Referral Marketing Strategies

Referral marketing can help you get more traffic and sales. But it will only be effective if you promote it well. You’ll need some strategies to do this, so check 12 referral marketing strategies below.

Make it Prominent

Having a referral program is not enough. If your website visitors or customers hardly know that your referral program exists, no one will sign up. This is the reason why you should make it prominent. It should easily be seen on your website. This way, your prospects can quickly sign up and get access to the reward.

There are many ways you can do this.

• First, you can put it in the announcement bar. This will help your customers to see that your project has a referral program easily, and they can quickly sign up.
• Include the link in the header, footer, about page and whatnot.
• Another thing you can do is put it in a pop-up window (don’t do it, lol) This should pop up on your online store’s front page. Other options include slide-ins from the bottom and the side. This will allow your customers to easily see that you have a referral program that they can sign up to. 

Promote Your Referral Program to Your Subscribers

If you are looking for an instant market for your referral program, you can promote it to your subscribers. Often, an online business owner will already have a list of prospects. These can be people who signed up in exchange for a freebie or they signed up because they did a transaction with your page. In any case, you can easily reach out to them with a single email.

PRO TIP: It is essential to not only reach out with a simple text email. These days, customers and prospects are more image-oriented. They want an email that looks good. If you do this, you’ll have a higher chance of convincing them to join your referral program.

NOTE: Don’t have subscribers? No problem! You can also promote your referral program through solo ads. These are advertisements that are promoted to the subscriber list of other people. This works if you want to build your list from scratch. 

Let Your Market Know Through Paid Advertising

One of the quickest ways to reach out to your target market is through paid advertising. With the power of Facebook pixel, you will be able to do this quickly without spending a ton of money. 

On Facebook, there is a Facebook pixel. This is a piece of code that collects data about your target market. This includes their general characteristics and interests. This does more than collect data. It can also be implemented when you want to launch an ad that is directed towards your existing subscribers. Also, you can use it to find similar audiences. These are audiences that have the same characteristics as your target market so they have a high likelihood of converting. 

Advertising through Facebook is easy. The system walks you in the entire process. It is essential to define the characteristics of the market and to select the output that you desire. From there, you can increase the traffic to your referral program quickly. 

Find Similar Markets

As mentioned, you can use paid advertising on Facebook to find similar markets. This will help you find audiences that exhibit the same characteristics as your current audience. All you need to do is to launch an ad and use your pixel data. This will automatically direct you to similar markets.

Another way to do this is to look at the traffic source of your website. This will show you where your market came from. From here, you can go to these pages and look for similar markets. It is important also to consider the personality and lifestyle of your target market. This will allow you to fully analyze their behavior and go to the websites that they frequent. The key is to be prominent in the places where your target market is active. 

Join a Referral Network

If you are having some trouble finding traffic on your own, you can always join a referral network. A referral network is a website that has an array of referral programs. Bargain hunters usually frequent these sites to look for discounts or rewards in exchange for referring people. Although the market may not have a high likelihood of conversion, it is still an excellent way to get the word out about your business, especially if you are still starting out. And if you have a really attractive reward, you’ll find that you can get a ton of referrals just from joining a network. 

For example, PayPal’s old referral network gives cash for every sign-up. The nature of the market is also suitable for the reward. Since they are bargain hunters, they will respond well to some free cash. So if you want to get more referrals from a referral network, it may be better to give a cash reward. It is far better than a discount reward. 

Get an Influencer to Help You

Trying to promote your referral program alone can be quite hard. It is harder if you are launching a referral program for a brand new website. This is because you don’t have a market or subscriber list to leverage. But there’s one thing you can do. You can get an influencer to help you.

Influencers are social media leaders. They have thousands to millions of followers and their followers look up to them for advice. Because of this, they are very helpful for your business in terms of promotion. They can promote your business to their followers and generate traffic and sales.

The same is true for your referral program. If you can get an influencer to promote your referral program for you, you’ll instantly see some sign-ups. 

The key is getting an influencer to work with you. You can do this in various ways. First, you can ask them. If that doesn’t work, you can give them a sample of your products and services and see if they like it. If they do, they will automatically promote your products and services to their followers. When they do that, you can give them an exclusive discount code that they can give away to their followers. This discount code can have their name on it. This helps them in terms of social credibility. It shows that they are working with different brands, and it can encourage other brands to work with them. 

To do this, you can create a separate referral program for them. You can easily set up one if you have referral marketing software. This means that you don’t have to encode your referral program from scratch. You can press a few buttons, and you can have it set up. This is what Best Hunting Bow Labs, which provides the most powerful crossbow did with great success. Another way to do this is to use an app. For Shopify websites, they can set up their referral program with a Shopify affiliate app. It is all about choosing an app or add-on that is compatible with your current platform. 

Promote Your Referral Program Offline

You don’t have to limit your referral program promotion online. You can also promote it offline. You can do this in your business location. For example, a restaurant can also promote to their existing customers. They can promote their referral program on their website and social media profile. And they can also promote it to their customers offline. They can do this by having a laptop nearby. They can ask the customers to sign up to the referral program manually, and they can get the reward instantly. 

Promoting a referral program offline usually ensures referrals. This is because they don’t have the option to back out once they have decided to sign up. They will sign up right away on your laptop. Also, you have the opportunity to catch your customers when they make their purchase. You can ask them if they are interested in the discount code right when they are about to check out. This will further encourage them to sign up for your referral program.

Use Your Checkout or Thank You Pages

Placing an affiliate program promo on the “success” pages is quite powerful if you know how to use it well. This is because it is where your customers are filtered to only include those who are decided to buy from you, and it is where you can promote a discount code easily. If the reward of your referral program is a discount code, this is where you can promote it.

Also, you can promote your referral program in the Thank You pages of other online stores. This can be a thank you page when they check out or when they sign up as a subscriber. You can ask them if you can promote your referral program within their pages. If you are working with similar audiences, you can also offer to promote their business in exchange for promoting yours. It all depends on your negotiation skills. 

Collaborate on Rewards

Rewards have to be exciting. Instead of the classic cash and discount code rewards, you can ask related businesses in your niche to provide better rewards. How can you do this? You can have a group reward instead of a single one. This means that one sign up can lead to different discount codes for related brands. Wouldn’t that be better than just one reward?

Many business owners are already doing this for giveaways. But it is a great way to promote referral programs as well. 

Include a Contest

Another way to encourage sign-ups in your referral program is to make it more interesting. You can do this by triggering their competitive spirit with a contest. This means that more than rewards, referrers also have a chance to win high ticket items or prizes just for referring people. This will encourage them to refer more people to your website. 

Support a Cause

Sometimes, it is not enough to have a simple referral program to get the attention of your target market. Sometimes, you’ll need to appeal to their emotions. You can do that with a cause. This means that you are in business for more than just money. You are also there to change a certain part of the world. With the right audience, this strategy can get you multiple referrals. 

Try Cross Promotion

It doesn’t hurt to work with other businesses. It is recommended. You should have known by now that you cannot promote your referral program alone, and you need the help of others. The best way to do this is to cross-promote referral programs with businesses that have similar target markets.

BTW, GRIN launcher can help you find and reach out to businesses with this.

To sum it up on Referral Marketing Strategies

Having a strategy is essential when it comes to promoting your referral program. Creating one is not enough. You should also know how to promote it and encourage more people to sign up. As more people sign up for your referral program, the higher your reach will be. Referral programs are useful because of their incremental nature. This means that as more people join the program, they can also get more people to join. Using this as your tool, you can quickly boost your business even with just one referral program.