As I tell my students time and time again — Word of mouth never just happens. Although it is a great way to bootstrap your marketing efforts, it does take, well, some effort.
The folks at Yodle.com passed along to me some good tips on how to effectively use referrals to help increase word of mouth.
Four Myths about Word of Mouth through Referrals
1. Great customer service alone will make your clients refer people to you. Unfortunately, most people expect great customer service these days (and you always provide great service) so they are not necessarily inclined to mention good service to others. In actuality, people are more likely to mention bad service to their friends than any good service they’ve had.
2. People who are close to you are great people to refer business to you. You would assume that this would be the case, and it certainly can be, but you must always educate those close to you on how to look for referral opportunities so that they refer the type of customers you want.
3. You should always ask for the referral at the end of a transaction with your client. You should constantly be asking for referrals! There is no set time to ask for a referral. You should ask any time the opportunity presents itself.
4. Looking for referrals in an indirect manner reduces stress and is normally the best way to get referrals. Though this may work every once in a while, typically, if you don’t ask for it, you won’t get.
Steps to use Referrals as part of Word of Mouth plan
1. Ask! Don’t be afraid to be direct about asking for referrals. Also, ask regularly to maximize the amount of referrals you can generate. A great technique is to view every client you work with as though your sole purpose is to get a referral. This will not only keep you cognizant about getting them, but it will make you more service-oriented as well.
2. Create a referral program — Offer service credits as an incentive to your clients who send you new business. It can be as a discount on their next service or a credit to their account, or any other trigger that will help entice people to refer new customers to you.
3. Spread the word by sending a description of your referral program to all of your satisfied clients. It also doesn’t hurt to send it to all past clients; it’s not only a great way to get referrals, but you can also rekindle old relationships!
4. A few other dos and don’ts:
- Don’t ask for a referral when presenting a bill.
- When asking for a referral, also ask for a testimonial from the client. It’s great for websites!
- Ask people who perform complementary services to you for referrals. (i.e. If you are a contractor, why not ask an electrician or plumber who may be on the same site?)
- Have some type of printed marketing material handy to provide clients with that describes everything you do– and give them a few copies to spread around
Good article. It always amazes me how few businesses I deal with both professionally and privately, ask for referrals, as though it’s too embarrassing for them.
We get referrals from businesses who list in our online business directory by taking up to 5 email addresses from them at the end of the sign up process and sending each one a personalized invitation ‘on their behalf’.
Every time one of their referrals then registers with us, we move the original company’s listing nearer the top of their category in the directory as a reward. Although take up is low in percentage terms, this has still proven to be a good way of getting quality traffic to the site for free.
Great advise! As a small business owner who targets to a very small portion of the population, advertising and marketing is always a challenge (especially when working with very few earmarked marketing dollars). My goal has always been to build my business based on word of mouth, but as the article explains, that goal is often easier said than done. I will certainly employ Yodle’s suggestions to see if that helps improve my referral list.
Scott Gray
I enjoyed this post. I thought the readers might also appreciate this white paper which describes a customer follow-up strategy which, if done correctly, can generate customer referrals. Below is a direct link to the white paper which bypasses the name and email collection web pages. This link should work until IT decides to change it.
http://www.frequentfollowups.com/whitepaper.aspx
– Robyn Williams