Whether you want to increase your sales or push your brand’s awareness on a new high, a referral campaign is always a wise choice in order to broaden the top of your marketing channel.
So, let’s say you build your referral campaign; now what?
People flood your page and you get millions of participants. Yeah, right.
In almost all occasions, it doesn’t work like that.
There are thousands of referral campaigns that might interest you, but you’ve never heard of them.
So, how do you make sure that your referral campaign lands on as many eyeballs as possible;
And how do you make sure that you’ll turn the simple visitor to a participant?
I got your back fam.
Here are 6 ways to grab more participants for your referral campaign.
1.Give your existing customers an extra push
The best way to ensure that your campaign will get the number of participants it deserves is if people are sharing it.
Your customer base is far more likely to become your early ambassadors, so why not give them a boosted incentive to do so? If they truly enjoy your product/ service, they are more likely to recommend it to their friends.
In case you’re running a milestone referral campaign, you can instantly reward them for getting in your program by giving them a headstart in comparison with non-customers.
2.Make it really easy to share
Less is more, they say.
Obviously, if you’re about to spam users with a bunch of nonsense before they are allowed to share your campaign, most probably they won’t.
2 steps are enough:
- Sign up step
- Sharing step
You can allow users to signup by email or social media account, but in the sharing step, you must be really cautious.
People actually like to have a limited amount of choices; that way they don’t have to think.
So, apart from a clean an understandable UX design, try to keep the sharing options to the minimum.
Email is a to-go choice and you should also add 1 or 2 choices for social media; mostly the ones where your game is stronger. That way you ensure that people will share your campaign in places where you can support your level of awesomeness.
⚡Pro tip:
Dropbox used the best invitation hack I’ve ever witnessed.They offered the option to sync your contacts from Gmail, AOL, Yahoo!, etc.
BOOM!
3.A 2-side reward always wins
If you are running a referral campaign for an eCommerce, a great tactic to follow is to offer 2-sided rewards- that way both the referrer and the referred have something to gain.
This is exactly what Airbnb did by offering $25 discount for accommodation booking to both sides. This referral program became known as the ‘altruistic referral’.
Actually, Airbnb tested 2 variations for their referral campaign:
- Variation A was based on single-side reward offering 50$ to the referrer.
- Variation B offered 25$ to both the referrer and the referral.
The results of their experiment showed that Variation B brought 25% more referrals than Variation A.
4.Put it everywhere.
This is pretty obvious, right? You should demonstrate your amazing referral campaign on any of your digital properties.
You can start by putting banners on your website and blog. If you’re running an app, send your users a notification. In case you have the budget, you can also run a sponsored post on Facebook.
Note, that in Facebook ads, it’s better to go with videos.
Try to capture in a few beautiful seconds all things that your referral campaign has to offer- and please, show your face; it’s important!
In case your wallet doesn’t allow you to spend on ads, you should probably prepare your Facebook audience for your campaign.
A great way to do so is by gathering messenger subscribers using a bot from a service as Manychat.
Recently, I created a bot for my new venture, Growth Hacking University that subscribed people on our pages messenger when they commented on a certain post by using a given keyword.
I’ve also made a video explaining how I did it:
5.Up your follow-up game
When I started working as a marketing consultant, I was doing nearly anything for our newly founded company.
I was writing articles to attract leads, I was a sales guy and a consultant.
Sales were always hard for me because I felt like I was pushing people to finally buy. I hated follow-ups. The sad truth is that following up is the only way to close a sale.
The same mindset applies to your referrals.
The only way to make people refer to their friends and colleagues is to communicate to them a sense of urgency to them. No one wants inactive users.
Just email them to show them how close they are to achieve a goal, or consult them on how to get closer if they need to.
6.Sneaky remarketing
This is another brilliant way to follow up, without spamming their inbox. You can set a retargeting pixel on the page after the user signs up.
After that, you can create some beautiful ads to run only to users that are not so active.
A good tactic is to incentivize them by giving them a boost like the one that I described in the first section of this article.
TL;DR
Just by launching a referral campaign for your business doesn’t ensure that people will fight each other to get on-board. The good news is that there are 6 things you can do, to get the maximum number of participants possible:
- ‘Boost’ your existing customers.
- Make it easy to share.
- Use 2-side rewards.
- Announce your campaign on all your digital assets.
- Follow up inactive referrers.
- Retarget users to incentivize them to refer more friends.
Now it’s your turn to rock.
Cheers