88% of Consumers Trust Word of Mouth

What is Word of Mouth?

Word of mouth or WOM is one of the most powerful tools brands can use to acquire new customers.

Also known as viva voce, word of mouth has been around as long as people knew how to talk to each other. As such, it forms part of the natural human social instinct to pass useful information to others in the same social group, and to share experiences and advice that benefit all group members.

Whereas you can easily imagine our ancestors telling each other where dangerous animals had been spotted, or recommending which berries to eat or avoid, today it’s more often associated with advice about new products or services, such as whether it’s worth your while to go and watch a new movie. But it can also be a recommendation to avoid something. For example, a recommendation to avoid a particular restaurant based on personal experiences of being over-charged, having received poor service, getting food poisoning etc.

In its simplest form, word of mouth is where person A asks person B for his or her recommendation of where to shop for a widget, and person B recommends Acme Widget Stores, because either person B shopped there before and had a good service, or heard from another trusted friend that this was the case. In short, it’s the flow of information about a place, product or service. And it happens whether or not a brand or retailer takes any steps to encourage it. But, as we set out below, word of mouth can become really powerful when a brand or retailer takes steps to facilitate it creating, in effect, free advertising on its behalf.

In this Article we’ll look at:

• The Power of Word of Mouth
• What is Word or Mouth Marketing or WOM Marketing?
• Why Does Word of Mouth Marketing Work?
• Why you Need a Word of Mouth Marketing Strategy?
• How to Create a Word of Mouth Marketing Strategy?
• Avoiding Mistakes
• How to Measure Word of Mouth?

The Power of Word of Mouth

According to Nielsen, in its global Trust in Advertising Study in 2021, which surveyed 40,000 across 56 countries, 88% of consumers said that they trusted recommendations from people they know, above all other forms of marketing messaging.

And it’s not just consumers who say that word of mouth is the most effective form of marketing as can be seen from these statistics:

• 64% of marketing executives believe word of mouth is the most effective form of marketing.
• McKinsey & Co reported that word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20-50% of all purchasing decisions.
• BCG reported that word of mouth was 2-10 times more effective than paid ads.
• 23% of consumers talk about their favorite products with friends and family every day.
• 74% of consumers cite word of mouth as a major influence over their purchasing decisions.
• Nielsen found that consumers were 77% more likely to buy a product if their friends recommended it.
• Buyapowa’s own research found that 95% of people have referred a friend in the past year and an amazing 83% have done so more than once.

A recent study by Wynter asked 101 B2B SaaS CMOs to rank what actually gets a vendor into their consideration set and the top answer with 42% was word of mouth, followed by brand fame at 18%, then G2 reviews at 12% and AI recommendations at 10%. Paid ads and cold outreach were each at 2% only.

Hear Jacob Tice, Senior Marketing Specialist at Trupanion, explain how a personal recommendation from a friend is more compelling than any marketing message:

See the full interview here.
 
And with the adoption of the Internet, mobile phones and social networks, the spread of word of mouth information has greatly increased and it’s now estimated to drive a huge US$6 trillion of annual consumer spending which, to give you an idea, is more than the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Japan. In other words, it’s estimated to account for 13% of all consumer sales. That’s a lot of talking!

“In any market, having your friend come to you and say ‘This is a brand that I trust. This is a brand that’s had a real impact on my life personally’ is such a compelling thing to hear. It’s stronger and more from the heart than any pitch from a marketing department. You know, if your mom, if your aunt, if your best friend comes to you and says, ‘Trupanion saved my pet’s life. You should work with them. They can help.’ That is as compelling as anything you’ll see when you hear that sort of thing from a friend.
Jacob Tice, Senior Marketing Specialist – Trupanion

And, while research from the Keller Fay Group back in 2007 found that 9 out of 10 word of mouth conversations occurred offline, the importance of word of mouth, and word of mouth online in particular, is only likely to grow with McKinsey & Co reporting that 82% of Gen-Z trust their family and friends for advice on products more than any other source, Millennials are reportedly 38% more likely to discover brands through recommendations, and 91% of 18-34-year-olds saying that they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Although, while online word of mouth is likely to continue to keep growing, it’s probably still valid to say that offline WOM is still far larger than online.

What is Word of Mouth Marketing?

If word of mouth is the channel by which we share our stories, opinions and recommendations with friends, family and colleagues, then Word of Mouth Marketing (or WOMM for acronym lovers) is the collection of strategies and tactics used by brands and retailers to directly or indirectly leverage word of mouth channels to get past and present customers to promote them, with the aim of generating positive outcomes. Those positive outcomes include not only sales, subscriptions, app downloads, lead generation and free trials or freemium adoption, but can also include contributing back to the cycle of positive word of mouth by leaving reviews, user-generated content (“UGC”) or making referrals.

Simply put, Word of Mouth Marketing refers to all your attempts to create a conversation about your brand and/or, where a conversation already exists, influence it in your favor and direct it towards generating a desired outcome. The common elements of Word of Mouth Marketing include encouraging customers to refer your brand to a friend, soliciting ratings and reviews from them, asking them to share social posts about you or to create and post user-generated content about their experience with your brand. And thereafter looking to maximize the effectiveness of that word of mouth, by using it as social proof in conversion journeys, such as by showing ratings and reviews or stating that ‘over 10k customers rated your brand at 4.5 or above’ etc. at key decision points in your conversion journeys.

Hear from Asya Kuznetsova, Product & Growth at Wise as to why referrals is qualifiable word of mouth:

See the full interview here.
 

Why Does Word of Mouth Marketing Work?

To understand why Word of Mouth Marketing works so well, we need to look both at the nature of word of mouth and compare this with alternative forms of marketing.

The first reason is that word of mouth is often shared in a social setting, such as a discussion between friends, family and colleagues. And the research from the Keller Fay Group back in 2007 mentioned above found that those conversations were often more positive about brands and more likely to lead to purchases

In many ways, it’s obvious why word of mouth, and particularly face to face word of mouth, works so well:

• You’re typically receiving the information from someone you know and trust and, in the case of a family member or close friend, from someone who cares about the outcome of the recommendation;
• A family member or friend is likely to know you very well and know what you would like and not like, and can give a more targeted or tailored recommendation for a product or service, particularly when they know you are looking for a product or service like this;
• Often the person giving the recommendation is actually a customer of the brand in question and has accurate and updated experience of using the product or service, and his or her continued use of the product or service gives the recommendation more credibility;
• The person giving the recommendation, unlike a sales person, often has no vested interest in the outcome other than knowing that you will appreciate the product or service or, where there’s a reward for a referrer, this is disclosed and the amount or value of the reward is not enough to convince someone to give misleading information, and risk losing a friendship, in order to get the reward;
• Given our tendency to socialize with people like us, in terms of tastes, values, demographics, income, it’s likely that the giver of the recommendation has similar needs and expectations to the recipient and can understand why this would be the right advice.

In other words, it’s targeted advice from a trusted source, often given at the right time. But there’s another reason that’s equally important. In a world where the average American is targeted with between 4,000 to 10,000 marketing messages a day, it’s no wonder that people have learned to block out the majority of these messages whether by ignoring them or via banner blindness or with technology, such as spam filters and ad blockers, or by switching away from advertising saturated media, such as terrestrial television to online streaming and video gaming. Whereas, a recommendation from a friend or family member, whether face to face at a family meal, barbecue etc. or online via email or text is likely to be heard or seen. So not only is the message likely to be credible and from a trusted source, it can be both very timely and targeted and is likely to be received.

Often a close second to word of mouth in surveys as to what consumers trust, we find consumer reviews, with nine out of ten consumers reportedly checking reviews online before purchasing. However, while these can be considered as a form of word of mouth, they are typically less trusted than advice from people we know, because aside from concerns about the possible manipulation of reviews, when we read them, we really don’t know much about the person giving the review. The reviewer may be very different from us in terms of tastes, values and demographics, and so an otherwise good review could turn out to be meaningless in your own context.

But it’s not surprising to read that consumers don’t really trust advertising, celebrity endorsements and influencers as much as word of mouth from trusted sources. While advertising does fulfil an informational need, and can often be entertaining, it’s clearly written by or for the brand and is not impartial, and the writers of the ads often know very little about the actual recipient of the message, other than broad demographic or persona defined information. And with celebrity endorsements, while the celebrity is attaching some of his or her reputation and credibility to the product or service being advertised, it’s obvious that they are being paid, often large sums of money, to endorse the product and often in cases where they are unlikely to use the actual product being endorsed. Increasingly, surveys also show that consumers no longer trust influencers, aware that they are being paid to promote products and often promote one product one day and a competing product the next day. A recent study from Oracle found that only 37% of consumers trusted influencers more than they trust information from the brands themselves and an Irish study found 90% don’t trust information from influencers.

“Referrals is basically a quantifiable word of mouth. If you have a sophisticated referral system you could see who invited the customer, and for what job this customer came to adopt your product. So you can do a lot of data driven decisions that would allow you to work on your growth.”
Asya Kuznetsova, Product & Growth – Wise

Why you Need a Word of Mouth Marketing Strategy?

Because word of mouth is a natural human instinct, it’s impossible for a brand to stop current and past customers talking with friends or posting online about their particular experience with a brand (although it may be possible to smother a couple of negative reviews online with a large number of positive ones). But, as you can see from the statistics above, it represents an enormous opportunity for brands that do have high customer satisfaction to find ways to harness positive word of mouth, increase its reach and spread, and turn it into an effective customer acquisition channel through Word of Mouth Marketing or WOM Marketing.

Hear from Ollie Moore, AVP, Product & Member Marketing at Delta Community Credit Union, why, when you already get a decent amount of referrals from natural word of mouth, you need a referral program to track, manage and grow referrals:

See the full video interview here.
 
Of course, it’s important to emphasize that we’re talking about positive word of mouth here, because if you have a poor product or service, then the spread of negative word of mouth is likely to harm your business. So before embarking on a Word of Mouth Marketing strategy, a first step is research what your customers really think of your product and service and, if you find that there are things you can and should improve, you should look to improve those before trying to get customers to tell friends and family about you.

“Years before we started a proper referral program, we found that we had a lot of referrals happening organically. The challenge was how could we track it? How could we then capitalize on that or incentivize folks for their their organic referrals, and then how could we grow it? How could we really just make that a formal program in which members felt even more inclined to share what they loved? So it just made sense when we had the opportunity to formalize it.”
Ollie Moore, AVP, Product & Member Marketing at Delta Community Credit Union

But even if you do have a high number of satisfied customers, you need to take active steps to foster and encourage word of mouth because, as shown in a study from Texas Tech in 2018 [which unfortunately no longer appears to be available online], while 83% of consumers say that they are willing to refer a brand after a positive experience, only 29% actually do. So, if you don’t create the right conditions for word of mouth to spread, and if you don’t take active measures to encourage your satisfied customers to talk about you, then you’ll be relying on the natural propensity of your customers to tell others about you.

Many customers show their appreciation for your products or services by simply repeat buying and don’t think about leaving a rating or review, uploading user generated content (or even tagging you in the content they do upload!) or referring a friend unless you ask them to. Of course, when you ask them to take these actions, you’ll likely have more success if you offer a reward or incentive, as recent research from Yale University and UC Berkeley found that the presence of a referral reward can overcome one of the psychological barriers to referral, namely the risk that a referral could turn out to be bad. And research from Harvard University and others found that the presence of an incentive for the friend can encourage more referrals.

Buyapowa’s own research found that 74% of people would be less likely to refer a friend if there was no reward involved and 70% of respondents said that they wouldn’t act on a referral without a friend incentive.

How to Create a Word of Mouth Marketing Strategy

If you’re interested in creating a Word of Mouth Marketing Strategy, I’d highly recommend you check out our guide to building an Organic Discovery strategy like Airbnb. What started as an emergency reaction to the Covid Crisis, has become an enduring and highly profitable strategy for Airbnb, after they diverted marketing spend from performance marketing to brand marketing and encouraged customers to spread positive word of mouth to other potential guests or hosts. And even today Airbnb’s co-founder and CEO, Brian Chesky, recently revealed that the brand still gets “the majority, 90% of our traffic is coming to us through direct or unpaid traffic.”

But in short, here are some tips to get started:

Auditing your Customer Happiness

The most obvious point to start with is that word of mouth can be both negative or positive. And you’ll only generate good outcomes for your business if you can generate and amplify the spread of positive word of mouth. So the first step should be to check that, like Airbnb, you’re actually delivering an excellent customer experience, one that regularly exceeds customers expectations, and one that is worthy of sharing.

But it’s key to understand that it’s not your view of your product or service that counts, but that of your customers past and present, and their view of how good your offering is will be determined not only by what they experience from your brand but what competitors offer, and even from best in class solutions in other industries. For example, if you’re a bank and you offer a banking app, your customers will not only compare you with other banking apps like Revolut or Wise but with the service they get from Amazon, Airbnb and Shopify.

So a good start would be to audit how your customers see your performance via NPS surveys, exit surveys on the web, focus groups, in-store surveys and basically from every interaction you have with customers, such as call centers, chat and chat bot interactions. As well as asking how well you do, you can also ask how you compare with other providers. Armed with this information, you can relentlessly look to improve your product or service so that customers should be happy to recommend you.

Understand your customers motivations for spreading word of mouth

Jonah Berger of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, set out six basic principles behind creating content worthy of word of mouth and social influence, which he describes in detail in his book Contagious. These principles include:

1. Social Currency is a key sharing motivator: People are more likely to share information with friends if they look knowledgeable or trendy as a result;
2. Triggers: Remember that recommendations often need to be triggered, like a friend asking for a recommendation;
3. Emotion: People are more likely to share something if they care about it, so creating an emotional connection is key;
4. Public: Making information about your products and who else uses them will encourage sharing;
5. Practical Value: People like helping others by providing information that’s useful;
6. Stories: People react to stories, so using customer stories to tell how they use your product or service is very powerful.

You’d be well advised to incorporate these principles into your Word of Mouth Marketing strategy, including across your product design, packaging, advertising, innovation process, website, customer relationship management (CRM) program or anything else you do that touches your customers. For example, you could encourage social currency by giving an ‘expert’ status to customers who help other customers in community forums, or encourage customers to tell their own stories etc.

Hear from Natasha Saviuk, Director of Growth at Wealthsimple as when you should ask for a referral:

See the full interview here.
 

Ask at the Right Time

All things being equal, you’re likely to get more user generated content, ratings and reviews, and referrals if you ask your customers to do so and say that you appreciate their efforts. You’ll probably get even more if you offer an incentive (remember that incentives don’t need to be cash or cash equivalents, and can be status based such as making a contributor an ambassador or expert) for doing so.

“Clients definitely refer their friends at any stage in their lifecycle but we definitely see that clients are the most likely to refer in that first 30 day window. They’re actually 10X more likely to refer than clients later on. Probably just because when you’re a new client you’re excited you found a solution to a problem you’re having…..and especially when you’ve had an ‘aha’ moment in the app….we see a lot of referral activity around those times….[and] we definitely want to nudge clients after they’ve completed those actions.”
Natasha Saviuk, Director of Growth at Wealthsimple

A key determinant can be to find the best time to ask for UGC, a review or referral by identifying moments when a customer is likely to be happy, such as on renewal or after an upgrade, and prompting the customer at that time across the channels where they’re most likely to be engaged. Our recent Referral Codebreakers Research looked at the effectiveness of 11 different channels in encouraging referrals and found that while emails were identified as the channel most likely to increase the likelihood of a referral, by up to 239%, even the lowest performer, floating CTAs (pop ups) were still likely to increase the likelihood or a referral by 180%.

“Ask many times, in many places, with different messages, and in-context with whatever action you’re asking the user to take…..Thus, make the referral ask part of the main flows….And add it to the onboarding flow, and at the end of key transactions when the user is otherwise done.”
Andrew Chen, Partner – Andreessen Horowitz

Make it easy for customers to create Word of Mouth

But you’ll also likely get more UGC, reviews, referrals etc. if you make it easy for your customers to do so by providing an easy to use upload tool for images and make the rating and review form simple by limiting the number of questions and time required to complete it. If you create events, for example a firework display or lantern festival at a hotel, you can share photographs of guests on your Instagram page or make your hashtags easy to find and remember so that happy customers can easily share their own photos.

Showing other user generated content, from videos, images and reviews, as part of your customers own onboarding journey is likely to make them more inclined to add more content themselves, especially if you can remind them of that fact, and recent research from Rachel Gershon of UC San Diego and Zhenling Jiang of the University of Pennsylvania, found that referred-in customers where more likely to refer in new customers than those from other sources. And interestingly, in experiments, they found the propensity to refer increased between 20-27% if the customers were reminded that they too were referred to the brand.

Find and nurture Brand Advocates and Ambassadors

It’s also a good idea to identify and pay attention to who your brand advocates or brand ambassadors are. In other words, those people who are referring your brand, giving great ratings and reviews, uploading images and videos, liking and sharing your brand’s social posts and defending you in social against detractors. Because these people are self identifying as being brand advocates, you can engage with them and help them drive more. For example, by providing them with inside information, like being able to get their hands on the pre-release of your new product or be the first to try your new hotel etc. Of course, they can help with feedback on product development but they’ll also likely thank you by breaking the news to their social circles and social media followers.

Amplify Customer Word of Mouth

Where you can find and identify positive word of mouth, and have the right to do so, you can amplify the effects by simply liking and commenting on posts, incorporating ratings and reviews as social proof throughout your customer journeys, or using these in adverts stating you “score 4.7 out of 5 from 10,000 reviews” etc.

Avoiding Mistakes

If you try and manipulate Word of Mouth, things can, and often do, go badly wrong. Here are some tips to avoid common mistakes:

Learn to accept you have little control

It’s vital to understand that while you can create the conditions for positive word of mouth to spread by creating a great product or service, and you and aim to start conversations by ‘seeding’, you can’t control it. Of course, you can ask customers to spread the message, leave a review, upload a picture or video of them using your product and you can incentivize that, but you can’t force them to do so or control what they do and how they do it. For example, a customer may give you a glowing review except for one or two things, or upload a photo or video that might be low quality, badly lit or grainy. But you should understand that Word of Mouth is more convincing and compelling when it’s authentic and realistic, and reviews with typos and bad grammar, imperfectly shot videos or badly centered photos can convince potential customers that these are from genuine customers and are not manipulation from your marketing department.

Be honest and transparent

While we think that brands who try to manipulate or falsify Word of Mouth marketing are ultimately bound to fail, as a bad service won’t become a good service due to some fake reviews, it’s important to be honest and transparent. While there’s no harm in offering incentives and rewards for reviews and referrals, you should be open about that fact. The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) created a code of ethics, advising that the best Word of Mouth Marketing strategies should be credible, social, repeatable, measurable, and respectful, and that there is no place for dishonesty. Andy Sernovitz produced a nice short summary infographic that sets out the main points including (i) being honest about the relationship (ii) only saying what you honestly believe and (iii) being honest about who you are. You would be well advised to incorporate that into all your Word of Mouth Marketing practices.

How to Measure Word of Mouth

It’s genuinely quite hard to track something as unstructured and as tacit as word of mouth. Particularly as so much of it happens informally and offline, either in a conversation between friends in a bar, cafe or at work. Even much of online word of mouth can be difficult to track due to dark social with conversations on Whatsapp or Telegram and so on, not being tracked by analytics or where tracking links are often broken.

Some attempts to track offline word of mouth include using a memorable word or code, like saying ‘tell your friends to say Bill sent you’ or ‘tell them to quote Summer2025 to get the deal’. Others involve asking a percentage of new customers, ‘how did you hear about us’ whether by actually asking them in-store or via the call centre, or in post-purchase or exit surveys online. Additionally, brands can try and measure the potential of word of mouth using Net Promoter Scores and other surveys that ask ‘how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?’

This information can be used to extrapolate how many new customers, that can’t be attributed to known sources like paid search or affiliates, come from positive word of mouth, although you will likely find that the proponents of other hard to track marketing sources like television and radio commercials and banner ads will also be trying to claim those customers. Obviously, any model you create can be biased towards the conclusions you want to draw, as anyone who has read studies trying to justify huge expenditure on banner ads will see.

However, relying on a small sample of surveyed customers and NPS surveys to build a model is unlikely to be satisfactory. Thankfully, with the advent of digital tracking technologies and the displacement of many consumer conversations to online and mobile, it’s now easier to track and record the effect of WOMM, whether actually tracked referrals or the number of times ratings and reviews and user-generated content was consulted in a conversion path.

Here are some of the best ways to track WOM:

Customer feedback and reviews

A great way to get comprehensive insights into your word of mouth performance is to get customer feedback and customer reviews.

Feedback from your current and past customers is a rich source of information, not only on where they heard about you, but how well you’re doing now and how you can improve in future and may even let you score your brand against competitors and best in practice brands. How you can get feedback will depend on the nature of your business, as a hotel or restaurant will have many occasions to ask customers while they are on the premises. And even businesses that don’t have a lot of contact with clients but have a physical presence can add means to get feedback, as you will have seen by the installations that ask you to touch a smiley face or a frown after an airport check-in.

Every visit to a website or mobile site offers an opportunity to ask visitors their opinion and how they heard about you, as does every interaction with your call centre or online chat. And where your business has collected customer emails and the necessary consent to email, sending email surveys or NPS surveys can be a great way to ask customers as to their assessment of your products and services, and their perception of the overall customer experience. And, by using NPS surveys, you can even identify customers who are willing to recommend and promote your brand to their friends and family, which is ultimately the most important information as far as word of mouth is concerned. In order not to bias results, a good tip is to ask former customers, particularly those terminating subscriptions, as to their views.

However, the main drawback of asking people how they heard about you is that customers may not actually remember, or may not remember correctly, particularly for a complex user journey with many touchpoints. Alternatively, they may not be willing to tell you, or only give you generic high-level information such as that they heard about you online. And of course, any survey will only give you responses from a small percentage of your customer base.

Customer reviews and testimonials typically don’t ask where the customer heard about your brand, although this information can sometimes be volunteered in text responses. Of course, while parsing through mountains of customer reviews can be a daunting task, it can give you detailed and honest feedback from your customer base as to how well you are doing and how likely you are to get business from positive word of mouth. But where those ratings and reviews are online you can track conversions directly from the reviews using tracking links or use an attribution solution in analytics to see how often the reviews were consulted before purchase.

Social media analytics

With much of today’s discussion about brands and retailers taking place online, you can’t ignore the potential of social media, whether with behemoths like Facebook, YouTube or Instagram or simple online forums and message boards, or direct messaging apps like WhatsApp and Messenger. Today, an estimated 3.7 billion people currently use social media and on average, spend over 2.5 hours every day on their preferred social media platforms and messaging apps.

From the perspective of word of mouth, many online conversations and mentions can be monitored using social media tools like Cision/Brandwatch, Salesforce (Radian 6) and Meltwater (Sysomos) and analytics tools can measure visits from social networks, although you may be disappointed at the number of last-click conversions attributed to social media. Where a tracking link is shared on social media, that can be tracked to the social network and, sometimes, to the originator.

As mentioned above, a problem with social media is that such sharing takes place on Dark Social such as SMS or by simple copying and pasting. Another comment is that social media vanity metrics should not be confused with word of mouth as they often don’t actually paint a real picture or move the needle.

Because social media is fundamentally a word of mouth channel, by analyzing the data, you can examine the quality of the ‘word’ in word of mouth by seeing what folks are saying about you and where they’re saying it. A good indication of the strength of word of mouth can be obtained from monitoring social media metrics like shares, mentions, engagement, user-generated content and clicks to see the overall engagement with your content.

Hear from David Hixon, Executive Director – Head of Product & Lifecycle Marketing at Ally Bank, why referrers who refer one or two friends are often the best source of new customers, as this approximates natural word of mouth:

See the full interview here.
 

Referral, Influencer & Partner Programs

Any marketing expert will tell you that you need an advocacy marketing program, whether it’s a refer-a-friend program, a partnership marketing or an influencer campaign. What these all have in common is that they invite your engaged audiences (customers, employees, partners and influencers) to recommend your brand to their own circles of influence, by providing an easy means to share and the incentive of a reward for a successfully confirmed referral. The key to these programs is that they provide a reliable means to track the sharing to the successful outcome, whether using a tracking code, tracking link or other tracking means. So rather than inferring that a sale came from word of mouth, you have the actual proof.

There’s a big difference between somebody who has 10 referrals and somebody who has one referral, or two referrals. The ‘onesie twoosy’ guys are probably the best ones you have, because that’s the conversation over dinner with your with your high school buddy where you say, ‘Hey, man. I don’t know where you bank, but I’m at Ally and they have great rates and a great product and a great brand. You should go check it out.’ That’s a more organic referral that is more likely to turn into the type of customer that we like.”
David Hixon, Executive Director – Head of Product & Lifecycle Marketing – Ally Bank

A good advocacy marketing platform should allow you to collect and manage data all the way from the number of registrations, the number of sharing actions taken to the number of visitors to a dedicated page and, of course, final conversions. This can allow you to assess the performance of your chosen advocacy program and model a customer journey that reduces pain points and increases opportunities for optimization.

Of course, no advocacy platform will track all your word of mouth conversions, and some will still happen offline and not be tracked. But by actively pushing your referral platform across all customer touchpoints, using attractive rewards and incentives and smart psychology, such as gamification, tiered rewards, triggers and booster campaigns, you can get a large part of your customer base referring again and again. While performance will vary across different industries, for brands that do all of these things, we have seen up to 20-30% of all conversions coming from referrals, which is a powerful testimonial to the power of WOMM.

Want to Learn More?

If you’re interested in the sort of strategies that can positively influence word of mouth, then don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’d love to talk and share what we’ve learned working with over 350 leading brands and retailers globally.