For more than a decade, we’ve been powering referral and reward marketing programs for over 350 of the leading enterprise businesses across the globe, in 27 countries and 21 languages. And so we’ve learned a lot about what does and doesn’t work, and we’ve written a lot about what makes for a successful referral program.
But one thing that stands out across all successful referral programs, whether powered by Buyapowa or built in-house, is that there’s a ‘think referrals’ or ‘referrals first’ culture in the business.
And that’s all through all the business, from the very top to the bottom, every person thinks about referral and how it can help their business and help them achieve their personal objectives or OKRs.
In other words, referral is in their DNA. And that’s whether it’s a start-up right up to a large enterprise business. So it got us thinking: ‘How can you create a ‘referral first’ mentality in your business?
Here are the key lessons we’ve learned:
Your C-Levels need to be on-board
It has to start from the top. Your C-levels need all to buy-in to word of mouth and how providing a superior service for your customers should be driving you more and better customers from referrals. This means that they should constantly talk about referrals in meetings and when setting objectives for their teams
Word of Mouth should be in your company mission statement
Your mission statement probably already says something about providing outstanding service to each and every customer, going the extra mile, doing everything to provide value to customers. And you probably have something about listening to customers and getting feedback and NPS. But it should also include getting customer referrals from happy customers.
Referrals should be a company-wide KPI
Every time you have a company wide or ‘all hands’ meeting, you should have a question: ‘How many new customers did we get from referrals last [quarter]? This is a great way to ensure everything thinks about referrals.
Each business plan or project should address referrals
You should have a company rule that each business plan or marketing project should answer the question ‘how will this get us more referrals?’ or ‘how will this work with the referrals?’ That way, you’ll find the whole business will get on board with generating more customer growth from referrals.
Have a dedicated owner or project manager for referrals
In any business, any project that doesn’t have an owner who is ultimately responsible for the results and for getting things done, is bound to fail. And it’s no different for referrals.
Have a senior sponsor to help the referral channel
Having a referral program owner is a great step forward, but you should also identify a senior sponsor, perhaps a C-Level or VP, who has the power and authority to get things done in the business. Your referral program owner should report to this person or have a direct communication line to them.
Hear from Katie Brooks, Product Owner at toob, on why you should listen to the referral experts:
Katie Brooks: "So we really mapped out what our current process was and really nailed down what all the pain points were. So not only for us but also for our customers, what feedback they'd given us on the process.
And I think you just need to weigh up how much time you're spending on this versus how much time you could be spending on other things, because time is your most valuable resource of all.
And we really just took a lot of advice and guidance from the team that helped us to do the integration in the first place. Time is just a really expensive resource. So even if what you've got works right now, it's not perhaps going to work forever.
Like our scheme was never going to work forever for us. So get on it sooner rather than later. Because the sooner you go for it with a refer friend scheme, the sooner you can get it embedded, the sooner you can make improvements and make it efficient."
Robin Bresnark: "Is there any kind of experience or advice for that transition that you could pass on to anyone?"
Katie Brooks: "You guys are very clearly experts in your field. So when we brought to you how we imagined it to work, improving on our existing process, you gave us a lot of guidance on how your system could help with things that maybe we'd not even thought of in the first place.
So my advice would be trust in the experts because they really do know what they're doing."
See the full interview here.
Listen to the experts
Rather than trying to re-invent everything, you increase the chances of success by listening to the experts who’ve been there and done it. Learn from their failures as well as their successes.
“So my advice would be trust in the [referral marketing] experts because they really do know what they’re doing.”
Katie Brooks, Product Owner – toob
Celebrate your referral success across the company
This is important because when your referral program is smashing it, you should be shouting about it and celebrating the success of your colleagues who run the referral program. This is a great way to develop a referral culture in your business.
Of course, having the right culture does not on its own guarantee success as you’ll need to ensure that you actively promote your program across all consumer touch points, that you have a great proposition that your customers want to share, and that you offer great rewards and incentives. On top of that you need the right technology to ensure to pull all this together.
If you’d like to know more about this, reach out, we’d love to share what we’ve learned over all these years.