Referral software is a tech tool that automates creating, customizing, launching and tracking referral campaigns by rewarding customers for recommending a brand to their friends and family. In addition, it helps businesses encourage customers to refer others by offering rewards in vouchers, coupons, loyalty cards, and more.
The software can also analyze consumer behavior and offer insights to understand better which type of referral program should be used to target different customer categories. For example, your customers don’t know that you are willing to refer their friends. So, you’ll have to tell them!
But before posting an email about your referral program, you need to ensure that you have a seamless referral process. To make your referral program seamless, you’ll require to buy excellent referral software.
Examples of Referral Software
Post Affiliate Pro: Post Affiliate Pro is affiliate referral software that runs your entire affiliate program from top to bottom. It is intuitive, fast, effective, and infinitely expandable, and scalable. The system will give you access to the Merchant panel and your affiliates to the affiliate panel to see their stats and manage their promotion materials. Post Affiliate Pro will automate your entire affiliate program.
Yotpo: Yotpo allows brands to acquire customers more efficiently through referral marketing programs. With Yotpo, you can reward referrals with points, products, store credit, and more. In addition, customers have their choice of preferred referral channel, including intelligent popups and custom-designed pages, as well as preferred sharing options through Facebook Messenger and various ESP integrations. Finally, you can monitor and evaluate your referral program performance using our comprehensive dashboard.
Influitive: Influitives allows you to build a community and invite advocates-customers, partners, and employees to complete activities: referrals, product reviews, social media posts, and more. As they meet these activities, targeted to groups or individuals, they automatically earn points, badges, and levels to redeem perks and privileges. Easily report on all activities completed, and integrate with your CRM, and more to incorporate advocacy into every step of the customer journey.
Advantages of Referral Software
- Valuable data: The current consumer enjoys a personalized experience. By pursuing consumer referrals and engagement, you can supply your customers with the advantage of personalization. It also gives you a good sense of general market trends that can improve your brand better meet customer requirements.
- Great ROI value: While rebates and gifts will have a little cost to your company, referral marketing is a cost-effective way to promote compared to other modes such as conventional online ads. You can keep still more by streamlining your referral marketing scheme rewards into your comprehensive loyalty rewards program, which will enable you to award points preferably than a paramount gift or discount per referral.
- Save on new loyal customers: Referral marketing is more cost-effective to gain unique and loyal customers than other marketing and loyalty retention forms. In addition, because people are social creatures, individuals referred to your business are much more likely to continue loyal customers.
- Automation: Once you’ve established a good referral marketing platform, you can pretty much lie back and experience the benefits. While you will require specific steps initially, like setting your referral marketing promotion program and allotting rewards points, most of the work is done by your clients.
- Increased engagement: Building engagement strengthens your online proximity and raises the uncertainties of possible revenue. A client who refers a friend is likely to regularly hit your website to claim rewards or review a product with others. The more often a client returns to your site, the more items they serve to buy.
- Identify and target most loyal customers: Clients love feeling valued. Meanwhile, 68% of customers tend to go because of recognized brand indifference. Referral marketing platforms enable you to track and target your most loyal customers for rewards and provide a personalized interaction experience.
- Easy progress tracking: You can observe user engagement and see referral success with automatic progress tracking reports. An occasional glimpse at the information will help guarantee that you make your customer referral plan the best use.
Features of Referral Software
- Referral tracking: Log, store, and track the source and status of all referred customers.
- Rewards management: Plan and implement rewards programs for new, existing, and returning customers.
- Contact management: Store customers’ contact and referral details, such as their name, address, email, and social media account.
- Analytics/ROI tracking: Monitor conversion rates and analyze the effectiveness and profitability of your referral campaigns
- Campaign management: Create and manage multiple referral marketing campaigns to achieve your business goals.
- Lead engagement: Engage potential customers by sharing promotional or informational materials via social media, email, and other communication channels.
- Multichannel marketing: Coordinate referral marketing efforts is made across channels, including email, website landing pages, and social media.
Price of Referral Software
Most products in the market are priced on a “per month” basis. Pricing can be classified into three tiers based on the opening price. An enterprise or premium product is priced higher may incorporate additional features like advanced targeting, social media sharing, and flexible rewards.
Considerations while Buying Referral Software
- Integration with other applications: As a business, you need to track a referral’s complete journey, from discovery to conversion. To ensure seamless tracking, the referral software you’ve selected should integrate well with your existing solutions, such as customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation, and email marketing tools. Integration functionality will help provide consistent and up-to-date customer information across platforms.
- Availability of campaign analytics: Besides reporting capabilities, the referral tool should offer the analytics feature to measure aspects such as customer behavior trends, level of program participation, top campaign influencers, referral rates for different channels, and total revenue. These insights will provide an overall picture of your campaigns and help you design campaigns strategically.
Referral Software Trends
- Social media is gaining traction in the referral marketing space: It is a popular referral marketing channel, and businesses are increasingly using social media platforms to expand their reach and brand awareness. That’s why it’s essential to have referral software that can integrate your social media accounts, such as Facebook and Instagram. You can, for instance, reward loyal customers for posting their experience with your brand on social media, which in turn can help influence and attract other customers.
- The use of mobile referral apps is increasing: Mobile devices have changed the way people consume online data, which has made it easy for businesses like yours to reach out to customers. As a result, software vendors are increasingly offering Android and iOS-based referral applications that increase the chances of customer engagement by allowing referral submissions and access to offers and promotions right at their fingertips.