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WHAT EVERY

MARKETER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT

REFERRAL MARKETING

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Contents 1. Is referral marketing right for my business? ............................................................. 3

What Is Referral Marketing? (And Why Does It Work?) ................................................. 3 When Is a Referral Marketing Program Right for My Business? .................................... 4 Is your annual transaction size large enough and/or frequent enough to warrant rewards? ........................................................................................................................ 5 Do your transactions afford you the ability to capture customer data? ........................... 5 Do you have an online digital presence that allows you to interact with your customers?....................................................................................................................................... 6 Should I Really Be Rewarding Referral Behavior? ......................................................... 7

2. What Results Can I Expect from My Referral Program? .......................................... 8

How Should I Decide on Reward Amounts? ................................................................ 10 3. Who Should I Promote the Program to? ................................................................. 13

How Should I Promote My Referral Program? ............................................................. 16 4. The Devil Is in the Details ......................................................................................... 17

How Much Effort Is It to Maintain a Referral Program? ................................................ 18 How Much IT Input Is Required to Get a Referral Program up and Running? .............. 21 Do I Have Control over the Creative and Design Elements of My Referral Program? .. 22 Congratulations ............................................................................................................ 22 What Every E-Commerce Marketer Should Know about Referral Marketing: Wrap-up 23

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1. Is referral marketing right for my business? This question is a common one among e-commerce based companies, and for good reason. These businesses are looking for ways to continue growing in the age of social media, and leveraging the influence and reach of their customers is an attractive way of doing it. Referral marketing has also had proven benefits for many e-commerce businesses—to the point where the answer to the above question is almost always yes. Here’s why: What Is Referral Marketing? (And Why Does It Work?) Before we can understand why referral marketing is such a boon to e-commerce businesses like yours, we need to take a look at precisely what this type of brand promotion is. Essentially, referral marketing is a twist on the refer-a-friend campaigns of old. You attract customers, turn them into believers in your brand, and then ask them to become ambassadors of your brand. What you want is for your customers to tell their friends and families about your brand, to the point where you attract new customers because of those referrals. In an ideal situation, someone who comes to you via a referral will become such a believer in your brand that they will want to become an ambassador. In other words, over time, the cycle can repeat itself over and over again, growing your brand and widening your reach along the way. A referral marketing campaign is not the same thing as a customer loyalty program, though it is not entirely dissimilar either. In a loyalty program, you offer perks to customers who shop for your brand very often or spend a lot of money at your store. Referral marketing programs are also driven by the promise of perks. For successful referrals, you might offer your brand ambassadors coupons, discounts, free gifts, or other rewards. The thought of receiving these rewards drives your ambassadors to refer more people to your brand. In customer loyalty programs, your main goal is to get your top customers to spend more money at your store or to shop with you more frequently. In referral marketing, your primary aim is to get your top customers to tell their friends, family, or social media followers about your brand. It is an effective twist on customer rewards programs because it grows your revenues by means of broadening your brand following, not just by pushing the customers you already have to spend more.

In the long run, this type of marketing can have a much larger impact on your company’s growth and revenue than traditional customer loyalty programs.

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But why does referral marketing work the way it does? Think of it this way: your business has x number of dollars in the marketing budget. Spending that money on traditional advertising channels (TV, online, print media, billboards, etc.) can get your brand in front of a lot of people, but doesn’t necessarily see a great conversion rate.

Nowadays, many people just aren’t willing to take the word of a billboard or TV commercial when it comes to making purchasing decisions. They’re far more likely to listen to people they trust—whether that means their friends, family members or people they follow on social media. Referral marketing uses the best influencers in the world—people—to tell prospective customers about your brand. It’s an effective form of marketing because the message reaches your potential clients via the mouths or social accounts of people they already trust.

When Is a Referral Marketing Program Right for My Business? Now that we understand what referral marketing is and why it can be so effective, we can move on to addressing whether or not a referral marketing program is right for your business. We said above that the answer to this particular question is almost always yes, but there are a few caveats to that point. Ask yourself these questions before deciding whether or not to implement referral marketing as part of your business:

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Is your annual transaction size large enough and/or frequent enough to warrant rewards? With a referral marketing program, you have to be prepared to offer rewards to your brand ambassadors. Usually, that means offering one-time rewards to your top customers, as long as they are high lifetime value customers, and successfully referring new customers to you. However, if your transaction sizes tend to be small, if return visits from the same customer are infrequent and if your profit margins for each purchase are low (eg, a convenience store), think about whether or not it’s worth your time to reward customers for each referral they send. Cutting into those margins with a rewards program—particularly since there’s a possibility that referred customers will only ever do small transactions with your business—might be counterintuitive. For e-commerce providers looking to increase return visits, consider encouraging a follow-on sale by offering a referral reward:

Angela makes an online purchase of $100. During checkout she sees a 25%-off discount coupon offered which she can claim if she refers a friend (who becomes a customer). Angela sends a referral to her friend Brian. Brian makes a purchase and earns a 15% discount as a result of the referral. Angela comes back and makes a second purchase to get her 25% discount. And so on…

Do your transactions afford you the ability to capture customer data? This point is a big one. In referral marketing, your ambassadors will recommend your brand to friends, family members, and social followers, but it’s crucial to remember that you are rewarding referrals that direct business back to your store, not just the act of making a recommendation. As such, you need a transaction system that can track customer data to implement a referral marketing program. First off, without capturing customer data, you can’t know whether or not a customer found your store on their own or was referred by one of your ambassadors. Secondly, without custom data, you

"Without automation, referral programs can

be tedious to maintain."

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can’t automate rewards for your ambassadors when their referrals do pay off. Without automation, the referral reward process is long and tedious and will almost certainly result in poor service. When you can’t keep track of an ambassador’s rewards or pay them out in a timely fashion, you can leave your most loyal customers feeling frustrated and neglected.

Do you have an online digital presence that allows you to interact with your customers? Having an online store is relevant to the referral marketing process for two reasons. First, with an online store, it is much easier to automate the tracking and rewards for your referral program. Second, with a social media presence, you can keep an eye out for your ambassadors and the referrals they are making, engage customers in conversations, generate increased interest in your referral program, and more.

If you can answer yes to all three of these questions, then there is a very good chance that an automated referral program is right for your business.

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Should I Really Be Rewarding Referral Behavior?

Even when businesses have large transaction sizes, high profit margins, an easy way of capturing customer data, and a developed online digital presence, they are hesitant to implement a referral marketing program. The most common argument among this group is that, if customers like something enough, they will refer friends and followers naturally, with no rewards necessary. As a result, some business owners feel as if they are “buying” referrals by offering rewards as part of a referral marketing program.

First of all, it’s important to remember that the people who sign up for your referral program are the people who like and support your brand anyway. These are people who shop with you frequently enough and care about your products enough to express genuine interest in your rewards programs. Yes, you are providing positive reinforcement to your brand ambassadors and perhaps encouraging them to refer more friends or to refer more frequently.

However, this fact doesn’t mean your ambassadors aren’t sincere or genuine when they recommend your brand to someone else. Even with rewards on the table, most people won’t recommend something they don’t believe in to their friends or family members, simply because they want to maintain a level of trust in those relationships. Add the question of why someone would even want rewards from a brand they don’t genuinely like, and it’s pretty clear that referral rewards programs tend to incentivize genuine recommendations rather than prevent them. In fact, the real question shouldn’t be whether or not you should be rewarding referral behavior, but how much you should reward it. You’ll need to consider several different factors—including your profit margins, the size of your business, and the size of transactions—to determine what types of rewards you should offer or whether or not you should have reward caps or limits. If your rewards are too big, they won’t be profitable. If they are too small, they won’t offer as much of an incentive. Click here to learn more about designing an effective referral program that avoids mismatched rewards and maximizes ROI.

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2. What Results Can I Expect from My Referral Program? Learning the basics of a referral marketing program — and ultimately coming to the decision that referral marketing is a smart tactic for your business to try — is the easy part of the process. Now that you know the basics, it’s time to start thinking about what a referral program will look like for your business. How can you tailor a program that works for you? How can you get started? What sort of results can you expect once your program is up and running? For the sake of discussion, let’s start with the last of that string of questions: what sort of results can you expect once you get your referral marketing program? How much interest will the program generate among your customers, and what will the return on investment look like? These are questions that every business has asked that has ever implemented a referral program, so take comfort in knowing that you aren’t alone.

The first and most important thing to remember as you set out on your journey toward an effective referral marketing program is that you will get out of it what you put into it. Specifically, you need to funnel customers into the pipeline for successful referrals to come out of your program. With that thought in mind, your referral program needs to start with some strong promotion—similar to any other marketing program. You need to put information about your referral program in front of your customers. Don’t expect anyone to come to you. If you haven’t offered a referral marketing program in the past and are suddenly starting to offer one now, you need to tell your customers about it. As counterintuitive as it may sound, you need to market your marketing program. A good rule of thumb in digital marketing is that you need to create 10 or 15 impressions before your target audience will react to, remember, and respond to your marketing message. In other words, one outbound email newsletter or one social media post won’t be enough to get your customers to jump onboard with your referral program. Obviously, you don’t want to oversaturate your customers with advertisements and notifications about your program. You do want to make sure your customers see your marketing message, though, and the way to do that is

"Your referral marketing program needs to be marketed."

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sending that message in many different ways. Do email newsletters; make the referral program a common subject of your social media posts; put banner ads on your website to promote the program. The more you do to get to that 10-15 impression zone, the better chance you have of getting customers to sign up for your program. In turn, the more people you get involved with your referral program, the more you’ll get out of it in the long run. Once you have people in your referral program funnel, what sort of results can you expect in terms of successful referrals and ROI? This question is ultimately the more difficult one to answer when it comes to predicting results for a referral program. Simple law of averages indicates that the more people you sign up for your referral program, the more referrals you will get. However, predicting the actual mathematical outcome of your customer referrals is a less exact or obvious science.

One thing is for sure: you should not expect every referral you get to result in a new customer. Studies show that even the top performing referral programs tend to enjoy a ratio of 2:1 (which is to say they get one new customer for

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every two referrals that are sent). For brand new programs or less established businesses, a 15:1 ratio might be more realistic to start with. No matter where you are on the ratio spectrum at first, though, stick with it. As your referral program continues to grow (and as you continue to work out the kinks), you should start to see a better referral to customer ratio. Within the first four months of a program, typically the average across all the referral programs we’ve seen is somewhere around one customer for every five or six referrals, so make the 6:1 ratio your goal to start.

How Should I Decide on Reward Amounts? The other factor that will impact your ROI and the ultimate success of your referral marketing program is how you set up the actual rewards part of the program. The basic idea of a referral program is that you reward customers for referrals that bring new customers to your business. However, the nature of the rewards that you offer, the size of your rewards, who you reward, and when you deliver the rewards are all variables that can and do change from one program to the next. How you set up your rewards will depend on several factors that are unique to your business, including your industry, the average shopping cart size of your transactions, the amount of repeat business you tend to get from customers, your profit margins, the size of your business, and more. Are you at a loss for how to get started with sketching out a successful rewards program? We’ve outlined some of the factors you’ll need to consider below.

x The type of rewards you offer: Let’s start with the actual reward that you will offer to your program participants. There are a lot of different kinds of rewards that you can offer here, and all of them stand a pretty good chance at motivating your customers to start spreading the word about your brand. Discounts, coupons, gift cards, cash back offers, free gifts, free shipping, access to exclusive clubs or other special features, entries into drawings or other contests, and loyalty points are all rewards that can and do drive referral programs. Your job is to figure out what will motivate your customers because the answer to that question can vary from one business to the next. Conducting surveys, studying buying behavior, or simply asking your brand ambassadors what they want are all good ways of figuring out what reward type is best. Alternatively, you can offer a few different types of rewards and let your referral program members choose which to receive.

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x The size of your rewards: Rewards need to be significant enough that they motivate customers to sign up for your referral program and mobilize them to tell their friends about your brand. However, they can’t be so significant that they destroy your ROI. A referral marketing program can be the lowest cost means of acquiring new customers, but only if you don’t spend too much on the rewards. To figure out the size of your rewards, then, you’ll need to calculate your ROI. To perform this calculation, figure out the monthly or yearly spending of your average customer, determine the average customer lifetime, and try to estimate your average up-sell. You can use this information to calculate how much you will spend on different reward sizes over the course of your average customer lifetime. Click here to read more about this calculation and to get instructions for how to setup and use the mathematical equation.

x Who you reward: The “who” of your referral program probably seems like the most straightforward part of the arrangement. Obviously, you want to reward your customers for making referrals that earn you new customers. You want to incentivize your referral program members to tell more people about your brand. Just rewarding your members is the basis of a single-sided rewards program. However, you can also set up a double-sided program, where you offer incentives to both the person making the referral and the person receiving the referral. For instance, to encourage a

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new customer to act on a referral, you might offer them a discount or a cash back reward for spending a certain amount of money at your store. Such a reward might improve your referral to customer ratio, but would also affect your ROI, so it’s important to look at your customer base and target market to determine what is best for your business.

x When to deliver the reward: There can also be some variance to when in the process you reward your brand advocates (and the people they refer, if you choose to go that route). Option A is to automate the rewards in such a way that they are immediately delivered when a referred customer shops at your store. Alternatively, you could offer a bigger reward for program members who successfully refer, say, 20 people. Setting up different tiers of rewards for your program can help motivate your customers to become more active brand ambassadors. Once again, you’ll have to ask yourself what will motivate yours. In any case, wherever in the process you choose to deliver the rewards, make sure the delivery is done in a timely and efficient fashion. Members will jump ship on your referral program if it is difficult for them to access and use their rewards, or if it takes days or weeks for you to process their referrals and credit their account with a reward.

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3. Who Should I Promote the Program to? In the previous section, we said that “you need to funnel customers into the pipeline for successful referrals to come out of your program.” A referral marketing program is, by definition, driven by the customers. Therefore, your referral program can only be as good as the members that choose to be involved with it. Notice that the previous sentence said that your referral program “can only be as good as the members” that you bring into the fold. The sentence was not “your referral program can only be successful if you sign as many people up as humanly possible.” There is something to be said for having a large quantity of members involved in your referral program, but your first concern should be promoting your program to the kind of customers you really want. Pardon the cliché, but promotion for a successful referral marketing program is really a “quality over quantity” proposition.

When it comes to selling your referral program to your customers, it’s important to remember the like-attracts-like principle. Essentially, a program that caters to the kind of customers you want more of—and a promotional strategy that is also geared toward that group—will have a higher likelihood of yielding the results you want. Before you can start really thinking about how to promote your referral program, then, you need to figure out precisely who you want to target with your promotional strategies.

Luckily, this question is one of the easiest ones you’ll have to answer as you put together your referral program. You don’t even have to know the first thing about referral programs to answer this question. Rather, just ask yourself what the “perfect customer” is for your business. Who are your most important consumers? What attributes define those people?

"Like attracts like: Ask for referrals from the types of customers you want more of"

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In general, a perfect customer will add a high lifetime value to your business, will be loyal enough to your brand to make repeat purchases, and will have high transaction sizes when they do make purchases. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why this kind of customer is so valuable. A person willing to open up their wallet and spend a lot of money with your brand—and to keep coming back over time—will naturally have a high monetary value for your business. Here’s where the like-attracts-like principle applies. Your goal with your referral program is to attract new customers that meet the qualifications of the above description: people who will spend a lot, keep coming back, and bring a high level of lifetime value to your business. To get those people, you need to promote your referral program to the ones you already have. Highlight your highest-value customers: your repeat buyers and your big spenders. Then, gear your referral marketing program so that you are targeting those people.

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Not only will your biggest customers also get the biggest benefits out of your rewards program, but they will also be more likely to introduce other high-value customers to your brand. They have professional colleagues and contacts with the same needs as they have; friends and family members with the same interests they have, and social media followers involved in the same things they are. In short, if there are people out there who are like your best customers, they probably are the people who know and trust your best

customers. As a result, by promoting your referral program to your top customers, you are more likely to see the kind of ROI you want. Like-attracts-like. You may say, “Well, I have a much larger base of less loyal customers. Shouldn’t I promote my referral program to those consumers, to reach a broader array of people?” After all, if you have more people involved in your referral program, you will probably see a larger quantity of successful referrals. It’s simple law of averages

that, when you have 100 people referring friends instead of 20, you will see more conversions.

Again, though, you might need to spend some time thinking about quality instead of quantity. Nothing’s wrong with implementing a referral program simply to grow your business from scratch. But once you’re up and running and have had a chance to segment your customer base, promoting your referral program to your less loyal customers might mean that you have more referrals coming in (though there’s no guarantee here, since less active customers will also have less motivation to go after your rewards.) However, since like tends to attract like in consumer circles, promoting to your middle-of-the-road customer base may just more middle-of-the-road customers. Over time, therefore, you might pull in more new customers but might see less ROI because those people don’t have an exceptionally high lifetime value to your business. Of course, if you have active customer success programs in place that are migrating your customers from low-lifetime-value groups and nurturing them into higher LTV echelons with promotions and upselling, then sometimes attracting a high volume of new customers provides a large quantity of fuel to your fire. In that case, promoting the referral program to customers across all segments might be advisable. Just be aware that if you’re bringing more customers on board who spend less with you, and are less loyal AND you do

“Spend some time thinking about quality instead of quantity.”

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not currently have a program in place to increase their loyalty or get more share-of-wallet, you may just be spending your reward money on short-term gains.

How Should I Promote My Referral Program? Once you’ve decided on your target audience, promoting your referral program can seem like a daunting task. Lucky for you, though, you’ve already laid all of the foundations for a successful program. To promote your referral program, you obviously need to go through channels like newsletters and social media. In many ways, a rewards program with great benefits, easy-to-understand rules, an easy sign-up process, and quick reward payouts will promote itself. Still, while you won’t have to trip over yourself too much to get your top customers to realize the benefits of your referral program, you will have to give those customers plenty of opportunities to discover it. Your most loyal customers are familiar with your business, your website, and your produce prices without a referral-driven rewards program. They think they know the status quo and have no reason to go searching for a new program that they know nothing about. As a result, it’s your job to change that status quo by putting information about your referral program in front of your customers. Where should you start? Everywhere. We’re not kidding: Successful referral programs are consistently promoted across all channels. Think about where and how your customers are interacting with your brand. They’re coming to your website; they’re browsing their favorite products in your catalog; they’re seeing your posts on social media; they’re seeing your newsletters in their email inboxes; they’re completing the checkout process for their shopping cart; they are, perhaps, watching for special offers via email or text message; they’re receiving your “thank-you” message and e-receipts after their purchase. Make a list of every channel that you use to communicate with your customers, with special attention paid to how you interact with your most loyal customers (hint: Those that keep buying from you). Then, take

"Successful referral programs are promoted consistently and frequently"

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advantage of every single channel available to you to start promoting your referral program. Realize that your promotion tactics won’t be successful right away. It will take more than a single newsletter mention or social media post to get all of your most loyal buyers on board with your program. Remember that not everyone reads every newsletter, that it’s easy for someone to miss a social media post if they’re offline for a few hours and that email messages can end up buried in someone’s inbox.

A successful promotional campaign will market your referral program to your customers consistently and frequently. Of course, you shouldn’t spam or saturate your followers, for risk of alienating valuable customers. However, by making your referral program as visible as possible on your website, your social accounts, and in your email messages, you should gradually be able to attract your most loyal customers to the sign-up page.

It’s also important to remember that, even once you’ve convinced your top customers to sign up for your referral program, your promotion campaign still isn’t completely finished. On the contrary, as you gain new customers and grow your brand reach, you’ll have reason to promote the program to an entirely new set of people. You will also probably have to do some extra promotion with your program participants. Some members will sign up for your referral program and immediately start bringing friends or followers into the fold. Others will sign up but forget about the program, or start by referring a few people but then fall off the map a bit. Reaching out to your existing members will remind your customer to stay active with their referrals and keep chasing the benefits of your rewards program.

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4. The Devil Is in the Details

We've talked about what referral marketing is and why it can be advantageous for your business. We've looked at the “how and why” of setting up the actual design of your program. We've touched upon the results you can expect from a well-executed referral marketing program, and we've discussed program promotion in detail. Now, it's time to address some of the details that you will want to keep in mind as you get your referral program off the ground. After all, the devil is in the details, and the answers to each of these frequently asked questions can and will impact the future growth and success of your referral marketing program.

How Much Effort Is It to Maintain a Referral Program? When you are in the process of launching a referral program, it's easy for all of your attention and focus to go toward the basic foundational elements or promotional strategies. You are thinking about the logistics of implementing a referral program within your existing retail business, about the rewards that are going to draw customers to your program, and about promoting the program to potential members. You have a lot on your mind, so it makes sense that you wouldn't necessarily have a lot of time to think about the big picture future of your program.

Once your referral program is up and running, though, you will probably start thinking more about the long-term existence of the program. Specifically, you will wonder how much effort you will have to put in to keep the program running smoothly.

Your best option for managing your referral marketing program going forward is to automate it. At RewardStream, our referral marketing software can help you to monitor your program participants, see success rates for referrals, and automatically distribute rewards. This is a big help: when you don't have to manually figure out who has earned rewards—or worse, to have to manually distribute the rewards—you save loads of time and effort in maintaining your program. Indeed, for most businesses, automation can mean the difference between a referral program that is unsustainable and one that continues to spur brand growth for years to come.

Even with automated referral marketing software on your side, you won't be entirely free of program maintenance tasks. Like anything else, your program needs to be nurtured if it is going to grow. Hopefully, you will get a good stable of top customers to sign up for your program immediately after you introduce it. However, the way you should think of this member group is like the "first

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class" of your referral program. Your first stable of referral program members is just a snapshot of your top customers when you launch the program. As you go forward, you will attract new customers—thanks in part to your brand advocates—and some of them may be great candidates for your referral program as well.

The first type of referral program maintenance that you should plan on carrying out, then, is remarketing. You worked hard at first promoting your referral program to top customers. As new customers come to your brand, you will want to market again to get those people interested in your program. Watch for customers who praise your products after getting great results, or for customers who have high transaction numbers but aren't members of your program yet. Also, keep an eye on social media and business review sites, to see if anyone is referring people to your brand or saying nice things about your business. Since these people are already making referrals without any prodding, they are perfect candidates for your program. It goes without saying that, if you offer rewards to a customer for something that they are already doing, they have little reason to say no!

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Remarketing shouldn't just focus on new customers, though. You may also have to reach out to your existing program members to keep up their referral activity. Sure, some members will refer friends consistently without extra reminders. Whether these customers are motivated by a love for your brand, the draw of your rewards, or both, they are self-sufficient as program members.

Other members might need reminders, and that's just fine. Some of your program members may forget to refer as regularly as you would like, or might sign up for your program and then go dark. These occurrences don't necessarily mean that your members aren't passionate about your brand, or that they don't care about your rewards. On the contrary, your members could be so busy with other things that referring friends slipped their mind, or they might not spend as much time online or on social media as your other, more consistent members. Either way, sending a message or two to engage these members and see what's going on can be an effective way to mobilize them and get them advocating for your brand.

Another maintenance consideration that you will have to remember for an ongoing referral program is the “tweaking”. When you first develop your referral marketing program, you put a lot of time and care into developing the specifics. What are your goals? How will you promote the program to potential new members? What referral-to-customer conversion are you hoping to achieve? What types of rewards will you to offer? How big are those rewards? What is your target ROI?

Although there’s a large body of evidence that can help you predict your program results with some form of accuracy, it's hard to know exactly how a referral program is going to work until you've launched it. As a result, it's pivotal to go back and reevaluate your program after it's been going for a few months. Measure your referrals; measure your membership; determine how many members you have, how many referrals they've made, and how many of those referrals have led to new customers. With those statistics, how much are you paying, on average, for each customer acquisition? Is that cost about what you expected, or is it too expensive? Depending on the answers to these questions, you may have to tweak your marketing tactics, redesign your rewards, or both.

"It's pivotal to go back and reevaluate your program after it's been going for a few months”

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How Much IT Input Is Required to Get a Referral Program up and Running? Another significant detail to consider when launching a referral marketing program is how much IT input and support you will need to get the program up and running. Will you have to monopolize your IT team for a few weeks to establish the program? Are you going to have to hire IT contractors to help you launch the program if you don't have an IT department in-house? Or are the IT needs of a referral program relatively modest?

The truth is that the answers to these question depend on you and what you want out of your referral program. The good news is that modern SaaS systems ensure that you can establish a referral program with zero integration into your transaction system, in which case you really wouldn't need IT for the job at all other than perhaps to provide a security review of the system. The drawback to this option is that you would need to manage your program entirely manually—from approving referrals to distributing rewards, to verifying that your members are following the rules of your program. Alternatively, you can work with IT professionals to integrate your program with your system and automate most of the program management steps. And, there are some

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intermediate forms of integration (like using file exchange over SFTP to provide a basic transfer of information between your systems and your referral marketing system) that would fall somewhere in between an entirely manual system, and a fully integration solution. Needless to say: There are a lot of options.

In the vast majority of cases, you are going to save money and time in the long run by taking an integrated route. In such a case, you should expect to do at least some work with IT to design your program, choose your software, and integrate it all with your retail transaction system, but the time-savings will pay off in the long term.

Do I Have Control over the Creative and Design Elements of My Referral Program? If you are like most business owners or brand managers, you want to make sure that every facet of your business meshes with the voice, feel, and look of your brand. As a result, getting your program to work with your transaction system isn't the only kind of integration you'll be thinking about as you implement the program. You’ll also want to make sure you have control over the creative and design elements of the referral program.

Luckily, this question is the easiest one to answer with a simple one-word answer: yes. Particularly if you choose to use a SaaS based automated referral marketing solution, you will be able to specify the language used to communicate with advocates and leads, choose the creative imagery for program pages and communications, and more. Ultimately, you should have no issue keeping your referral program aligned with the look, feel, and voice of your existing web content.

Congratulations

You’ve learned a lot about referral marketing, and the SaaS systems that can automate this process for you. Now that you understand what referral marketing can do for your business, we’d recommend reaching out to a provider like RewardStream to get a demonstration of a system that can help you start acquiring customers at the lowest cost of any marketing program.

www.rewardstream.com | info@rewardstream.com | 1.877.692.0040 23

What Every E-Commerce Marketer Should Know about Referral Marketing: Wrap-up

In conclusion, in order to ensure you're ready to implement a referral marketing program for your business, this document has helped provide you with:

x The definition of referral marketing and why it works well for obtaining new customers.

x Questions to help your business determine whether or not referral marketing is right for you.

x What sort of results businesses should expect to see from their referral marketing programs.

x The do's and don'ts of designing rewards for your referral marketing program, including the type of reward, the size of the reward, who gets rewarded, and when the rewards should be distributed.

x Who to target when promoting your referral program. x The best tactics for getting the word out about your referral marketing

program. x The amount of effort and time necessary to maintain a successful

referral program. x Determining how much IT input and expertise you will need to launch a

successful referral marketing program. x How to keep control over the creative elements of your referral program.

We hope you enjoyed this near-comprehensive crash course in the art of planning, developing, and implementing a successful referral program.