Your product is not all that you bring on to the table.
You also bring the goodwill that your business has created in the past & the relationship that your business and your clients share – This helps you gain better traffic.
7 Ways to Ask for For a Referral
- Do Your Homework (Tip – Use LinkedIn)
- Successful Onboarding Process
- Provide Customers with the Right Template
- Act on Positive Feedback
- Zero Moment of Truth
- A Different Artery for Advocacy
- It’s Time to Offer Incentives
In an effort to create a wider client base on the basis of understanding the conventionally existing power of word-of-mouth, companies are trying to turn to customer referrals as a medium to increase clientele.
The Big Question – What Exactly is a Referral?
Referral is an attempt to create a high percentage of business through your existing clients and their prospects.
A referral, specifically a customer referral is one of the most powerful tools for enviable marketing and selling available out there.
When talking about a referral, there exists an art to gain a qualitative referral from your customers. (P.S: Quality is the key to selling)
In order to carry out a successful referral program, there needs to be great understanding about the difference between how many referrals your company can raise in terms of quantity and quality because here quantity doesn’t play a real role, but quality does.
The base for a qualitative referral is created by the relationship and mutual understanding of the company or the agency with its clients.
Turning to such referrals, companies are able to connect with more prospective customers without investing a lot on advertisements because every person who lands up on your portal is not there to make a purchase.
We have compiled the 7 most effective ways to get more client referrals from succesful agencies
1) Do Your Homework (Tip – Use LinkedIn)
Rather than focusing on increasing the number of referrals blindly, focus on quality.
When you reach a customer through your name or the company’s name, you’re reducing the need for them to sit down for you and ponder upon it.
LinkedIn’s advanced people search feature helps you reach the qualified second-degree links that your existing connections can hook you up to.
For this, select the people option from the drop-down menu when you tap the search bar on the homepage of LinkedIn.
From there you can filter for qualified second degree links available on the basis of industry, location & keywords, etc. to create a list of potential referral opportunities.
2) Successful Onboarding Process
You take a leverage of gaining referrals only when you have given a good experience to a customer with your product.
By keeping your customers updated with the benefits and outcomes that the product is possibly providing them will make them get a feeling that they’ve gotten the value for their money.
They would more likely be to put in a good word or two about your product & company.
This is the right opportunity to get a referral.
3) Provide Customers With The Right Template
While you’re looking for a referral, do not forget that your customers are busy and they would be making time to give you an effective one.
Effectively, it’s your responsibility to make the task easy for them.
Provide your clients with that right template wherein they just have to take very minimal effort of maybe filling the blanks and just getting done with it.
This template should basically contain all the right questions which would be of matter to you rather than you expecting them to write down a paragraph for you (Nah, that’s not happening!)
4) Act On Positive Feedback
You need to prove your worth in order to gain referrals.
There is a need to maintain a consistency with collecting and acting on the feedback in order to make sure that you’re meeting the needs and expectations of your customers.
You can conduct some surveys using different survey software (eg. Survey Monkey, HotJar) to make sure that you are doing your job right.
Now, the prerequisite is to give out a list of potential questions and place them right in order to get a true gist of the feedback.
5) Zero Moment Of Truth
According to Google’s ZMOT, a customer before buying a particular product engages with almost all the other contents available out there which means that they’ve not shied away from eating up all that has been served up by you before making that particular purchase.
Now, this gives you a learning to place the content in a strategic enough manner in order to make sure that it lands in the right hands and also, consider the fact that your loyal customers are already using your products.
Do not forget to put a “Share this with your friend ” link up there so that you can get it just right.
6) A Different Artery For Advocacy
When you ask for a customer referral and end up getting a push back, do not insist.
Instead give them some space because you don’t know the real reason behind them acting in a certain way.
You can get back to them after a while has passed.
Maybe this time – in a different way, ask for writing a review for you, conducting a case study, or maybe asking for a little testimonial.
These little actions have a good potential to drive in some new prospects to your company.
This way you won’t risk or compromise your relationship with your existing customers and will still be having new ones on board.
7) It’s Time To Offer Incentives
When you go about looking for those quality referrals, you need to accept the fact that nobody likes working for free and now, that you want your clients to rub through their network in order to expand your network, you need to offer them something of value.
For this, you can do research and align according to your customers’ values.
For example: You can see if they are using the product for their personal use, professional use or maybe as a source for some third party and accordingly you can give them their incentives.
Now, be it a scratch gift card or free monthly subscription to them, you need give back something in return (coz’ they deserve it)
Now that you know about the 7 major ways to get more client referrals for your agency without committing a heavy budget and your relationship with your customers, get the deals right to your table and enjoy the traffic.
And lastly, do share this article on your social media 🙂
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