Eat, S**t, Sleep: Let your Customers Sell You ! – Referral Marketing – the New age Dark Horse

You know, it is better to be lazy in Digital marketing world. Because if you are lazy, you will find out ways to get your goal achieved without breaking a sweat. Have you ever thought that If those people who have already purchased from you, sends in at least two of their friends to your door, how many sales will you get and the friends, if they send their friends and like this it goes on…

You might end up over achieving your sales goal by a huge margin and you can call this with a well packaged name of “Referral Marketing”.

If you take a closer look at this new dark horse (new in digital world), you will notice that it is  social in nature but has elements of direct marketing..

Referral marketing is a more systematic way to monetize time-honored word-of-mouth marketing (the latter of which dates back long before digital). Like other social tactics, referral marketing taps into a long-standing human behavior, and, as in the case of social, digital has helped referral take hold.

Refer-a- friend programs are now being used in industries ranging from retail to entertainment. Recently even Google launched its own referral-marketing program that pays $15 bonuses to businesses for each user they sign up for the Google Apps for Business.

GigaOM’s study shows that marketers are getting value from referral, especially for acquisition and conversion. And marketers who use referral give it high marks for rewarding existing customers and generating valuable new customers. It’s extremely effective, generating a higher percentage of new customers for its practitioners than other tactics. A sizable number of marketers also believe referral helps them capitalize on their social follower base and capitalize on their existing email user subscriber base.

Those findings suggest a number of attributes about referral:

• Referral is efficient, providing a double reward to a business. When a transaction occurs as a result of a referral, the business gains a new customer and also builds loyalty with an existing customer.

• Referral enriches social media by complementing social’s awareness and retention value with the elements of acquisition and conversion.

• Referral can provide more value to marketers when integrated with social and email rather than when used in isolation.

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