By Theresa J. Trevor, Marketing Creative Director, Amplifinity

Engaging your brand advocates can be tricky – like all of us, they can be a finicky bunch.  Some are motivated by incentives, others are not.  Some want to write recommendations, others talk about you at parties, and still others promote you on blogs.  A referral program is one tried-and-true method of engaging and, more importantly, nurturing and growing your brand advocates.  Amplifinity has defined the following 9 Critical Success factors for creating, growing and sustaining your referral program:

1. Promote the referral program often and through different channels

• Integrate your referral program promotion into all other marketing/customer service efforts.
• Send dedicated marketing messages to inform and promote the referral program.
  • We see a dramatic increase in effectiveness when potential advocates receive emails and other marketing collateral focused solely on the referral opportunity.
• Include face- to-face program promotion
  • Referral success grows significantly when organizations motivate and train employees to ask for referrals and provide them with the tools to engage with the program.

2. Offer relevant, achievable and compelling incentives to your advocates

There are a wide variety of incentives out there; find out which ones work best by asking your existing advocates, or trying a tiered reward structure that utilizes several different rewards sure to suit many different preferences.

3. Create an incentive structure that encourages people to refer as many times as possible

Tiered reward and points programs also have the benefit of keeping your advocates referring again and again.

4. Give advocates tools to make referring easy on and offline

Empower your advocates to make referrals wherever they communicate with the people in their network, ensuring your clients never miss an opportunity to earn a referral.

5. Allow prospects to accept the referred offer easily and through multiple channels, on and offline

Make it as easy as possible for your prospects to accept a referral and become a new customer, both online and offline. Multiple channels are a must!

6. Expand the referral program in different phases to include customer, employees, and partners.

Customers aren’t the only ones who can make referrals. Employees and partners can make enthusiastic and effective advocates.  And employees and partners are happy to be included in the fun.  The added bonus? It builds community within your organization on top of generating new customers.

7. Keep advocates engaged and attract new advocates by refreshing the program, and changing the incentive offer.

Launch new and different campaigns so your program never goes stale. Changing it up keeps people coming back again and again.

8. Provide visibility into the referral process.

Create a program that allows advocates to easily check referral and reward statuses, and find information about the program.

9. Implement fast, transparent and efficient reward fulfillment process

Engage a company that fulfills rewards quickly, answers advocate questions thoroughly and promptly and provides an Advocate Dashboard where advocates can check reward statuses.

Contact Theresa at ttrevor@amplifinity.com