How to implement referral marketing to escalate your e-commerce sales

People like to speak and share about the things that fascinate them, it might be about the new dress which they purchased from an online store or the latest festive offers running on the internet, they tend to tell it to their close ones. 

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When someone from family or friends talks about your service, it makes a greater influence on the other person listening to them, as the acclamation is coming from a reliable source. This word of mouth marketing can be encashed in a proper way to gear up your E-commerce business.

Referral marketing is nothing but gaining new customers through your own happy customer's impactful words. For this to happen it is necessary that you provide a high standard of service to your customers. 

This is the most effective means of marketing as you are targeting the known audience to attract an unknown audience. With a lot of things happening around the day, sometimes your customers may forget to share their experience with your brand. Hence you can embrace such customers through your referral program.

You can reward the customers (or both) referring their friends to perform the specified actions on your website such as creating an account and making a purchase. A reward may be a discount on the next purchase, coupons, referral points, free product etc., You can use referral marketing strategies to your E-commerce business, but make sure you have enough customer’s base and sales and traffic coming to your online store. If not, it is a little difficult to gain fruitful results from this strategy. There are different ways in which you can execute it and some of them are mentioned below:

1. Dedicate a place for call-to-action button on the website:

If you have a good amount of traffic coming to your website, ensure that you have a refer-a-friend button on the front page of your website so that it is easier for your customers to utilize it. Provide options to share it on social media platforms to increase the reach. You can also design a popup page on the referral program when your customers land on the homepage of your website. By this the customers will be aware of the program and will take the necessary actions.

2. Let the email speak for you:

Since you have already developed a set of audience for your brand, another way of revealing it to them is through personalized emails. Email is another direct way of conveying the information to your customers. By sending emails to your existing customers you are laser sharpening your target audience who can accomplish your referral program. When your customers are happy about your product & services, writing a personalized email to them can result in a high conversion rate. Customer's sense humanized touch in the emails than any other touch points, which makes them connected with your brand and hence do not hesitate to take the necessary actions. You can also send reminder emails if the outcome is not satisfactory from the first email campaign.

3. Evoke at the end of the purchase:

The perfect time to request for a referral is immediately after your customer has made the purchase. They have made a purchase only after knowing the quality of service you render and due to the trust factor which they find in your brand. Hence they would not step back in doing the favor of referring their friends as they are sure that this would benefit all the three. Hence creating a pop-up page after the check out page will help you to gain referrals.

4. Spread it in Social Media:

Social media is one of the powerful platforms for brand promotions as a majority of the population have at least single account in any of the social media platforms. These platforms can be used to reach a larger audience. You can create a post on the referral program on your company page so that the followers of your company page can share it with their contacts. If necessary you can run a sponsored content to widen the posts reach. But make sure you are adding clear details on deadlines and terms & conditions as well.

5. Do not underestimate reviews and testimonials:

Every 4 out of 5 customers trust a brand by the reviews posted by the other customers on the internet. Hence reviews can turn out to be an important source of referral which will help to gain prospect customers. You can also request your happy customers to write a review about your company on your social media pages and you can also publish their testimonial on your website.

Wrapping Up:

In order to gain better results from referral program, you must make sure that you are furnishing the best service to your customers, as quality service leads to self-driven word-of-mouth marketing which will cost you nothing. Hence standard service and referral programs can together gain you more customers.