After your company begins a direct referral program, you should start seeing more profit coming into your business.<\/p>\n
![\"consumers](\"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/consumer-trust.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
<\/p>\n
Source<\/a><\/p>\n To say that Zappos knows about happy customers is an understatement.<\/span> Zappos even goes as far as to call itself \u201ca service company that happens to sell shoes<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Most companies would place profits from their<\/span> word-of-mouth marketing success\u00a0into new marketing campaigns<\/span>. Instead, Zappos places its profits back into the customer experience. By doing this, Zappos is an example of how <\/span><\/span> great customer service creates lots of direct referrals<\/span><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n Here are a few examples of how Zappos utilizes its word-of-mouth success<\/a>\u00a0to continue building upon its customer service<\/a>:<\/p>\n Source<\/a><\/p>\n Throughout time, technology changes how companies operate.\u00a0With that in mind, one of these changes took place after email became a popular way for the world to communicate with each other. Now, many companies use email marketing as a way to reach customers with news, promotions, and other types of information.<\/p>\n Email marketing<\/a>\u00a0isn\u2019t only a popular way to communicate with consumers, it\u2019s also quite effective. One study found that 73% of consumers choose email<\/a>\u00a0as their preferred way to interact with brands.<\/p>\n Source<\/a><\/p>\n Dropbox provides an excellent example of how to do an email marketing program. Pictured above, you\u2019ll see how effective a simple email marketing template can be. The bold title makes it clear what\u2019s in it for those who refer Dropbox to others. You\u2019ll also see the text box makes it easy for people to easily add the names or email addresses of their referrals. The simple yet eye-catching blue send button is a great call-to-action.<\/p>\n It\u2019s often a great idea for brands to offer incentive-based referrals<\/a> to customers and business partners. Incentive-based referral programs<\/a> encourage customers to become loyal by giving them rewards.<\/span><\/p>\n In the past, companies typically offered coupons or gift cards for their referral programs. With the popularity of everything going digital, most companies now give out digital referral incentives.<\/p>\n If you want to take things to the next level, implement a program that rewards the people who give and <\/em>receive the referral. For example, one type of referral program incentive can involve offering a 15% discount to an existing customer for referring someone to this business, and extending this same discount to that person’s referred friend.<\/p>\n As a male grooming company wanting to have a stellar launch, Harry\u2019s could have taken many routes to achieve this goal. It chose to utilize an email marketing strategy that led to great results.<\/p>\n In the months leading up to this company’s official launch date, Harry\u2019s employees went to work attempting to talk to, as Co-CEO Jeff Raider puts it, “friends, entrepreneurs and virtually anyone else who would listen to us talk about Harry\u2019s.”<\/p>\n After a lot of hard work, Harry\u2019s received about 100,000 email signups<\/a>\u00a0over the course of a few months. Each of these signups got redirected to Harry\u2019s unique referral page<\/a>, which is where the true genius of this email marketing campaign began.<\/p>\n Source<\/a><\/p>\n While this program combined email and social media marketing, its foundation was from the email addresses that Harry\u2019s had spent gathering from any interested source it could find. Harry\u2019s had also spent the majority of this campaign communicating with this group through targeted emails.<\/p>\n It also combined a referral program with a <\/span> gamified referral element<\/a> that was hard to resist. Here\u2019s what it looked like:<\/p>\n Harry\u2019s did a great job of offering referral rewards to its brand fans\u00a0to enjoy by referring this company to others. By using a microsite and making these rewards fairly easy to obtain, it achieved its goal of having a successful launch and lots of referrals<\/a>.<\/p>\n Source<\/a><\/p>\n Another type of referral happens when customers review your business. Of course, you\u2019ll first need to create and claim pages on relevant review websites (Google, Yelp, etc). You don\u2019t have to sit there and wait for reviews to come in. Instead, feel free to begin asking customers to review your business<\/a>. It’s also wise to try NPS software<\/a> to find out what customers think about your company.<\/p>\n During this time, you\u2019re likely to find that your loyal customers\u00a0are quick to complete these reviews. Other customers might need a bit more convincing. To solve this problem, think about enticing customers to leave reviews for discounts, free products\/services, or even points as part of your company\u2019s loyalty program.<\/p>\n Whatever you do, avoid \u201cgaming the system\u201d by purchasing fake reviews or asking customers to only leave positive reviews. Review websites are extremely good at detecting suspicious behavior and they\u2019re not afraid to lower rankings and remove accounts<\/a>.<\/p>\n So, what makes reviews so important in the world of referral marketing<\/a>? If you want to market your brand to others and build social proof, it\u2019s hard to find a better way to do this than by gaining reviews (preferably positive ones, of course).<\/p>\n Zendesk is a business that sells customer service software. It\u2019s also an example of a business that knows how to utilize reviews as referrals. Instead of using a simple review template or pulling a quick quote, Zendesk considers its reviews as customer stories. It’s also a company that knows as to utilize their customer’s reviews as types of referrals.<\/p>\n Source<\/a><\/p>\n For each story, you\u2019ll find a full-length explanation of what challenges each of Zendesk\u2019s clients faced and how the company helped solve their problems. You\u2019ll also see that each story contains a beautiful layout that shows you the Zendesk service each company uses as well as how these products helped them. By telling a story, it gives potential customers a much clearer picture of what to expect after hiring Zendesk.<\/p>\n As mentioned earlier, technology continues to change how companies operate. With that in mind, it\u2019s also important to consider having your business utilize the power of social media referrals<\/a>. The best part of this type of referral program is that most of your brand\u2019s advocates are already on social.<\/p>\n If someone is referring your business to others, it\u2019s likely going to take time for this person to reach out to their entire network. With social media, it only takes one share for your company\u2019s content to instantly reach their entire audience. Think of it as a massive amount of direct referrals that take place the moment a loyal customer clicks that share button.<\/p>\n Source<\/a><\/p>\n Pepsi\u2019s recent emoji label campaign is a great example of how a company utilized both influencer\u00a0and social media referrals to its advantage. It began this campaign by creating a #sayitwithPepsi hashtag and partnerships with a network of popular social media influencers.<\/p>\n Each time an influencer posted content featuring Pepsi, it extended the reach of this campaign to new audiences. After the influencers began posting their content featuring relevant pics of the newly labeled bottles and relevant hashtags, Pepsi started looking at the results of each social media campaign to see which ones were the most engaging.<\/p>\n Source<\/a><\/p>\n Next, it took the content with the best engagement metrics and had an entirely separate group of influencers share it with their groups of followers. The goal of this campaign was to grow this soft drink company\u2019s fanbase and engagement rates. After this campaign was over, it led to 46 million impressions and 50,000 engagements<\/a>\u00a0from social media users.<\/p>\n Wrapping things up, there are several popular ways to refer others to your company. Certain companies achieve success by using one type of referral, while others might succeed by using a combination of referral types. The fun part is trying them all and seeing what works best for your business.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you thought the only way to get people talking was through direct referrals, we’ve got some good news for you. Here are five popular types of referrals that you should include in your marketing plan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":17496,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-referral-marketing"],"acf":[],"modified_by":"Megan Mosley","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12975"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12975\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22130,"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12975\/revisions\/22130"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Example: Zappos<\/h3>\n
\n
2. Email referrals<\/h2>\n
![\"using](\"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/email-stats.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
<\/p>\nExample: Dropbox<\/h3>\n
![\"dropboxs](\"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/dropbox.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
<\/p>\n3. Incentive-based referrals<\/h2>\n
Example: Harry\u2019s<\/h3>\n
![\"harrys](\"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/harrys.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
<\/p>\n\n
4. Referrals from reviews<\/h2>\n
![\"referrals](\"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/reviews-as-referrals-example.png\" "\\"\\"")
<\/p>\nExample: Zendesk<\/h3>\n
![\"zendesk](\"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/zendesk.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
<\/p>\n5. Social media referrals<\/h2>\n
![\"verizon](\"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/verizon-referral-program.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
<\/p>\nExample: Pepsi\u2019s emoji label campaign<\/h3>\n
![\"pepsi's](\"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/pepsi.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
<\/p>\nKey takeaways<\/h2>\n