Three Traits of Successful Referral Programs for Local Businesses
1. Educate
First thing’s first: your customers need to know you have a referral program (and how it works) before it can become effective.
Everywhere you can, your referral program should be front and center of your customers to see.
Headline your campaign with a clear CTA:
i.e. “if you share your love for our business you’ll get free.”
Follow that message with an enticing image displaying each reward clearly along with the associated referral milestone necessary to receive it.
When creating a referral program for your small business, make sure you’re putting yourself in the mindset of your customers!
We’re all busy and constantly getting pushed advertisements /calls-to-action from all types of businesses.
Making the referral rewards as clear, visual, and shown as often as possible is critical for the success of your referral campaign..
2. Motivate
Along with ensuring your referral offer is shown at your storefront, on social media, and everywhere possible, you need to motivate your customers by providing a real-time “counter” tracking where they are in the referral process:
“Congrats! You’re only X referrals away from receiving Y!”
Whether it’s a visually appealing progress bar or simple numerical counter, make sure your customers know where they are in the referral process.
The goal here is to update the customer with their progress and encourage them to keep referring to earn more rewards.
3. Assist
You have a great referral campaign for your small business, you’ve educated your customers, and set up motivating rewards to push them along their referral journey.
What’s left is to do everything in your power to make actually sharing your product or service as easy as possible.
The last goal here is to remove every little bit of friction.
You can do so by first, we providing customers with their own referral “code” or link and teach them how to use it.
Ideally, your customer referral journey includes multiple options to share with friends — via link, text, email, social media, and in-person with a friend. These options are all there to give your customers flexibility with the number of places to share.
When a customer shares via text or email, you should provide a pre-drafted excerpt explaining your business and the referral offer for friends, if any. You do this to prevent the customer from wasting their time coming up with a way to explain your business and offer to a friend. Additionally, who better to explain your business and offer than you?
Just make sure that the text is editable, so if the customer chooses, they can add their own personalization to the referral message.
That’s it! Of course, setting up a referral campaign takes time; however, time-and-time again referrals are proven to be the most cost-effective way to grow your small business.
Get started with a Townee Referral or Advocate campaign today and discover the power of the new & improved customer word-of-mouth marketing.
All business campaigns include a 14-day free trial, so if you don’t see the results, you don’t pay!
