Referral Business Formula – Step 3 of 3
Welcome to step 3 in our 3-part series on the Referral Business Formula, or RBF. How to Grow Though Best Customers.
In step 2 of 3, we showed you how to Attract Your Best Customers by applying the 80/20 rule to segmenting your customers, creating buyer personas to targeting your best customers, aligning your outside perception with your inside reality, and then creating custom offer funnels that convert your ideal prospects into your best customers.
If you haven’t read Step 1, Clarify Your Message, and Step 2, Attract Your Best Customers, we suggest you go back and read them now. Each of the 3 steps in the Referral Business Formula builds on the previous step and forms the building blocks that will help you to grow your business faster, smarter, better.
It’s a framework for helping you acquire more new customers who stay longer, buy more often, and consistently promote your business.
This simple, yet powerful 3-step process will help you to
- Clarify your Message
- Create Marketing that Attracts your Best Customers, and
- Grow your Business through Best Customers
The Referral Business Formula makes it simple and reciprocal for your best customers to promote you to members of their tribe. These are the new best customers you want and need most.
Let’s go ahead and unpack Step 3, Grow Through Best Customers. This is where you get to work smarter for more predictable and sustainable growth.
RBF Step 3
Grow Through Best Customers
If you run a business or you’re a sales or marketing leader, you love it when you grow through your best customers. But in order to get the right customers, several things need to be in place. The following RBF strategy and tactics will ensure that you get the right new customers, at the right time, and for the right reasons.
Leveraging the Speed of Trust – Trust is the single universal currency that has no social, economic, or geographic boundaries. Everybody understands TRUST, earns TRUST, and values TRUST. And, it is the individual who determines its worth.
Next to earned trust is borrowed trust. When your current customers introduce you to their tribes, you and their tribe get to leverage that shared trust. Shared trust gives both parties the confidence to proceed and creates momentum that can accelerate decision making, and double, even triple sales conversions.
When you position yourself and your business to fully leverage the trust you have with your existing customers, you get to leverage the trust of their friends, customers, and associates… and gain the maximum number and benefit of their tribes.
Double-Sided Incentives – The best referral offers are those that provide an incentive to the best customer and their tribe. This is based on the Law of Reciprocity. When you openly offer double-sided incentives, everybody benefits and feels good about the experience.
The best incentives for your best customers’ tribes are those that come from your current product/service offering and promote trial. And the best incentives for your current customers are a product/service that is a natural cross-sell, upsell, or one-time-offer. In order to create the right incentive for both parties, you’ll want to ensure that your offers benefit everyone.
Offer Funnels for growing tribes – Much like the marketing offer funnels, referral offer funnels are developed and managed using the same automation tools and techniques. The key difference is in messaging, content, and marketing.
Offer funnel messaging to your best customers reminds them of all the reasons why they are your best customer. It then gives them a simple and easy way to promote you to their tribes. It also tells them what’s in it for them and their tribe. Offer funnel messaging to members of a best customer’s tribe comes from the referral and makes a case for why they are sharing the offer. Both best referral offer funnels need to provide incentives for making and accepting offers.
Referral offer funnels include any combination of the following: sharing tool, Landing Page, Web Forms, Email Opt-in Page, Lead Nurturing Emails, and Sales Converter Page… all designed to seamlessly convert members of best customer tribes into net new A and B customers.
To boost the effectiveness of your referral program, you’ll want to add ‘give and get’ links to the main navigation of your website, your email footers, sales receipts, and at every other touchpoint in the customer relationship.
Manage Growth – Today’s marketer knows that if you can’t measure it, you shouldn’t do it. Fortunately, marketing automation technology is readily accessible to all manner of businesses. Talk to us about how to plan the work, do the work, and work the plan using our referral marketing platform.
Tribeify offers a world-class, all-in-one referral platform as a service (PaaS) that automates the entire referral experience. It also allows you to track, monitor, and report on your campaigns and program performance through a single dashboard. We can also manage your entire referral program for you as part of our shared revenue model.
Tribeify RBF platform – Tribeify has built custom workflows that leverage the best of marketing automation technology and added best-in-class referral marketing strategy and infrastructure to deliver a single seamless referral experience for you, your best customers, and the people who trust them most.
Summary:
Looking to leverage the speed of trust, create double-sided ‘give and get’ rewards, develop offer funnels that convert, and managing growth using best-in-class marketing and technology. Tribeify can help.
Now that we’ve shown you the third and final step in growing your business on purpose, you now know all three steps to the Referral Business Formula. To get the best results you’ll want to stack all three steps of RBF.
