What is a Referral Program?
A referral program is a business strategy that incentivizes your existing customers to recommend your brand to their friends and family. This can include their family, colleagues, friends, through to anyone they see on social media looking for a product or brand like yours.
The program is also often stated as word-of-mouth marketing and is a great growth tactic that helps you gain more potential buyers through your existing customers. It convinces your referral partners to become independent promoters of your brand and get rewarded in exchange for doing so.
Why do you need a referral program?
In today’s era, businesses realize how important word-of-mouth marketing is and how it can change the entire business scenario drastically. This purpose can be easily fulfilled using an engaging ecommerce referral program that enables your already existing customers to recommend your brand to others.
A strong referral program has the potential to skyrocket your business while optimally tracking the growth during the process. This is because referral programs encourage sharing and make it easy to both share and track the invited customers.
How Referral Program Helps E-Commerce Businesses to Boost Their Sales?
Referral Programs help e-commerce businesses to encourage their existing customers to share their brand experience with others in return for certain incentives. This helps businesses to spread positive word-of-mouth about their brand among other potential buyers who might be looking for similar products as yours.
Customers tend to purchase from a brand that is trusted and is recommended by someone known who has already encountered a pleasant experience through it. Thus, by referral ecommerce, you can easily promote your brand through someone who your potential buyer already trusts and thereby increasing your chances of sales. The program helps you gain more customers who are willing to purchase from your brand and hence boost your sales.
Why Referral Program is Beneficial Than Traditional Advertisements on Social Media or Search Engines?
The Referral Program is comparatively more beneficial and result-driven as compared to other traditional advertisements on social media and search engines. Here’s how -
- Promotion Through a Trustworthy Source
Unlike traditional advertisements where you simply promote your own products, a referral program enables you to promote your brand to other potential buyers through their trusted source. This helps in more conversions as the customers tend to purchase from sources that are trustworthy and especially recommended by someone they already know and rely upon. - Saves Huge Advertisement Costs
In traditional advertising campaigns, you pay for the entire campaign, irrespective of the number of purchasers you get in return. Usually, these advertisement costs can be overwhelming for a business with a very small return.
But in the case of ecommerce referral marketing, you only have to pay the referral members for those referred customers who actually purchase from you. This results in saving you huge advertisement costs while increasing your sales. - Pay Only After The Sales
When you opt for starting advertisements either on social media or any other search engine, you have to pay in advance to run the entire campaign. Whereas, in the case of the referral program, you have to pay after the sales are done. - Great Brand Awareness Program
A referral program is a great way of creating brand awareness among your potential buyers without actually having to spend any additional costs on the same. Whereas advertising directly on social media or search engines can cost you significantly for the entire campaign just to create a significant difference. - Improves Customer Retention
Providing attractive incentives to your customers to share their brand experience with others keeps them motivated and improves customer retention in a much better way than any other advertisement campaign.
How Does Shopaccino Help you in Creating a Customer-winning Referral Program?
Shopaccino offers a power-packed, fully customized, and one of the best ecommerce referral programs designed to suit your unique business demands while helping you to multiply your customer base.
- Create an attractive Referral Program without any hassle
Quickly set up and create your referral program as per your unique business strategy and requirements with the Shopaccino referral program application. Decide and set rules to provide incentives to your referral members on different meaningful actions taken by them. - Invite your Customers to join the Referral Program membership
Invite your customers to join your referral program membership by sending them personalized notifications about attractive incentives. - Generate a unique code or link for your Referral Partners
Shopaccino helps you in generating a unique code or link for your referral partners so that they can share it with their friends and family to earn incentives. - Allow Referral Partners to share Referral links or Code on Various platforms
Shopaccino enables you to allow your referral partners to share their referral links or code on various platforms easily. Provide your customers with a hassle-free experience by simplifying the process. - Provide a seamless customer experience
Improve customer retention through a seamless customer experience that integrates effortlessly with web and mobile applications. - Provide real-time tracking of referral earnings
Allow your customers to track their referral earnings in real time for a transparent referral system with shopaccino’s exclusive referral program.
Referral marketing ideas and tips
Referral marketing isn’t as difficult as people make it. Here are some referral marketing ideas and tips to help you simplify the process and make it work.
- Choose Attractive Incentives
The referral program keeps your customers motivated only when the incentives and rewards you provide are attractive to them. Thus a careful selection of luring incentives is important to keep them engaged with your brand. The better the incentives are, the harder your customers will work for your program. - Use a Referral Program Software
Using referral software for ecommerce makes the entire process much smoother and easier. It offers easy integration and automation to handle your repeated process. The software will help you to make your program look more consistent to keep your referral partners engaged with your brand.
- Promotion of the Referral Program is a Must
A referral program is a strong marketing tactic that helps you attract more customers to your business. Thus, to make it successful just like any other marketing campaign, you must promote it on different marketing channels. The more you promote it, the better results you will get.
Conclusion
In conclusion, a referral program is a great marketing strategy that every other e-commerce business must adopt to boost its sales and profitability. By expanding your customer base through positive word-of-mouth directly from your customers, you can create a positive brand image in the eyes of other potential buyers.
Furthermore, providing incentives to your existing customers for recommending your brand to others helps in better customer engagement while increasing your profits. So, it's a win-win situation for everyone.
