You know your company needs a referral program. After all, no marketing strategy works better than referrals. People trust their friends and associates, and their recommendations automatically instill confidence in certain brands. Why not yours?

To take advantage of this powerful marketing strategy, create a referral program for your business. By using best practices, you can create a referral program that will help you to reach more customers in your target audience and retain them year after year.

In this blog post, we look at several important steps on how to create a referral program for your business. Let’s get started.

Choose Rewards That Matter

If you want to entice your customers into referring you to their friends and associates, you’ve got to give them a worthy incentive. Think carefully about your customers as you’re deciding how to reward them. Do they like recognition? Discounts? Free products? Prizes?

Also, consider whether you want to offer single- or double-sided rewards. A single-sided reward offers a prize only to the sender of the referral. While this can be effective, it’s generally less effective than double-sided referrals. With a double-sided referral, both the sender and the recipient receive a reward. This motivates people who don’t want to be seen as profiting off of their personal networks.

Create Awareness

Once you’ve chosen a good reward and decided on the logistics of your referral program, you need to make people aware of it. Place a banner prominently on your webpage, and consider using ads on social media and search engines.

Additionally, you can include information about your referral program on your email signature, your invoices, your blog posts, and your email newsletters. If you have a physical storefront, create posters or graphics that advertise the program, and encourage your employees to talk about it with your customers.

Make it Easy

Once your customers are interested in making a referral, you don’t want anything to get in the way. Reduce friction and abandonment by making the referral process as simple and seamless as possible.

You can do this by providing email and social templates your customers can use to make it easy to share the offer. Some referral programs make users jump through several unnecessary pages in order to share links on their social media accounts. For best results, choose a single sign-on solution. They shouldn’t have to create a whole new account in order to refer a friend.

View Your Program as Dynamic, Not Static

As with the rest of your digital marketing, you will get the best results from your referral program if you stay on top of your analytics and make adjustments along the way. You may want to try A/B testing to find out where it’s most effective to advertise the program. You may want to change your keywords and messaging in order to entice more people to submit referrals. If you don’t get great results right away, don’t get discouraged. You might just need to tweak your marketing here and there.

Dedicate Real Resources

Whether you create and manage your referral program in-house or delegate the project to a third party, it’s important to dedicate real resources to the program. In most industries, referrals make up the heart of marketing efforts. If finding new customers for the future is a priority for your business, commit to dedicating resources to your referral program.

For more information about creating a referral program for your business–or to discuss any other content marketing issue–get in touch with Park Slope Softworks, your Brooklyn digital marketing company. Be sure to get a free SEO analysis of your website today!