How To Get More Referrals For Your Business
Although, the key components of a successful business are professionalism, communication, and leaving a lasting impression. All these play an important role in defining how your customers perceive you and your business. You might not fully realize that all these actions on your part have the power to increase your word of mouth marketing. Simply put, it means that if your customers are satisfied with your quality of service, they are more likely to recommend you to their friends and family because you are awesome. Client referrals are an effective way to grow your small business.
Being awesome is obviously an important aspect of getting referrals from your existing customer base, but you may still need a bit more to get more referrals. Here are 5 simple but effective ways for you to increase your chances of getting more referrals.
1. Offer Excellent Customer Service
Being nice to your customers is a huge part of being a professional. It is true irrespective of whom you might be helping. Whether it is a new customer, your top customer, or an irate customer. However, being nice to your customers is not the only way that you can get more referrals.
Consistency is of great importance when it comes to customer service. It means that you should offer all your customers and partners the same great experience. If you do that, you will build up your customer/partner relationships meaning that those people will in turn feel more comfortable referring your business.
At the very least, the efforts you make at offering excellent customer service will help you avoid negative customer reviews, which turn away potential customers.
2. Be Mobile-Friendly
Today, just about everyone has a mobile device or smartphone. People love to access information easily and share it quickly. If you are mobile friendly, the chances of people sharing your content/website are higher, which means more referrals. Whether you use an app to achieve this or use a mobile compatible software, you are essentially making yourself easier for people to refer to others.
Using an app allows you to offer your customers value as well as connecting with them in a better way. Your customers will love the fact that they are able to keep up with you without much of a hassle and at their own convenience. At the very least, you can use an app to supplement your website to have the best of both worlds since it helps put you ahead of your competitors.
3. Customer Engagement
Creating a business that people want to refer others to is a long-term game. You have to put in the effort to create a relationship with them. Whether you use a video introduction, face to face meeting, or onboarding emails to achieve that, it is important to get to know your customers and for them to get to know you.
If you engage with your customers, you will have opportunities to figure out what their needs are and determine how you can deliver what the customer needs. In doing so, your customers will start noticing that you are actually listening and engaging with them, which will in turn help build trust between you and them. Trust is the foundation upon which referrals occur.
4. Being Where Your Customers Are
Being where your customers are might seem like an obvious point, but for good reason. If you are where your customers are, on various social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc., you are making it much easier for people to share your business. Customers can easily and quickly tag you, or even share your content with their friends on that particular social media platform.
You are probably wondering why it is important to be where your customers are since you already have a website and possibly even an app. However, that is almost always never enough. In most instances, customers are looking for a quick interaction or quick resource from you. Your social media pages are excellent places for all of this.
If you are where your customers are, you will also enjoy more casual interactions with your customers, which will help you build your reputation and provide numerous ways for you to get more referrals for your business.
5. Run a Referral Program
All of the the suggestions we’ve made above rely on generating referrals organically. However, you might be surprised to learn that the easiest way for you to get referrals is actually asking for them. If you want to make it easier to ask for referrals, you can create a referral program.
There are various approaches to running a referral program of course. There are various referral marketing software services out there, or you could go old school and use spreadsheets to track referrals.
One of the easiest ways to promote a referral program is to include the referral program in your email marketing campaigns. It’s natural to reach out to a customer after you’ve completed their job to ask how you did, ways to improve, and if they’re satisfied with their experience, to ask if there’s anyone else they’re aware of that could benefit from your service or product offering. And then give them a reward for doing so.
Other ways to run a referral program include influencer marketing and affiliate marketing, which are essentially institutionalized methods for generating referrals.
The Bottom Line
Getting more referrals for your business does not necessarily have to be hard. The important thing is to ensure that you provide a good product or service, and stay engaged with your customers. It is also a great way to show appreciation, particularly to those that refer, since this seemingly small action will continue the referral flow.