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.
- Explain how referral marketing generates leads.
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.
Companies operate on the belief that consumers trust the opinions of people they know more than advertisements, a concept known as referral marketing. 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 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 badge, 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. The company is powered by Salesforce Products including AI, Data, and CRM. The marketing team uses Data 360 to identify customer behavior and interests, which helps them create targeted promotions that increase relevance.
The current advertising for customer acquisition is expensive, so the team explores more cost-effective ways of growing the customer base. Understanding the power of word-of-mouth marketing, they set out to create a referral program with Salesforce Referral Marketing.
Referral Marketing is built on the Salesforce Platform and integrates natively with Data 360 and Marketing Cloud Engagement and Marketing Cloud Next. 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 and Marketing Cloud Next enables you to automatically create messaging journeys once a promotion is active. Later in the badge, you use analytics, including a Likely to Refer model, to find customers with a high likelihood of referring others.
This badge 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, the Cloud Kicks team is ready to put Referral Marketing to use.
Here’s how the team designs the referral process. When an advocate joins the program, they’re issued a unique referral code, which they share as a referral link. Friends receive a voucher when they sign up, to use on their first purchase. After that purchase, the advocate receives the same voucher.
Once the incentives are set, the next step is getting them in front of the right people. A strong marketing strategy uses content assets, such as email and widgets, to promote the program to your 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.
Here’s a quick video that explains the key aspects of a referral promotion and how you can plan for promotions with Referral Marketing.
With a strategy in place, the Cloud Kicks marketing team is ready to get its referral program up and running. Follow along as they create the program in Referral Marketing.
In the next unit, follow Yasmin Ahmad (she/her), the marketing manager, as she designs and builds a referral program for Cloud Kicks.