Nurturing brand advocates to generate more customer referrals is the dream of every online business. One of the best ways of generating customer referrals for online stores successfully is by focusing on the service part of the business. Selling is no longer enough, and to satisfy your customers, you need to up your customer service game.
Your marketing team needs to do a lot of legwork to come up with your own customer referral solutions. Once you have won your customers’ trust, word-of-mouth customer referrals will amount to almost 50% of the total sales.
How Do Customer Referrals Work?
One sure-shot way of getting more referrals is to deliver outstanding service, but remember, many referrals also come at specific moments—times when the customers are functioning in a good mood and wouldn’t mind promoting your brand.
So, how do you do that? By being consistent and delivering the best possible experience to your customers during every interaction.
Another way of achieving customer referrals for online stores, as mentioned earlier, is to know when is the right time to start a customer referral program. Also, following customer referral program best practices is beneficial for your organization as they reveal two things:
- Customers trust your brand enough to participate in a referral program and that incentivizing their referrals will be a good idea
- They are willing to go out of their way to make more referrals.
How do Referrals Work for Online Stores?
Regardless of the area of operation, every business can use a referral program. But online companies can leverage it even better.
Starting an online customer referral program is very valuable for an online business. It doesn’t cost much to acquire a referral and generates excellent profits.
The overall value of a referral can be evaluated differently for different businesses. Still, roughly it is calculated by adding the customer acquisition cost (CAC) and customer lifetime value (CLV) when gaining new customers through referrals.
In a nutshell, you need to have a lot of patience when dealing with customers, handle their queries tactfully, and deliver positive experiences consistently to generate a referral out of them.
Best Practices to Boost Customer Referrals
By following the points in this article, you will make your customers believe that they can trust you and not share an offer but merely share their experience with the brand.
With that being said, let us move on to the best practices to boost customer referrals for online stores.
Explore your CRM system:
The best way to find your most valuable customers is by searching in your existing CRM system. Use the system’s data to find out which customers have been regularly purchasing from your brand and ask them to participate in your referral program.
Leverage the checkout process:
Timing is everything, and it holds for customer referrals as well. If you want to increase the referral requests, the checkout process is the right place.
Placing the request after checkout does not distract your customer from their tasks, and since they have already made a purchase, they might do your bidding out of the positive attitude towards your brand.
Use autofill wherever possible:
Customers do not like to fill lengthy forms, and most people are lazy by nature. That is why you should enable autofill for different forms and have relevant social media integrations to use that account to make referrals.
Be creative with questionnaires:
Sending a questionnaire straight away can appear to be pushy and distract the customers. Be creative with the process and send your questionnaires disguised as requests.
Workaround the message these forms send, and instead of appearing like a favor, it should appeal to a customer’s self-esteem when you ask for their opinion. Don’t forget to stress how valuable they are to your brand and that you will continue to serve them with the same passion in the future.
Incentivize the referrals:
When someone refers their friend to your brand, it won’t be a big deal to offer them something in return. Small cash discounts, gift cards, and loyalty points are a few good ways to incentivize your loyal customers. This can go a long way to boost your customer referrals for your online store in the long run. Moreover, introducing a customer referral rewards system only costs a fraction of what you might otherwise spend to acquire a customer.
The Experts Corner
Amazon Prime Referral Program:
Amazon’s referral program is one of the best in the world. It is impressive as it boasts a 150 million members strong count through its program.
While it ended in 2017, it is still considered a pivotal moment in online business. It helped the brand get close to a net worth of a trillion dollars.
It worked because the prime members demographic is a lucrative one and the members who join this program spend twice as much as regular shoppers.
Amazon capitalized on this and exquisitely increased its user base.
Secondly, the program was highly cost-effective, and enlisting new prime members was a brilliant idea as it dramatically slashed the CAC.
They proved that online businesses can also tap into word-of-mouth marketing campaigns and deliver outstanding results.
Ministry of Supply:
This small start-up integrated space tech with clothes. Sounds cool? It definitely is!
This men’s apparel brand featured phase-changing materials that were adapted from NASA’s spacesuits.
But the success isn’t in the idea alone. They used the power of product blogging and tied up with over 150 product-relevant blogs to kickstart their journey.
They used customized emails to raise over $30,000 in about five days. Once they achieved the milestone, they were featured in TechCrunch and Forbes and further raised $400,000 for their Kickstarter campaign.
Build a Strong Customer Referral Program to Improve Referrals by Five Times
When you get a referral program right, you can create offers regularly to engage more customers every day. But can you do it all manually? Not really!
Therefore, to stay one step ahead of the competition, it is better to get an all-in-one loyalty generation platform for your business.
NextBee’s customer referral platform evolves with its AI-based programming. It seamlessly integrates with your CRM system, POS system, and marketing automation platform to give you detailed analytics about your most loyal customers.
Not only can you increase the referrals by 5X, but you can also improve CLV by 12% and increase social engagement by 50%.
Kickstart Your Customer Referral Program with NextBee Today
With our robust and feature-rich platform, you can get all the tools required to create an effective referral program in a single package.
You also get expert help and a clear idea about future ROI from our experienced team on the plus side.
To know more about our platform, schedule a free consultation today.
