Referrals are Priceless

Referral marketing is an often overlooked facet of marketing.  Word of mouth referrals are extremely valuable.  When people are looking to make a buying decision, that often ask friends or workmates for their ideas about who to buy from. 

Think of all the possible contacts each one of your clients has.  Family, work, social, it could be dozens.  That is a pretty good market to tap into.

If you can set up a structured referral program you will instigate your clients talking about you, and referred you to others.

To run a successful referral program you just need to need to take care of three easy steps:

1.    You need to do a great job for the customer.
2.    You need to ask the customer to refer you.
3.    You need to reward the customer for referring you to someone else.

That’s all there is to it.  Just adopting this one change into your business will land you new customers almost immediately.

There are many ways to set up a referral program.  Be creative.   One example is offering $50 to every person who refers a paying customer to you.  (Or some other amount.) 

Or for 5 leads (5 names you can contact) you can give a customer 10% off their own cost.

Or create a referral card that each of your clients can hand out to friends and family.  The card can be for a discounted service, and have your client write their name on the back.  When the referree purchases your product or service, you’ll know who referred them, and then they will get the same discount when they return.

All you have to do to build a profitable referral system is to provide a great service to your existing customers, explain to them how the referrals work, and they will be happy to refer you to others.  It is really that simple, and it works.