Referral Marketing Make sharing Easy. Make It Easy For Visitors And Customers To Refer Your Brand. You always want to make sure you’re making it as easy as possible to share your products and refer your brand. There are many ways you can do this. Consider how MeUndies Underwear has done this on their site by adding it right to their main navigation. There is no doubt that referring friends is an important call-to-action for them.
Generally it is helpful to give your customers all of the sharing options that they might want to choose from to maximise the chance of sharing and to maximise the chance of them using multiple sharing channels. That is not to say that all sharing channels are equal. Sharing channels vary in effectiveness by demographic but the rough rule of thumb is that the more meaningful the share the higher the conversion rate. So, when people share face-to-face the conversion rate is higher than if they are referred by email. Similarly email converts better than if they are referred by Twitter. Working out which share options are right for each of your customer segments is a key part of getting referral to work.
Give your customers options all the time from on your products to WebPages…
The basic rule here is that you should enable your customers to share however they want to. The sharing options we find most successful are:
Face-to-face:
At Neoneyx, we let customers share using their name so that a referred friend can visit the site and just enter the referrer’s name in order to receive their introductory offer. This allows us to capture the face-to-face referrals that are happening that might otherwise be lost, reward the referrer and start a virtuous circle.
Unique sharing URL:
Each customer gets their own unique sharing URL that they can post wherever they like: in an email, on social media on a blog.
Email:
Allowing people both to send an email from the share page with the option to look up their friends email addresses and giving them an email they can forward on to their friends later on.
Social:
For example, via Facebook (directly or on their timeline), via Twitter, via Whatsapp or Weibo (for the Chinese market and diaspora).
Maximise meaningful shares
For most demographics face-to-face, email and sharing URL are used most to share. That said there are some demographics that favour social, particularly the “Young Mum” demographic, where we can see more than 70% of successful referrals coming from Facebook sharing. However the share rate is only half of the story. The conversion rate from share to referred friend purchasing varies significantly by share channel. The more personal a sharing message feels, the more likely it is to result in a successful referral. Accordingly face-to-face conversations convert best, emails are next best. The social sharing options still deliver, but a single Tweet often lacks the power to drive many referrals. When optimising the programme it is important that you experiment with all the channels and don’t be afraid to get rid of share options that aren’t working.