs content, so if you can be the partner that brings content to the relationship building table, you win!

When it comes to content, I like using the following five methods to get a referral relationship going.

Invited content – Reach out to potential strategic partners and offer them exposure on your blog. This is a great way to get referred and introduced to a strategic partner’s community.

Co-branded content – If you’ve created a “must have” piece of content in your own lead generation efforts, take it to potential and existing partners and offer to let them send it to their community and cobrand it with their contact details. It’s a win-win!

Sponsored content – One of the most powerful ways to get referrals is to get asked to present your expertise to a room full of your strategic partner’s best clients.

Curated content – Select a big topic and bring in partners who are willing to introduce their networks to a day-long event. Fill the event with partners that will equate to a group referral.

Incented content – Something as simple as a photo or video contest rewarding the person who gets the most votes is an effective way to create some buzz while getting some great referrals.

Have you started implementing a referral program at your business? What are your favorite tactics to use to bring in referrals?

Many of the ideas in this post receive even more coverage in my Wall St Journal best-seller – The Referral Engine.

If you liked this post, check out our Small Business Guide to Referrals.

Customer trust is a commodity that’s remarkably in short supply.

Lack of trust is one of the reasons why businesses fail to persuade customers to buy a product or service though they may have handsome rewards or gift coupons on offer. On the contrary, a good word about your brand or product from a trusted family member or friend might work like magic.  It could turn a reluctant customer in favor of your product. Sometimes forever.

The fact has been verified by Nielsen study which says, word of mouth marketing is 92% more effective than any other form of marketing.

The bottom line is: If you want your business to survive and thrive, get people talking about your product. More than that, get them to refer your product.

Even in the app landscape word-of-mouth marketing or referral marketing has proven its mettle, time and time again in driving app downloads. From DropBox, Airbnb, Uber to Evernote, referral marketing has turned out to be one of the most important pillars on which edifice of their success stands.

Nevertheless, you don’t have to take my word for it. There are many app companies who are already leveraging customer referral programs as their chief growth engine to drive incredible app downloads and more.

1. DropBox Referral Marketing Program

With a staggering 3900% growth rate, Dropbox is reckoned to be an all-time referral marketing champ. The company had just 1,00,000 registered users in 2008, which climbed to a staggering 4M registered users within a mere 15 month period, thanks to its straightforward referral program.

How did they do it?

Dropbox offered both the referrer and the referred a free 500 MB space on every successful referral. It’s called reciprocal incentive in the customer referral lexicon. Meaning, customers would refer your brand to their friends and family only if you give them something substantial in return. The referral program resonated well with the users and rest, as they say, is history.

2. Airbnb Referral Marketing Program

Though Dropbox engineered an unheard of growth rate through referrals, but then,  Airbnb’s referral program is touted to be the best in the world. Founded in 2007, the company is today valued at over $25 billion, thanks to its double-sided referral program.

How did they do it?

Airbnb offered both the referrer and the referred $25 travel credit, on the grounds the new member completed his/her first trip. This was a quite a calculated approach by Airbnb as the referrer was paid only when the new user made a purchase. This ensured they weren’t putting money into any unprofitable referral schemes.

Plus, they offered an additional $75 credit when the referred hosted a guest the first time.

The program was a runaway hit, helping Airbnb double its users each year since 2012. The company is also said to have made the most of the recommended contact feature available in Gmail and Android APIs, which resulting in higher conversions.

Few things Airbnb ensured while sending out their referral invites:

• They A/B tested their referral invites to ensure their referral invites sounded as gifts rather than promotions.
• The language of the invite was altruistic, given that altruistic emails enjoyed far more success ratio than outright promotional emails.

3. Uber Referral Marketing Program

Uber’s referral marketing program had become so popular that today every cab and ride sharing app is duplicating it, be it GRAB TAXI, LYFT, SIDECAR, or GET AROUND.

Uber also follows a double-sided referral scheme akin to Dropbox and Airbnb.  Nevertheless, the chief attraction is the drivers’ referral program. The drivers are considered to be valued partners of Uber and are offered  $5 cash for every new rider they bring on board.

How did they do it?

For Drivers

• Every Uber driver is offered a promotional code which is passed over to the potential So whenever a new buyer sign-ups for a driver’s account using the former’s promotion code they get linked to his account.
• And when the new driver completes his first ten trips, and if you are the first driver to refer him, you are entitled to $5 cash.

For RIDERS

• Any new rider using your promotional code will get $20 off on their first ride.
• You gain $5 cash in return every time your promotional code is used by a first-time rider.

4. Evernote’s App Referral Program

With a valuation of more than $1 billion, and with more than 100 billion worldwide users, the popular note-taking app has also launched a popular double-sided refer-a-friend program.

How did they do it?

Both the referrer and referred are rewarded when the later successfully completes a user sign-up. In return, the former wins Evernote Points. The referrer is entitled to use his earned points toward premium subscriptions, increase in monthly upload limit and so on.

On the other hand,  for signing up through your link, your referred – that is your friends and colleagues – would be offered a month of Evernote Premium for free, which means they could enjoy some powerful Evernote features like Offline Notebooks, smarter search, and more.

How App Start-ups Could Use Referral Program Strategy

All these four powerful app referral marketing case studies is a testament to the fact that referral marketing is one of the best marketing strategies to boost app downloads. In fact, it could be construed as a shortcut tool to built instant customer trust.

Nevertheless, app developers or marketers shouldn’t apply this strategy as soon as the app is ready. One needs to establish a loyal customer base first if they really want their referral campaign to hit the ground running.

A few selected tips to get your app referral campaign up and running:

1. Establish A Loyal Customer Base and Then Target Them

Don’t target the entire customer base. It could turn out to be an exercise in complete futility. Rather focus on your most active customers, because they wouldn’t mind recommending your app to his or her’s family and friends.

2. Employ Double-sided Referral Programs

All the above-mentioned app referral program worked fine because they leveraged double-sided referral strategy to a T.  Like it or not, humans are selfish. (Sure, there are exceptions to this, but by and large, “what’s in for me,” is how the human mind works.) So, dangle the reward bait without any second thoughts, if you really want to your referral program to work.

3. Take Industrial Data Into Account  

According to a recent study by app analytics firm AppsFlyer, iOS users download apps most during the weekends, while the Android users download more during weekdays.  So, while shooting your referral emails via SMS or push notifications, bear this point in mind.

Action days:

iOS apps:  Target your referrals on Thursdays and weekends. The iOS apps have 30% higher install rates on these days compared to other days of the week. However, avoid Mondays because there’s 40% drop compared to the weekends. Bottom line: Spend sparingly at the starting of the week when users are less likely to download apps.

Android apps: You are free to send out referrals all through the week as app installs are strong and consistent; nevertheless, target Tuesdays without fail, as it witnesses 4% higher download volume compared to the weekly average.

Rope in Key Influencers to Promote your Referrals  

Of the several users joining your referral program, only a few would qualify as the key influencers.  Find them and reward them handsomely so that they become the brand ambassadors of your app.

Leverage Social Media to Promote in-app Referrals

This goes without saying. It’s the age of social media, so if you want to really want to make your in-app referrals a grand success, leverage different social media channels. Even put your website and mobile site to work.

Wrapping Up

App referral programs are doing good.  Dropbox, Evernote, Airbnb, to name a few, are just tip of the iceberg. But then, before you embark on your referral campaign make sure that you earn some goodwill, that is building a good loyal customer base first and foremost. It’s because your referral marketing campaign would literally be riding on their shoulders. And also, make sure you are targeting quality users who would interest in using your app in the long run. And before I forget: A/B test your referral schemes. There’s nothing such as referral marketing blueprint to follow. Tweak and tinker your referral programs as and when needed.

So, tell me, are you using referral marketing to attract more customers? How is it going for you? Any experiences worth sharing? We are all ears.

About the Author

Jini Maxin is a Senior Writer with OpenXcell – Mobile App Development Company which offers mobile app development services across the globe. She is a voracious reader who pours all her learning into producing well-researched and data-driven posts. You can connect with her on Twitter.