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The Most Powerful eCommerce Referral Marketing Strategies

Growing your eCommerce business nowadays can sound like a big deal! With so many marketing tools, activities and strategies, it is becoming more and more difficult for some marketers and business owners to boost their brands without paying tons of dollars. 

In this article, you will get to know one of the most important, non-costy, and efficient marketing strategies. A referral marketing strategy should be your go-to if you are aiming to build a trusted and emotional relationship with your customers and make them fall in love with your brand with the least budget! 

Read on to know what a referral marketing strategy is, why it is important and what are the most powerful strategies that you can use in your business.

Table of Content:

  1. What is a Referral Marketing Strategy?
  2. The Most Powerful Referral Marketing Strategies For eCommerce
  3. 5 Benefits of Referral Marketing Strategies For eCommerc

What is a Referral Marketing Strategy?

Referral Marketing Strategy

This is a marketing tactic that boosts a business's sales via recommendations and word-of-mouth marketing. It is all about getting the help of your fans to boost and naturally market your brand. This can help you turn your regular customers into brand advocates.

To sum it up in an easy way, it is a strategy where your brand gives little rewards (i.e. discounts, coupons, offers …etc.) for your current customers to successfully bring new consumers (i.e. recommended family and friends) to purchase from your brand. 

The Most Powerful Referral Marketing Strategies For eCommerce

1- Research is Key

Doing a very detailed research before launching your referral program is crucial to know what will work perfectly for your audience and what will attract them to refer your products! Also, you can do a survey to know what products they like the most and how they want to be communicated with.

2- Ask your customers

Asking your customers to promote your products and services and offer them rewards or referral incentives in return, offer them discounts, free products, or other offers.

This can be done through pop-ups on your website or you can ask them while they are checking out or through email marketing right after their purchase. It is important to promote your referral program to your audiences and let them know so they can use it.

Referral Marketing Strategies

3- Set Your Objectives

Know why you are doing this? What are the results you are looking for? Once you know your goals, and define them in detail, then it should be easy to proceed to the next step. You need to know exactly if you want to increase awareness, revenue, or sales.

4- Choose The Right Time And Way 

Asking your customers can’t just happen at any given time. It is so important to know when exactly to ask for referrals. The best time to ask your customer to make a referral is when they are happy about their purchase or when they leave a good comment on your social media or right after a purchase. So that they can recommend you to their friends.

eCommerce Referral Marketing Strategies thank you
Image Source: referralrock.com

5- Use Email Marketing

Email marketing can be so personal and effective. And sending emails to promote your referral program. You can do this by sending the referral link in a thank you email or a product announcement email. With the right CTA at the end of your email, customers can be hooked.

Discover The Top 5 Referral Emails Practices

6- Collaborate With Social Media Influencers

Using social media marketing is, of course, crucial for the success of your referral program. Moreover, collaborating with social media influencers can be a great way to promote your referral program as well as your brand and products!
Choose the influencers that share the same identity and values as your brand and collaborate with them.

Social Media Influencers

7- Ease The Process for Your Customers

Referring to a friend should be easy! If your customers found it difficult to refer to a friend, they definitely would ignore it. Make it easy to encourage them to refer. You can easily integrate referral marketing automation. Make sure that your referral program includes as few steps as possible.

Referral  Process Image Source

8- Offer a Good Reward

Some customers will refer your brand to a friend just because they like your products. However, other customers will want an incentive. Hence you need to offer them an attractive reward.

A good reward can encourage past, current, and potential customers to use your referral program which can directly drive more conversion. Check who are your most loyal and valuable customers and do a thorough research on what incentives will push them to recommend your brand!

9- Use Referral Links 

This is the key to success in your referral program. This will allow you to track and analyze who exactly sent referrals to your site and which new referrals turned into new sales. It simply looks like a normal URL link, but it doesn’t merely lead to a home page, but also it includes a unique code that tracks who the referral came from, as well as the referred lead’s movement across the site.

Use a call to action before the link to let your audience know what it is, how they should use it, and what their reward is.

eCommerce Referral Marketing Strategies LinksImage Source: growsurf.com

10- Analyze and Measure

It is important to track and know the ROI of your referral marketing! How many new sales did it result in? How many customers used your program to refer to a friend?
Remember that your ultimate goal is to increase your sales and revenue so you need to know if your referral program is worth it or not.


11- Say Thank You

Always make your customers feel appreciated and end your referral process with a thank you email to show them that you are grateful they helped you with promoting your brand. 

5 Benefits of Referral Marketing Strategies For eCommerce

Being one of the best and most affordable and budget-friendly marketing tactics, referral marketing is the easiest to use for businesses. Besides, it increases your sales while lowering your customer acquisition cost (CAC). 

Here are a bunch of benefits that you can savor: 

  • Building Trust
eCommerce referral marketing can easily build trust, and loyalty and spread the word of mouth. Referral marketing is one of the best tools to build trust because it depends on family, friends, and people that you trust recommendations.

Benefits of Referral Marketing Strategies For eCommerce Image Source
  • Attracting the right audience
Most probably people recommend the brand to other people who are actually interested! Hence, your audiences might as well recommend your brand to their family and friends who they know will want or need to purchase your products or services.
  • Increasing Sales & Conversions 
Referral marketing is a low-cost tactic, which is proven to result in a 30% greater conversion rate and 65% of new business, according to Review42.
  • Encouraging UGC (user-generated content)

Using referral marketing can encourage your loyal audiences to create their own content, user-generated content. Your fans will love to feel that they are your brand ambassadors. This can also boost trust and engagement.

  • Integrating with Social Media 

Referral marketing goes perfectly with social media marketing. Word of mouth on social media channels can do wonders for your brand encouraging other people to check out what their friends are posting about. Moreover, some softwares can help you automate and track your referrals from social media easily.

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