5 ways to turn your customers into referral machines

TommyCarey Level X³

January 18, 2018, 5:50 am

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When it comes to making money online, you can definitely do everything on your own and be successful, but if you bring on your customers to bring in additional referrals you'll be tapping into a powerhouse marketing team. When your customers start to send in referrals, the likelihood of those referrals signing up is pretty high, this is because the referral already trusts your client and they will now trust you because of it. A referral is usually something that is done without you asking, or urging, because the client was so happy with your service or product that they will share your website with their friends and family if they happen to need something related.

To really get your happy clients to send in referrals, you can offer then incentives in the form of money or a new product for sending in a few new customers. You can always ask them to share their experience, as long as you're sure they had a great time with your and your products or services, but don't ask everyone because that could be a big old mess of random reviews coming in that could be good, neutral, or negative.

In this discussion I'll be going over a few ways you can turn your happy customers into a consistent referral team, and those ways are:

Offer them a commission for every referral that signs up
The most common way to get your clients to send in referrals is to give them a commission for each person that actually signs up with your services or purchases a product from you. You can offer a large or small commission for each sale, but you'll likely want to give away enough of a commission that the client is happy and you still make some money when everything is done.

With digital services you can usually offer something like 50% to 75% off since you don't really have any inventory and everything is either done already or takes very little time to set up and send out. For physical products, that cost money to build and ship, you will most likely be giving a smaller discount like 5% to 15% off. Figure out what you can afford to lose, and also pay out as a commission while still making some money for yourself, and you'll come out with the right number you can give away. Now, if you can give away 50% commissions, you don't always have to. Just look to see what your competitors are giving away and be sure to beat their commissions 5 ways to turn your customers into referral machines

5 ways to turn your customers into referral machines

You would want to set up an affiliate program, but these are pretty common with websites and tracking systems 5 ways to turn your customers into referral machines

Offer them a percentage off for every referral sign up
If you're selling a monthly digital service, you will be able to discount your prices for each referral sent to you by a client. This is a tantalizing offer because people love saving money, and if they like your service, they will actually send you plenty of traffic to help get their own services for free 5 ways to turn your customers into referral machines

If you go this route, you'll need to have something set up to automatically discount the referral commission from the overall pricing of the service the client is paying for. If you have a lot of clients, this will get tedious if it's not automated, because you could have to apply discounts each and every day which you likely don't want to do.

Offer package or product upgrades for referrals
This method can get tricky, but it has worked for some companies in the past, so you might want to try this out. What you'll do is offer clients a free upgrade to their products or services for referrals that actually sign up. This won't work great for physical products, because you would need the client to ship back the original and you would send the upgrade, which could hurt your own profits. With digital services as well as something like a manual labor services, such as lawn care services or plumbing services, you can easily give out referral upgrades to your clients.

Think about it, if you have a lawn care service and tell all your customers they can get 25% off simply by referring their friends and family in the area, they will start sending out texts and emails right away 5 ways to turn your customers into referral machines

Give them an amazing service and request they share their experience
This is one of the older tricks for getting some great referrals, and it's because you're pushing your happy clients to leave you positive reviews online wherever they are the most. It doesn't matter if they're on Facebook or a forum, they can post their experience and how much they loved your business, and other people would come to check you out.

You would only want to ask the people you were sure had a great experience with your business, so you were sure they would leave something positive. If you were to ask all of your customers, you might get a lot of negative comments from the "spam" they thought you just sent to them lol 5 ways to turn your customers into referral machines

In conclusion
Turning your client list into a referral team isn't the easiest thing to do in the world, but it will definitely help you bring in a massive amount of new clients if you can get your clients to help you out 5 ways to turn your customers into referral machines

You can offer them money, discounts, or free products and services in exchange for referrals and they will likely jump on board. You never know how many referrals you will get until you try to acquire them, so get out there and see if your customers would be on board for this type of marketing that would benefit them 5 ways to turn your customers into referral machines

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Razzy

Comments

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JoeMilford

These are all really great suggestions, but for me, they apply to a site or blog which is already pretty successful, of course. Giving commissions for referrals would require me to have a bit more capital or to be generating more revenue from the sites. I really like your ideas about percentages off and discounts for referrals, though--that is definitely doable on my level, and it would be a fair exchange based on my profit and the profits which the reviews might eventually help to bring in. Turning your client base into a referral team is really just a way, I think, of formalizing what they were already doing, by word of mouth, when it comes to supporting your product anyway, right?

9 years ago

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TommyCarey

Your site doesn't actually have to be successful for this to work well. Actually, it works best to make your website successful 5 ways to turn your customers into referral machines

Think about it, if you just started off making around 10 sales a day, and getting just 3 of those sales to send referrals, you could turn that into 13 a day. Now, that likely won't scale with the amount of sales you have, so lets say you get all the way up to 100 sales a day, you're probably going to get 10 to 15 referrals if you do everything right.

If you're profiting $15 to $15 per sale, that's $45 additional profit if you're doing 10 sales a day and up to $250 additional if you were getting 100 sales a day. These are all random statistics, and you'll never really know until you start to implement the strategy, but I know it definitely works.

Turning your client base into a referral team is really just a way, I think, of formalizing what they were already doing, by word of mouth, when it comes to supporting your product anyway, right?

Not really, because people who are happy with their purchases will talk about it with their friends if their friends bring up the product or service. If you're offering an incentive, the client will bring up the purchase and then refer their friend 5 ways to turn your customers into referral machines

You'll obviously target the people who had a good time, because the people who had a bad time will just tear you apart online. So, by telling the happy people to share their experiences online to get some money in return, you're going to see them share their reviews more often. Remember, happy clients and customers don't always leave reviews online, but this is a way to push them to post their experiences in public, which will boost your own sales 5 ways to turn your customers into referral machines

9 years ago

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AmieBotella

I guess the commissions doesn't have to be that big. Just incentives of a sales you'll be making with a 'sure' referral. You don't lose anything, except just the discount you'll be shedding off for the referral. This is like an old chinese story being taught in our country way back in the old days. Chinese are known to sell items at low price. They mark up small just so many people can afford their product. In doing so, the accumulated small profits are larger than a high priced good that sold less.

If you're going to analyze this, you won't be spending extra money because you will only give commissions to sure and closed deals with their referrals.

9 years ago

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JoeMilford

I really liked the way you explained this, and I liked your mention of the Chinese proverb--there is definitely some wisdom there and a good business practice to be found. I think that making money off of bulk-selling the cheaper items is just a really smart way to approach the business. I like Razzy's idea above, as well, of maximizing profits off of small five dollar or ten dollar sales which eventually accumulate and add up. The main idea is to get the traffic and to get the traffic to make some purchases!

9 years ago

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AmieBotella

Yes. I think this ideology still works even up to this time. When you purchase in bulk, you get bigger discounts. Or if you're the end-seller, you mark down a little bit of the price to attract more clients resulting to bigger sales profit.

In case of attracting traffics, the traffic will only be useful once you have a large conversion on the sales because of it.

The bottom line is you always have to keep innovating and always trying to keep your clients help you attract more sales by the quality of work/product you do or the services you give.

9 years ago

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Corzhens

The commission is in order when you need to utilize your customers for the chore of getting customers. I did that when I had my offline business because during that time before the internet, the word of mouth is one of the best ways to promote your business. What I would do is to choose a customer who is vocal with his opinion. Giving a freebie to that kind of customer can result in the spreading of my business to other people. But don’t do that with an introvert customer for the freebie will just be wasted.

8 years ago

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kgord

I think those are fantastic suggestions to be honest. I think some of the best referrals are word of mouth and it is one of the ways that your reputation can spread online and beyond. It is just one of the options that you might be looking for when you are looking for referrals to broadcast information about your business.

9 years ago

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overcast

I think the experience that we give to customers before and after the sales. That is what decides how we are learning along the way. And I am sure that many of you are already aware of the things that referrals can do to business. On that context you can see that having referral always helps out. And people should be always focused on what they are giving to their customers. Being humble and being good to customers is necessary.

9 years ago

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Corzhens

I think offering a commission is one good way and fair method of getting referrals from your customers. I believe that a customer is a business partner of sorts and it’s a good idea if you strengthen that concept. When the customer earns something from your business then you become partners in practice. And commissions need not be big amount and it can even be in kind. But nevertheless, the act of sharing is there in you and the earning is there in the customer.

9 years ago

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Everett

I was thinking the other day of adding a small referral program to one of my websites. However, I am stuck at the percentage rate to offer the affiliate. I do not want to offer a really small percentage rate of the item price, but I do not want to offer a high percentage either. I still want to be able to make some good profit, and also letting the referral make some good money too.

Another thing, I was thinking that there was not much of a market for affiliate programs via programming niches. There really is not much success. I have tried this before with other code marketplaces (will not name them here) and basically failed. I do not believe a lot of people are actually willing to promote a product that they are not really interested in, or really do not know how to promote. I think trying to sell code products/services as an affiliate is very hard unless you have some type of high traffic programming blog or something.

We will definitely see in the future if I allow the referral program, and if I do I'll update this post for others to share my experience.

9 years ago

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Martinsx1

The first tip discussed on this article about how to turn your customers into a referral machine killed the topic dead on spot. I can remember vividly how it worked on me when a forum owner offered me such offer and I took it with both hands without hesitating. Who wouldn't want to make extra bucks from just getting a referral?

9 years ago

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Pixie06

If you offer a referral commission then this will no doubt encourage existing customers to bring in new customers. I am active on several forums and I can see how members are motivated to get new referrals so as to win the first prize. I have not yet introduced a referral program in my business. This is something rather easy to implement. I will try to discuss this with others in my business. Thank you for this wonderful post.

9 years ago

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treecko142

While giving your customers money or discounts or gifts for referring other people is very easy and is guaranteed a few referrals, it really helps if you create an amazing service in the first place because it will be more profitable in the long run because the people are not only in it for the commission, but they are actually visiting your business to avail of your service.

9 years ago

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