Referral Marketing Touch Points. Referral can be promoted in many different places: at various locations on site, in emails, as card inserts and even via the phone channel. Typically businesses look to find a couple of touch points to launch with and then build out the promotion points over time. The best starting point tends to be post-purchase or post-sign up. You’re looking for somewhere that is close to a point of delight in the customer experience and that gets significant volume from engaged and happy customers.
Identify the right touch points
When promoting referral there should be three ambitions:
- To get as close to the point of delight as possible
- To keep the programme top of mind
- To enable customers to easily find it if they look for it
To achieve this you it’s great to place promotion points in different places on your site and within your email cycles. We typically recommend starting on the post-purchase or post-sign up page. This page is usually close to a point of delight. In online retail the greatest delight is when people have physically received their order. However you’re not in an online conversation with them when that happens and so you back up to the last time you were, when they were happy enough to buy. Putting an offer in front of customers here should result in between 10% and 30% of customers who see an offer sharing it with their friends. You are also likely to want to include a reference promotion point for launch so that customers can find the referral programme if they’re looking for it. The “my account” section typically lends itself to this and including a dashboard giving the status of any referrals that have been made works well. It can also be good to include the referral progamme as a standard feature in email newsletters. Like almost all things marketing, reminding customers about something means that more of them take note of it. Inserts can also work very well. In an online retail example, including a physical card with the product does get to people at exactly the point of greatest delight. The key here is to find a way to enable people to share without needing to go to a website to share a link. If you can give them cards that they can share with their friends it is much more effective.