SMS referrals: the cost-effective way to grow your customer base and enhance impact
An mHealth Case Study
In Africa, mobile-driven word of mouth (WOM) remains one of the most powerful ways to generate new sales and sharpen your competitive edge. With the Echo platform’s referral and coupon features, you can use SMS to wield that power efficiently and affordably.
Access Afya, a health social enterprise in Nairobi’s informal settlements, uses these features to help local Community Health Workers (CHWs) drive residents to quality healthcare, boosting sales and enhancing impact at low cost.
Through outreach in low-income neighborhoods around Access Afya’s micro-clinics, CHWs encourage residents to utilize professional clinical services when needed and adopt healthy behaviors. Competition from cheap, informal providers and unlicensed chemists makes this a challenge, but the Echo platform gives Access Afya an edge!
How Community Health Workers use SMS to Refer Patients and Drive Behavior Change
When CHWs meet a prospective patient (a lead), they send a single, free SMS containing the lead’s phone number. Once the lead’s contact detail is shared, this is automatically registered on Access Afya’s Echo platform account and enables Access Afya to conduct continuous SMS engagement with the new lead. Since the SMS referrals are free, there is no limit to how many leads CHWs can generate!
To ensure that community members can take the first step towards quality care, Access Afya also uses SMS to issue patient discounts. As each new lead is registered, the Echo platform sends them a unique coupon code via SMS. When the lead visits an Access Afya clinic, a clinician redeems the coupon with a single SMS, and the new patient instantly receives a discounted medical consultation.
How SMS Referrals Enable Access Afya to Monitor Impact
To monitor the impact of its referral campaign, Access Afya’s management team regularly generates reports from the Echo platform, tracking which coupons have been issued, which prospective patients have redeemed them, and at which clinics.
The reports enable Access Afya to monitor CHW performance and reward them with clinic credits based on the number of SMS referrals made. Referrals are always most effective when rewarded, so this has been critical to growing and sustaining the campaign’s impact.
Within the first two months of deploying the SMS referral campaign, over 250 CHWs have registered on the Echo platform to make referrals and they have converted more than 100 new patients which resulted in more patients traffic at Access Afya’s clinics.
How You Can Use SMS Referrals
In the long-run, referred customers are more loyal and profitable than those acquired through other sales channels, so newly referred patients are more likely to return for further services, helping Access Afya grow its customer base and sustain its impact.
SMS remains the most effective channel to drive this growth, especially in areas like those served by Access Afya. While 90% of people have mobile phones, work is largely informal, so very few use email.
Even if your customers do use email (and your emails get past their spam filtering tools), email open rates are much lower than SMS read rates, and SMS are more likely to resonate with today’s 8 second attention span! So don’t miss the opportunity to turn your customers into marketers with SMS referrals!
For more details on SMS referral marketing, reach out to sales@echomobile.org
