How referrals can help your online business
We’ve all seen the ‘Email to a friend’ link on different types of sites, be they blogs, news sites or shopping portals. However, just how effective is this marketing technique and how can it be leveraged to improve click-throughs and therefore generate greater traffic to your pages?
The popularity, and ease-of-use, of this technique speaks for itself. Adding just a bit of code under an article or product listing and the ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing takes off with visitors referring it to their friends and family.
What makes a visitor refer or recommend something they see on your site to a friend? By very definition, friends share similar interests and when a visitor sees something that appeals to them they’re more than likely to refer to someone else they know will be similarly interested.
The very decision to refer a product to a friend follows the same formula as that of making a decison to buy something - emotion followed by logic to validate the emotion felt. The product must meet the visitor’s criteria on buying - price, need, exclusivity, fun. If all these criteria are met for the visitor, more than likely you’ll have a sale on your hands and a greater chance that they’ll refer it to their friends.
However, a good way to improve on the clickthrough rate is to introduce an element of fun and value for the visitor - make them an offer e.g. they get the product at 10% off if they refer it to 5 friends. With the sophisticated, and yet easy to implement, referral scripts out there this kind of offer is easy to track. Or maybe offer them discount vouchers for the next time they shop thereby increasing the probability that they’ll be back to your site for some further shopping. Another good way is to enter them into a draw for some concert tickets if they refer the product to 10 friends.
Now where did my ‘Email to a friend’ link go……?
