Generate Brand Advocacy
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the importance of a referral program.
- List the benefits of a referral program.
- Design a referral program.
Get Help from Your Customers
For long-term sustainability and growth, businesses need new customers. But finding the right customers is no small task. Building trust and credibility is expensive and time-consuming. And reaching a broader audience to increase brand visibility isn’t easy.
Known as referral marketing, companies build on the belief that consumers trust the opinions of people they know more than advertisements. Marketing managers use referral marketing to seek new customers through existing ones because the power of word of mouth can generate a high volume of quality leads at a minimal cost.
First-hand product recommendations from close friends solidify a company’s credibility. To capitalize on this dynamic, businesses strive to motivate customers to actively recommend products to their family and friends. Providing attractive incentives for referrals gives customers even more reason to recommend a business.
Explore the Benefits of Referral Marketing
Referral marketing can create high-quality leads, particularly among millennials and younger generations. Here’s a look at how it helps businesses.
Lower acquisition costs: Businesses typically acquire new customers through marketing campaigns and other forms of advertising. Because referral marketing relies on existing customers, it reduces marketing costs considerably. It’s more cost-effective to acquire new customers through existing ones.
Increase revenue: Referred customers are valuable because they already have a positive perception of the brand. As a result, they’re likely to spend more and have a higher lifetime value than customers acquired through other methods, such as advertising.
Boost customer retention: Referral marketing uses incentives not only to engage new customers but also to keep existing ones. Current customers who actively advocate for the brand gain rewards for sharing contacts, which helps retain those customers.
In this module, you follow the marketing team at Cloud Kicks to learn how to build and run a referral program.
Meet Salesforce Referral Marketing
Cloud Kicks is a retail company that makes stylish and comfortable custom sneakers. Lucy Lin, the Cloud Kicks marketing manager, conceptualizes marketing strategies, conducts market research, and tracks demand for products or services.
Cloud Kicks is powered by Customer 360, Salesforce’s suite of products including AI, Data, and CRM. Lucy can use Customer 360 data to identify customer behavior and interests. She can then create targeted promotions, thereby increasing their relevance.
The current advertising for customer acquisition is expensive, so she wants to explore more cost-effective ways of growing the customer base. Lucy knows the power of word-of-mouth marketing and sets out to create a referral program with Salesforce Referral Marketing.
Referral Marketing is built on the Salesforce Platform and integrates natively with Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud Engagement. With full access to the extensive platform capabilities, you can create segments based on customer preferences and associate the segments with referral promotions. Integration with Marketing Cloud Engagement enables you to automatically create messaging journeys once a promotion is active. Then fine-tune the target segment using the Likely to Refer Analytics AI model to identify customers with a high likelihood of referring others. You learn more about analytics later in the module.
This module explores a retail scenario; however, all industries can use Referral Marketing.
Lay the Program Foundation
In Referral Marketing, customers are called advocates, and their referrals are known as friends. After researching customer interests and what rewards work best for referral programs, Lucy’s ready to put Referral Marketing to use. Two-way incentives are a popular choice because they’re a win for both the customer and their referrals.
Here’s how Lucy wants the referral process to work. When an advocate joins the program, they’re issued a referral link. The advocate invites their friends to sign up as new customers, who are rewarded for signing up and completing their first purchase, after which the advocate also receives a reward.
Double-sided rewards work well because advocates get incentives for referring more people. And friends are rewarded for completing a successful transaction. Conversion rates are higher as friends receive a reward and know that the advocate depends on their purchase to get the same reward.
As for incentives, Lucy aims to pick those that maximize benefits for both advocates and their friends. She establishes a marketing strategy with content assets to promote the program, such as emails and widgets. Using these, she can target the most loyal, satisfied, and profitable customer segments. In this case, a widget is a web page interface that enables a user to perform a function.
In the next unit, follow Lucy as she designs and builds a referral program for Cloud Kicks.
Resources