Referral marketing involves using reviews from happy customers to market a business. Strategies can be intentionally implemented through payment or perks that customers are paid for sharing their experience, or they can be developed more organically, as is the case when videos go viral. They are important because they are the number one factor in every buying cycle, while other marketing strategies are only effective for one or two phases.
Referral marketing includes taking advantage of what people are saying about a particular business. Recommendations are based on positive customer experiences that are shared with others in a wide variety of ways. Word of mouth is the most powerful way customers share their experience with a business. Customers also leave reviews online, such as on online directories like Yelp or on sales sites like Amazon. Social media is also a powerful way for people to share their positive experiences with others.
The marketing aspect of marketing recommendation involves leveraging what customers say about a brand to encourage others to try that brand.
The first step in leveraging referral marketing includes understanding why customers like to make referrals in the first place. The most popular reason for recommending a local business is because people want to share that they are trustworthy and professional.
Additional reasons consumers recommend a local business include:
- Friendly and welcoming
- Unique or original experience
- Great deals and discounts
- Cheapest price
It’s also worth noting that while it’s the least likely reason people recommend a business, some simply because the business asked the customer to recommend them to their friends and family.
What is referral marketing?
How many times have you heard that there is no better marketing than word of mouth? In other words, the information that is transmitted between the brand’s own consumers. Like a friend, we tend to trust consumers who have already tried a product or service more than the information we receive about it through traditional advertising.
According to customer reviews, Bright Local survey, 91% of Millennials, ages 25-40, trust online reviews as much as they trust their friends and family. And 86% of customers say they read local business reviews before using their services – you have one of the most powerful marketing tools a brand has.
In our daily lives, we talk about product recommendations when someone we know tells us about the benefits of a product or service based on their own experience. Therefore, the success of these recommendations is based on two aspects:
- The veracity of the testimony, because there is direct evidence that the product/service was used.
- The bond of trust that exists between the two people.
By extrapolating this real situation to the digital world, we find that users are trying to replace this bond of trust with the search for opinions, recommendations and line advice to help them make decisions.
Also, according to the study cited above, the vast majority of users read an average of 10 online reviews before making a decision. Then 50% of users who have read a positive review take action, for example, by going to the company’s online store.
How are recommendations made to clients?
Every business wants satisfied customers. There are plenty of studies showing that happy customers spend more with companies that make them happy, but honestly, who needs a study to tell them that? Happy customers return. Unhappy customers get mugged.
Today, satisfying your customers is about providing more than just a great product or service. It’s about providing a great end-to-end customer experience (CX), including exceptional customer service courtesy of your website, app, and contact center.
To ensure that your customer satisfaction levels are as high as possible, you need to think carefully about how you manage your customer service.
Increasingly, customers expect to be able to solve simpler problems, hands-free. They certainly won’t thank you if they have to call to do something they could do themselves (if only you had provided an FAQ for them).
Helping customers help themselves will also free up your service representatives to spend time and energy on the more complex queries where they can really add value.
When self-service fails, you want to make it easy for customers to contact you however they want, whenever they want. You also want to make it easy for your service reps to meet customers wherever they are, whether it’s on your website or in your app.
How to recommend a product or service?
Once you have achieved a certain level of professional success, you will be in a position to help others in your field. One of the best ways to do this is to write a business reference letter recommending the professional services of your contact.
You can write these letters of recommendation for clients, coworkers, or vendors—anywhere you’ve done business with in the past. Sometimes the recommendation is for a person applying for a new job in your industry. Other times it may be for a business you have worked with looking to build its customer base.
Writing these letters is more than pleasant. It can help solidify your professional reputation and grow your network too, if you do it the right way. Here’s what you need to know about writing a business reference letter.
There are a few things to consider before agreeing to write a letter to your business contact. Ask yourself the following questions before agreeing to be a reference:
If you’re writing a letter as a representative of your organization, talk to human resources before committing. While some companies allow their employees to write letters of reference freely. Others may restrict or ban them altogether. So be sure to find out what your employer’s policies are before you consent.
Many organizations also have references that go through the human resources (HR) approval process. Check with your company’s policies before proceeding.
You must meet the candidate in a role that allows you to write a meaningful reference. For example, if you have worked with the person as a freelance writer, but are now starting a dog-walking business, he cannot attest to his abilities in another realm.
Recommendation of a business
Business owners and operators still rely heavily on recommendations. In the professional world, companies often use letters of recommendation to positively influence others about the quality of products and services offered by another company. In this article, we’ll define business letters of recommendation and provide instructions, a template, and an example for creating your own.
A business letter of recommendation, or reference letter, is a recommendation for services or products provided by one company to another company or person. The third party that produces the letter can be an individual or a company, as long as there is a positive evaluation of the business or the individual.
The reference letter can serve several different uses:
You can endorse the quality of the products and services provided by a business to potential customers.
It can act as verification of claims for services rendered.
You can positively influence job candidates who want to know more about a business.
The format you use for a business recommendation letter will depend on the area and industry that the letter serves. The requirements for recommending a service-oriented business or provider, for example, will be different from those of a retailer, as they will include different elements. However, there are some common contents required in almost all business letters of recommendation.
How to recommend a product?
Ready to start using product recommendations on your site?
Take this related products section on the IKEA website, for example. The product page itself is a garden furniture chair, so this section below shows other products that complete the garden furniture set.
This product recommendation wheel works because it groups related products together. Someone interested in the chair may also want to complete the section. But if they don’t, they can continue without doing it. It’s just a reminder that they can buy a group of products that match the one they’re already looking at.
What if you are a giant eCommerce store selling a range of products? Department stores, for example, have thousands of items in hundreds of categories.
Amazon still uses product recommendations to promote the items. Their “daily deals” page highlights several hundred products that have a special offer. They use urgency to push people to buy one of those products, and recommend a wide variety to cater to whatever type of shopper lands there:
Remember how earlier, we mentioned that people who land on a product page might not be interested in that exact product?
You can use data from your website to find the common products people see after landing on a specific page, then recommend those products to other people who visit. It’s a great way to use your data to make better recommendations.
How to recommend a brand?
Brands are eager to harness the power of recommendations, and many companies measure an “NPS” or Net Promoter Score, which illustrates how likely someone is to recommend a specific brand or business. According to a UK study by Fred Reichheld, “a 7% increase in word-of-mouth promotion unlocks an additional 1% of company growth.” Their research also shows that “a 12% increase in brand advocacy, on average, leads to a 2x increase in revenue growth rate plus market share increases” and, conversely, “a reduction of 2% in the negative growth of sales 1%».
A recent report from social media marketing agency Zócalo Group delves into how consumers view online and offline recommendations from friends, family, and peers. Their results show that 46% of their respondents were influenced by their Facebook friends, linked with positive brand reviews, and only 1% were behind YouTube video reviews.
- 92% of consumers see word of mouth and recommendations from friends and family as the most influential regarding purchase decisions.
- People define Facebook likes, positive brand reviews, and YouTube video reviews as recommendations, along with someone offline expressing love for a brand, and a friend or co-worker using a specific brand.
- The 4 most trusted sources for recommendations are a close friend, family member, brand advocate, and product expert.
- Peer-to-peer recommendations are 20 times more valuable than celebrity endorsements.
- 49% of people make recommendations because they want to help people.
Recommendations are the gold standard for moving consumers down the purchase funnel. We all know that brand recommendations are happening on a daily basis, and this study shows more about where and why they are happening.
How can a brand be promoted?
Here are tips for promoting your brand so that when you open your business, rebuild your business, you have a plan and process in place.
Visiting my favorite local market was an eye opener. The person behind the counter was wearing a T-shirt promoting another store. Wow. Here was a branding opportunity delivered to the competition on a silver plate.
The shirt had a compelling design and slogan, so I asked about it and was happy to tell Allll about someone else’s business.
This does not mean that you should print t-shirts. This means that you need to focus on your business.
When owning the store, you would better have a dress code and probably a uniform to protect and promote the brand.
The store owner missed out on several branding opportunities that went to the competition. A staff uniform can embrace the individuality of staff but cleverly tell a brand story to customers.
Creating a memorable brand is not easy and should be a lot of work. Your brand is your company, product or service. You need a unique selling point (USP) that is yours and yours alone that you can offer, own and provide better than anyone else. You should focus on this and adjust it. Don’t pick five things. Pick one and own it.
What you do best should not be offered by everyone. The way it is sold has to be unique. It will be difficult and frustrating. You’ll want to give up and throw anything out there. But if it was easy, everyone would do it. Take the time, commit the funds, and do it right.
How to make a brand popular?
Learning how to grow your brand can position your business for success, but you may not know where to start. That’s where this guide comes in.
We’ll show you not only how to grow your brand on a budget, but also how to implement effective and simple strategies to improve brand awareness and spread the word about your products.
No, these strategies will not generate results overnight. But they will continue to build momentum as you create new online courses and extend your brand to new endeavors.
When you are first starting out in knowledge trading, chances are you don’t have unlimited means. You have to market your business if you’re interested in growing your brand, but you have to pinch your pennies in the process.
That is not impossible. In fact, there are plenty of ways to grow your brand on a budget.
Who does your business serve? What qualities do these people possess?
A buyer persona is a fictional biography of your ideal customer. Describe that person’s goals, habits, struggles, problems, demographics, and other details so he can market to them more effectively.
Imagine how you would describe a character from your favorite television show. Where does he work? What are the main sources of conflict in his life? How does he spend his time? How much money does he earn? Where does he live?
What is a product recommendation?
A product recommendation is basically a filtering system that seeks to predict and display the items that a user would like to buy. It may not be entirely accurate, but if it shows you what you like, then you’re doing your job well.
Recommender systems have become increasingly popular in recent years, and are used in a variety of areas including movies, music, news, books, research articles, search queries, social tags, and products in general. Mainly used in the digital domain, most of today’s e-commerce sites like eBay, Amazon, Alibaba, etc. use their proprietary recommendation algorithms to better serve customers with the products they are required to. There are also many more benefits, which we cover in future blogs.
And if set up and configured correctly, it can significantly increase revenue, CTRS, conversions, and other important metrics. In addition, they can also have positive effects on the user experience, which translates into metrics that are more difficult to measure but are of great importance to online businesses, such as customer satisfaction and retention.
All this is only possible with a recommendation engine. Recommendation engines are basically data filtering tools that use algorithms and data to recommend the most relevant items to a particular user. Or in simple terms, they are nothing more than an automated form of a “counter player”. You ask for a product. It not only shows that product, but also related ones that you could buy. They are well trained in cross-selling and up-selling.
With the increasing amount of information on the Internet and with a significant increase in the number of users, it is becoming important for companies to search, map and provide them with relevant part of information according to their preferences and tastes. Chatbots also work in the same job, but they are a little smarter and learn from every product you use or buy.
What are product recommendations?
Product recommendations are part of an e-commerce personalization strategy in which products are dynamically populated for a user on a web page, app, or email based on data such as customer attributes, browsing behavior, or situational context—providing a personalized shopping experience.
Product recommendations are especially valuable for organizations that have a very large and diverse product catalog. The catalog may be diverse due to a wide range of products, or it may have a small number of product categories but a lot of variety within sets of product offerings.
Product recommendations are essential to meeting aggressive performance targets for online retailers and are a proven method of driving profitability.
With them, you can drive conversions by suggesting that other products that customers have purchased with the item the customer is browsing, products that are in line with the customer’s search queries, or products that pair well with an item that is already listed in a customer’s cart.
Product recommendations are especially helpful for businesses that have large product catalogs, as this gives them more options to connect with and guide customers.
A product recommendation solution is considered a must-have for most online retailers and it’s easy to get started with the basic implementation.
While widely used by retailers, personalized recommendations can be difficult to implement and many companies struggle to balance scalability with the control that businesses and specifically merchandising teams require.
How to recommend a product to a customer?
Short and sweet is always better when it comes to writing good copy for product recommendations.
The most important thing is to establish exactly how the products you recommend are relevant to your customer. On the home page, that could mean you’re displaying your “best-selling items.” On product pages, you can display “frequently purchased together” products to encourage higher average cart values.
You can then use catchy product descriptions to highlight the value of each product.
In certain cases, when appropriate, and when longer sentences are needed for descriptions, you can even use AI writing software.
There are several ways to improve the results of your product recommendations.
The first way is to tailor your recommendations to each individual customer perfectly. You can use a recommendation engine like Limespot Personalizer to improve your data collection and processing.
You should also test their product recommendations to find out which ones work best. Doing this continuously leads to optimized product recommendations.
You should always recommend your products in a way that customers can have an easier and more enjoyable shopping experience. Make sure you are really trying to help them and not just sell.
Providing your customers with great product recommendations is an essential part of running an online store.
These recommendations help your customers find products they love and also help increase your conversion rate and average order value.