Email and referral marketing are pretty effective growth strategies. Each serves its own purpose and has proven to be highly effective, but when they work in tandem, their outcome is way more promising.
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If you are currently running a business and want to elevate its visibility and drive sales through referral programs and email marketing, then our guide is for you. Let’s dive in and see how these marketing strategies work together.
What Is Referral Marketing?
Let’s start by understanding the essence of the concept. Word-of-mouth advertising is a strategic approach that uses your current customers to promote your services. Say you have a local bakery and want to encourage your clients to share their positive experience with your brand.
But unlike Google or social media reviews, this strategy does not aim to share feedback and show your business’s trustworthiness. It goes further and assist in attracting new clients.
To get there, referral programs offer perks to referrers and referrals. For example, you may offer a discount on the next order to your referrer and free delivery for the first order to the referral. You see, it is a perfect opportunity to increase your customer base and retain existing ones.
Fortunately, today, managing a referral program has become pretty easy. You can handle the whole process, from launch to rewards, through referral marketing solutions. Let’s shortlist some of them:
Referral Rock
This referral software website will assist you with end-to-end referral program management. Specifically, it will automate the program, from creating referral links and setting reward rules to sending reminders and tracking payouts. That said, you can simply introduce your referral idea, and the platform will help you with the rest.
Referral Factory
This can be another useful tool for organizing your word-of-mouth campaigns. Specifically, this platform will assist you in building, promoting, tracking, and rewarding customers. Like the previous one, it is also capable of tracking referrals and automating rewards. And perhaps most importantly, it can smoothly connect with other systems you use, such as email platforms.
Referral Candy
This platform promises to turn your word-of-mouth efforts into measurable revenue. It helps businesses create and manage referral programs, track referrals, and reward customers after each new referral they bring. It can also automate program tracking and rewarding, thus simplifying referral program management,
What Is Email Marketing?
Now let’s give a short overview of email marketing. It’s one of the oldest marketing strategies that still delivers measurable results. It’s a business channel that allows you to connect and communicate with both potential and existing customers. You can use emails to increase brand awareness and promote special offers.
Overall, email marketing is proven to deliver a high ROI and is pretty cost-effective. You can use it literally for free or use some special email marketing platforms to automate email campaigns.
Here are some promising platforms to consider:
Sender
This email marketing platform is a real treasure for small and medium-sized businesses. Moreover, it offers a free subscription that includes up to 2,500 contacts and 15,000 emails per month. Let’s admit it: that is a reasonable offer for small businesses that don’t need to manage huge volumes of clients.
It also has advanced and premium features, so you can always switch to a paid plan to support your business growth. Ultimately, Sender offers 24/7 customer support.
Mailchimp
Well, this is one of the pioneers of email marketing, and it remains a popular choice for businesses of all sizes.
Mailchimp is attractive because it provides plenty of ready-made templates, so you can easily adjust them and create engaging content for your campaigns. It also helps you manage and segment contacts, as well as automate campaigns. Moreover, Mailchimp offers advanced analytics, allowing you to track your campaign performance and improve it.
Brevo
This email marketing platform combines email campaigns, automation, contact management, and transactional email. It can be a practical option for small and growing businesses looking to manage different types of email communication in one place.
How Email Marketing Supports Referral Marketing
Getting familiar with the connection between referral and email marketing, let’s now break down how they collaborate.
So, you have created your referral program. The next step is sharing it. What can assist you here better than email? You probably already have a segmented audience through email, so use it to send your referral program to the most relevant customers.
All you need is to write a catchy title, then add a couple of short details about your program and include a link.
Besides that, you can also use emails to send reminders about the program and updates on rewards. Additionally, you may employ emails to reward referrers and referrals, for example, by sharing promo codes through email that they can use to get a discount.
And perhaps one last yet major advantage of using email for referral program organization is that it is cost-effective, and as mentioned earlier, it can often be done entirely for free. You see, to reach your desired audience through social media, you will most likely need to opt for paid ads, while with email, you already have relevant people ready to interact with your program.
Wrapping Up
The two different marketing strategies, referral programs and email marketing, can connect to deliver better results. Specifically, emails can become a real helping hand when it comes to sharing and promoting referral programs. Moreover, they can assist in rewarding customers automatically.
We also have some effective referral marketing tools and email platforms that can help you organize the process smoothly.
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