Referral marketing can be a powerful strategy for growing your email list. It leverages your existing subscribers or customers to help spread the word about your brand and attract new subscribers. Many businesses are looking for answers on how to increase email subscribers at the lowest cost and effort to grow their email database. Many are asking – how do I get 10,000 email subscribers? Referrals can be the answer. Here are five easy ways to use referral email marketing best practices to grow your email list:
Create a Referral Program
Set up a formal referral program that rewards your existing subscribers or customers for referring new people to join your email list. Offer incentives like discounts, freebies, or exclusive content to both the referrer and the new subscriber. Incentives increase the probability of receiving referrals by 50%!
Make it easy for people to share their referral link through email, social media, or other channels. Leverage effective referral email marketing automation to make it easier on yourself, your subscribers and customers, and their referrals. For example, you will want to make sure that thank you notes automatically go out in a timely way and you will want reminders when and how to fulfill incentives.
Optimize Your Sign-Up Process
Ensure that your email sign-up process is simple and user-friendly. The fewer steps and fields required, the better. Make sure it’s mobile-responsive as well. When someone clicks on a referral link, they should be able to sign up quickly and easily to your making list.
The key here is to make sure you are intentional with your desired new subscriber journey. This can and should include the use of automated tools that talk to each other such as your CRM and your automated referral program.
Leverage Social Sharing
Encourage subscribers to share your emails or specific content with their friends and followers on social media. Include social sharing buttons in your emails to make it easy for them to do so. When someone shares your content, it can lead to new subscribers as their network becomes aware of your brand.
Think of it as creating a surround sound experience including the use of retargeting as appropriate where potential subscribers to your email list see multiple angles of attack on why they should refer others to subscribe.
Run Contests and Giveaways
Organize contests or giveaways where participants can enter by subscribing to your email list and referring others to do the same. The chance to win a valuable prize can motivate people to share and refer, which can rapidly grow your list.
Match contests to your audience. This is so important that you may want to put out a survey to your subscribers asking them to rank different types of promotions, raffles, etc. to see what may be most valuable to them as an incentive to refer others. When considering this, make sure you run your potential investment in this through some quick number crunching on conversion vs cost to make sure it produces acceptable ROI.
Segment and Personalize Referral Campaigns
Segment your email list to target specific groups of subscribers with personalized referral campaigns. For example, if you have loyal customers, create a referral program tailored to them. This requires tracking systems.
You will want to track engagement of subscribers such as open rate, click rate, past referrals, quiz/polling engagement and more to see where you may want to put more chips down on them to generate more referrals. If you don’t have a referral program that makes tracking a breeze, check this one out.
Send personalized referral invitations based on the subscriber’s history and interests to increase the chances of them referring others. Pay attention to the format, messaging and tone of your referral invitations so they appear in your unique voice vs spammy and inauthentic like so many bulk email invitations we all receive that looks like “white noise” to us all!
Remember that the key to successful referral marketing is to make it a win-win for both the referrer and the new subscriber. Ensure that the rewards or incentives you offer are attractive and provide value. Additionally, continuously track and analyze the performance of your referral campaigns to make necessary adjustments and improvements over time. Doing so can increase online referrals exponentially.
ReferMe IQ™ is passionate about helping organizations build high growth referral-based businesses with their ”state of the art” automated referral platform. Peter S. Velardi is an accomplished senior executive and entrepreneur who has impacted thousands of individuals and organizations to build a fast growing referral based business.
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