Do you want to know the one thing that is proven to make a business successful? The secret is referral marketing – when one of your customers raves about you in front of their friends.
When it comes to marketing, there is nothing better than word of mouth. When your existing customers refer you to their peers, your chances of earning new customers is exceedingly high.
Let’s look at some data now. Neilsen says 92% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know. McKinsey says referrals influence 50% of all purchasing decisions. And another study published in the AMA journal of marketing suggests that referred customers are more loyal and bring a 25% higher profit margin than other customers.
This data should be enough to convince you that referral marketing is key to success. It just works, period.
But the catch is, it’s not easy to generate referrals. The problem with humans is they forget. While your customers might have a great experience with you, they might just forget to refer you to their friends. That’s a problem, isn’t it?
That’s a huge opportunity to miss out!
But not all is lost. Luckily, there is an art and science behind the process of encouraging your customers to refer your business to their friends. By referral marketing, we mean deliberating the entire process of making your customers refer you. If they are having an incredible experience with you, they should be referring you to their peers, shouldn’t they?
There are a lot of referral marketing strategies you can use to earn more referrals. But one easy way is to install a referral marketing plugin on your website that will pretty much automate the whole process. The referral plugins will offer your customers an incentive to refer your business to their friends. It will also provide an incentive for their peers to accept the recommendation. So, it’s a win-win situation for all three of you: you, your customer, and their friend.
Here are some of the top Referral Marketing Plugins for your WordPress site.
Refer a Friend for WooCommerce by WPGens
Refer a Friend plugin for WooCommerce allows you to offer coupons to both your customers and the people they refer to. When a customer makes a referral, the referred customer is sent a coupon. If the new customer visits the website and makes a purchase, the original customer is also awarded a coupon.
The plugin does all the tracking, so you don’t have to play with the data and analytics. You can just install the plugin and let it do all the hard work and magic of referral marketing for you.
Referral System for WooCommerce
Besides the usual function that creates coupons for referrals, the plugin, Referral System for WooCommerce by Codup has additional functionality that will give an edge to your referral marketing program. The plugin integrates with the WooCommerce Points and Rewards Extension and allows you to offer points instead of coupons. If you already have a points and rewards system installed on your website, having this plugin can really step up your game.
You can do a lot of things with this plugin like:
Set up the points to currency conversion rate.
Allow your customers to earn points for different actions like creating an account, making a purchase, or even writing a review.
Control point settings like point expiry dates and a maximum number of points.
Gratisfaction
Gratisfaction takes your referral marketing program to the next level by enabling you to run social contests, sweepstakes, giveaways, and promotions on Facebook other than the usual referral marketing strategies like offering coupons or rewards for referrals. The Gratisfaction plugin combines all the powerful referral marketing strategies in one app. With this app, you can:
Reward customers for referring you.
Reward your leads, customers, and referrals with different types of rewards given for various actions taken by them.
Create a loyalty program by rewarding your existing customers with points and coupons.
Referral Candy for WooCommerce
Referral Candy is another powerful tool that will get you up and running with your referral program as quickly as possible. It merely works but beautifully. The program sends a coupon to your customers to share with their friends. If their friends make a purchase, the customer is given a referral award too.
Besides setting up the system, the plugin does all the tracking for you. So you just see beautifully presented and easy to read data to help you with your marketing efforts – how you generate that data is not your headache!
