Have you recently gotten a high NPS score? Congratulations!

Now, what do you do with it?

How about turning all of those potential client referrals into more business by creating a referral program for your customers?

When your buyers pick 9 or 10 on your survey, they are likely to refer your company to their friends and referred customers are some of the best for your business.

In a bank study by HBR, 10,000 accounts were monitored for three years. Through analysis, the bank found that clients referred by other customers were 18% more likely to stay with the bank over that period.

Additionally, they found 16% more profits from these clients. This just points to one example of how much more referral customers are to your company.

So, let’s see how to get referrals from your existing customers.

Start By Making it Easy To Refer Friends

There’s a significant chance that your clients just haven’t considered referring others to your business. Not everyone thinks “I just made a purchase, let me post about it on Facebook!” More often than not they need a nudge.

You can get client referrals by placing referral options in strategic areas of your website. For instance, on a thank you page, or in a transaction email.

Nicereply does this when someone has participated in a survey. They will receive a thank you page like the one below.

This is as simple as adding a few lines of copy to your site, in strategic areas such as the following:

Thank you pages
Order emails
Navigation of your site
Promotional content

How To Get Referrals Fast via Social Media

Using Click To Tweet links on your website can help generate social media interest and be a great way how to get referrals from your customers. Here is what the visitor sees when they click this example:

Remember, the easier it is for customers to find your client referral program, the more likely they will be to participate. Where could you add client referral options to your customer communications?

Give Customers A Reason To Refer Their Friends

Since you already have a killer NPS system in place, you know people would refer you, but how to get referrals from them in practice? Let’s get them to do it by giving them a reason; a tangible reward.

Some of the most quickly growing companies have strategically used client referral programs to build momentum. For example, Dropbox, Uber, Nice Laundry, Paypal, and Airbnb.

For each of these examples, a reward was given to both the person sharing and the person receiving.

Dropbox offered more cloud space for both users
Uber gave each user a discount on their next ride
Nice Laundry offered free pairs of socks
Airbnb pays cash for referring trips or rentals

Take the time to consider what item or discount you can afford to offer as a reward, and the expense of several people participating in the campaign. Companies who have done this successfully have chosen things that were relatively inexpensive to themselves but considered high-value by their customers.

How Zulily Gets Client Referrals

One example of how to get referrals through referral rewards program is Zulily. For years members could share their links to offer new users $15 off their first purchase.

When a new customer redeemed this offer, the existing member also received $15 for their next purchase. With each purchase costing at least $7 for shipping alone, the company could quickly recoup that investment.

This client referral program worked well for customers. All they had to do was click a few buttons allowing Zulily to post on their Facebook account. Any time they visited Zulily, they could find the feature to do it again, and possibly earn more money for their shopping habits.

Choosing a Client Referral System

There are countless ways how to get refferals through rewards systems.

Here are a few tools you can use:

Gleam Rewards

A favorite for their focus on integrating with social media, Gleam is easy to use, and encourages multiple actions from participants. Plus, their campaigns just look great out of the box.

InviteBox

Another program that helps with how to get referrals – InviteBox goes a step further by offering a feature that makes referrers meet a goal of a # of client referrals before getting their reward. This means you’ll be guaranteed ROI for these campaigns.

Referral Candy

Referral Candy does one thing very well, they run the referral programs on several e-commerce sites. They integrate with your website and email program to run your campaign smoothly.

Rewards programs are also run through Facebook pages. Fans who generate the most votes, visits to your fan page, or website are chosen as winners.

You can run one of these sweepstakes or contests through Gleam, and post the code from Gleam anywhere on your site. While these might seem less related to client referrals, when the rewards match up with your business offerings, they not only generate buzz but sales as well.

Gift certificates to your products, or give away your most coveted product is one way to keep participation to only those interested in your company.

Another option for getting referrals is to reward participants by giving them access to unique features, sales, beta access, or premium versions of software.

Here’s How To Set Up Your Client Referral Program

Decide if you will reward users for participating.
Choose where you will place opportunities to participate: thank you page, delivery email, rating email, prominently in your navigation, etc.
Select software for your referral system, have it installed, and test it. If you aren’t providing rewards, a simple refer a friend script will work.
Announce the opportunities to participate through social media, email, and on your site.
Test what encourages participation, where people are using the referral opportunities, and expand the program if it is producing results.
Launching Your Referral Program
An excellent way to launch is by emailing participants from your NPS survey. If you know who gave you a high score, you can just notify them since they would refer you, or you might create a referral campaign just for them.

When you are ready, start by testing your email copy on just a small portion of your database and once you have decent results (i.e.: a lot of people clicking to take action) include the rest of the list.

Once you’ve emailed everyone, announce the promotion several times through social media channels, and continuously remind people in email to get the best results.

Conclusion

Client referral programs are a great way to get your current customers talking about you. They also work as a low investment opportunity for expanding your email list and encouraging new sales.

With today’s technology, there are endless ways how to get referrals and create a campaign that interests your target market and is easy to install. Take the time to invest in a client referral program today, especially if your NPS score was high. Otherwise, you are leaving money on the table.

Tell Us!

Have you run a referral program before? How did it go? How else can we help you get client referrals?

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