Growth Tip #39: The Refer-A-Friend Program

By Pete Rakozy

Growth Tips, Reading

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Stage 8 of the Customer Value Journey is promote. This is after you’ve taken people through the previous steps of transforming them from complete strangers to raving fans, you now empower your happy customers with the tools they want to make it easy for them to talk you up to their friends.

Happy customers are powerful lead generation tools as they are the most trusted case study and review to their own friends. The question now is, how do you motivate those happy customers to send new leads and business your way?

Yes on occasion they will randomly refer someone, but we want predictable sales systems that grow the company, not hopefully sporadic sales systems. So what’s a business to do? Create a refer-a-friend program, aka the ambassador program. They have and continue to be used by many companies as a formalized way to reward you, happy customers, for bringing you more happy customers.

MorningBrew does a great example of these providing their subscriber’s points for every new subscriber they bring, which results in stickers, phone cases, sweatshirts, and more being gifted to the happy customer.

How to execute this growth tip

Research other companies doing this growth tip, like MorningBrew, HotJar, DigitalMarketer, etc. to get your creative juices flowing. Then think about what you can offer as a reward to people for helping you convert more people. Discounts, money, swag, or even a trip to your headquarters, could all be great incentives. If you're stuck, just ask yourself what rewards you would want.

Create an account using one of the tools below and set it up. It's highly recommended you use a software solution instead of trying to create and manage your own from scratch. What you save in money, you'll lose in time, and as a business owner, time is the one resource you can manufacture.

Launch your referral program then promote it to all of your customers. If using a tool like ActiveCampaign, you can segment all the customers into highly engaged buyers and promote to them first. Invite them to join your ambassador program and get rewarded for what they already are doing, promoting your biz! Also, make sure you inform every new customer that this program exists from day one of them becoming a customer.