Growth Marketing Strategies with Rewards & Referrals

What is growth marketing?

Growth Marketing, often referred to as Growth Hacking, means looking holistically at the whole customer lifecycle of your customers and prospective customers (and even past ones) to maximize the revenue you’ll get from them over time. It applies right across your sales funnel and includes:

• Finding cost effective and scalable customer acquisition solutions;
• Reducing customer drop off points across every part of your sales funnel, to reduce waste;
• Maximizing value from the first sale through packaging and upsells;
• Reducing churn with retention marketing and loyalty programs to increase Customer Lifetime Values (CLV);
• Getting your existing and past customers to bring your more good customers through ratings and reviews and referral marketing;
• Working with partners to offer complimentary packages to increase customer value and to access their audiences through partner marketing.

Key to Growth Marketing

The key to Growth Marketing is that it’s a data driven and ‘always on’ marketing strategy where you’ll use a scientific method to create hypotheses (for example, less customers would drop off in the conversion process if you show social proof or offer a reward for sign up), testing those hypotheses (A/B or multivariate testing the status quo against different options), analyzing the results, then accepting or rejecting the hypothesis.  And then rinse and repeat with another hypothesis, or move on to test another part of your sales funnel.

And because the World doesn’t stand still, as new technologies and competitors emerge and existing competitors change their positioning or offering, what worked yesterday may not work today or tomorrow. So there’s always something to test!

But as there’s a plethora of articles about Growth Marketing Programs and Growth Hacking, we want to focus here on three key parts of an effective Growth Marketing Strategy: Referral Marketing, Reward Marketing and Partner Marketing.

Key parts of an effective Growth Marketing Strategy

Referral Marketing is your Growth Engine?

As we’ve highlighted in our recent Customer Led Growth (CLG) article, according to Forester, companies that crack CLG tend to grow 1.8 times faster than their competitors. And a key part of CLG is referral marketing, as it’s how you take the satisfaction of your customers (past and present), employees, agents and others and turn it into net new customer acquisition. 

While, provided you do have happy customers and stakeholders, you’ll get some customers from natural word of mouth, you’ll only really see the full benefit of the potential of this channel if you have a referral program. That’s because most happy customers will express their satisfaction by simply repeat-buying from you, and not think of telling friends and family about you unless prompted and incentivized. As found by a famous study from Texas Tech, while 83% of consumers say they’d be willing to refer a brand after a positive customer experience, only 29% actually do. 

So having a referral program that asks your customers and stakeholders to refer you, ideally after a positive customer touchpoint, provides an easy and safe way to do so and provides enticing rewards and incentives can create a scalable and cost effective customer acquisition channel with a viral loop effect or referral contagion.

It’s no surprise that many of the behemoths we know and love today, like DropBox, Airbnb, Slack, Tesla, giffgaff and others, built their businesses on referral. And when you consider that our recent research found that 95% of respondents claimed to have referred at least one friend to a brand in the past year and eight out of ten people expect to be able to refer their favorite brands, then if you don’t have a program for effective referral growth hacking, you’re missing a trick. Particularly when you consider that our Referral Myth Debunked research found that most respondents hadn’t heard of a brand before it was referred to them.

Reward Marketing all across your sales funnel

Reward marketing can be the grease that makes your business engine hum right across your entire sales funnel, as the effective and targeted use of digital rewards can make pretty much all of your marketing more effective, not just in the case of referrals.

For example in the case of customer acquisition:

• You can offer rewards with purchase to create an added incentive to convert, so that someone who completes a purchase before a set date or from a set campaign will get a welcome gift (a voucher or gift card etc.). Obviously, using an expiry date can create the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) to drive action now;
• Offering a highly attractive reward as part of the checkout process could reduce form drop offs or even be effective in winning back someone who drops out, with a floating CTA to come back etc.
• Above the Line campaigns can be made more effective and traceable by offering rewards that are only available via a specific link or code, for example as we set out here in the case of sports sponsorships;
• And in the case of upsells and value maximization, you can offer a reward for someone who upgrades before a set date;
• Etc.

But a digital reward strategy also plays a key role in customer retention, which is another key element of Growth Marketing as you can offer rewards to customers:

• As part of general recognition, such as a thank you for being a customer over a set period of time – like the second anniversary of sign up;
• For having added value back to your customer acquisition engine, such as a thank you for having left a review, uploaded a photo or helping out in a customer support forum;
• For taking other actions that have value to you, such as switching to a smart meter, paperless billing or downloading and using your app;
• As a win back to prevent churn, such as offering a voucher if a customer who expressed a desire to leave agrees to stay another year;
• As an apology if something went wrong, like a late delivery;
• And, finally, as part of a surprise and delight initiative to randomly reward certain customers. 

The only barriers here are your imagination and a platform that allows you to do all this effortlessly (we’ll get to that later). 

Partner Marketing: Thinking Outside the Box

Partner marketing is where you get to tell the real expert Growth Marketers and Growth Hackers from the wannabes. Quite simply it means thinking outside the mental box that is your actual customer base and thinking about how you can tap into all those great customers that other brands have.

The first step is to identify the brands that already have your ideal customer profile as their customers, and then think how you can interest that third party brand in marketing your product or service to its customers. Ideally, your product or service will add value to the customers of that brand, like a pet food manufacturer offering discounted pet insurance to its customers, but maybe the other brand is more interested in having you reciprocally market its products and services to your customer base. Or maybe they’re more interested in the cash that they can generate.

This is like affiliate marketing on steroids and it’s how brands can really accelerate and scale their growth and enter new markets and niches. 

How can you pull this all together?

So hopefully having convinced you on the key importance of these steps to your overall Growth Marketing Strategy, how do you pull it all together to be able to create an efficient, scalable and trackable strategy?

The answer is that you need an enterprise platform that’s able to deal with all these elements from one simple to use interface that:

• Let’s you run many referral, reward payout and partner marketing programs all at the same time with minimal fuss and without onerous manual reconciliations or other processes;
• Perfectly matches with your brand and tone of voice in every aspect;
• Allows you to seamlessly integrate with your back end systems to automatically trigger reward payouts;
• Provides you with accurate, up to date and real time data to back up all your Growth Marketing hypotheses and learn from your experiments;
• Allows you to personalize your marketing at scale;
• Complies with all data protection laws and regulations and allows you to evidence that you do so; and
• Offers a wide selection of rewards and incentives that appeal to the widest number of stakeholders and across many different countries and provides full accountability for distribution and redemption.

What’s next?

So it probably won’t surprise you to learn that the platform I just described above is called Buyapowa. If you’re planning to implement or galvanize your Growth Marketing Strategy, we’d love to talk.