There is a strong distinction to be drawn between businesses targeting other businesses (B2B) and businesses targeting consumers (B2C) in the ways that they approach online brand engagement. Certainly B2B and B2C companies are gaining equal amounts of utility from peer-to-peer referrals. The differences lie in how and where they are best able to leverage these referrals and convert leads to sales.
Everyday businesses struggle to balance managing leads and building a stronger company. But no longer! New Customer Relations Management (CRM) software has been spreading like wildfire, making it easier and more cost effective to keep customers happy and engaged.
How does a business in the Internet age take advantage of customer referrals? Read on for the 6 best practices to consider when starting your next customer referral program.
1. Communicate Directly
If you want your program to have a meaningful impact on your business, don’t expect your customers to look for it. Directly inform your customers about your referral program and how they can benefit from it.
Ever since storming the film industry in the 1980s, actor Kevin Bacon has appeared in over 60 successful films. But of all these stellar movies, he is perhaps best known for a bar game that has caused many a drunken argument between friends—the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
Picture this: You’re walking down a busy street and a bus zooms by, you saw some kind of ad but you’re suddenly startled by a loud speaker blasting the newest pop song…what was the name? You can’t remember because a man dressed as a sandwich just handed you a flyer with a special one-day offer!
As social media integration has become ubiquitous, the term “Brand Ambassador” has taken on a different, more relevant meaning. Brand ambassadors no longer need to pound the pavement for sales. With newly available referral software, your business can leverage the power of online fans to go out and generate new business with only the click of a button. New definitions of brand ambassadors move the conversation onto social networks, a brand ambassador 2.0, if you will.
Not content with Pinterest having all the eCommerce fun, Facebook recently rolled out “Collections” – a new feature that allows online retailers to add “Want,” “Collect,” and “Buy” buttons to posts about products.
Few charitable organizations can boast the rapid growth and incredible impact numbers of Kiva. Kiva’s mission is to alleviate poverty through empowerment of local business, which it does by enabling everyday people to become lenders who send microloans from $25 to entrepreneurs of their choice around the world.
Meghan Lockwood is a natural-born writer and storyteller with a gift for good conversations. After starting her career as a financial analyst at Merrill Lynch (and realizing that managing rounding errors was a less-than-inspiring career path) she is now putting her raconteur-skills to work as a content manager for HubSpot. Meghan kindly agreed to chat with us about HubSpot, inbound marketing, and the future of the world as we know it.
Every successful marketer has integrated some level of email outreach into their overall strategy, but the best of the best know it takes a delicate balance of budget allocation, selective communication, and analytics to make sure their efforts prove well worth the investment.