There is simply no better source of new business than word of mouth. A referral means that not only does the referrer trust you enough to recommend your product or service to their own network, but it also means that the person referred is willing to put their trust in you as well.

While referral marketing is not new, it is enjoying quite the resurgence. Christophe Van den Bulte, a professor of marketing at Wharton, says “[Referral programs] are an old idea that’s getting more traction these days, and we now have solid evidence of their financial benefits.”

“92% of people trust recommendations from friends and family.” — Neilsen Study

Referral marketing is more precise than traditional marketing in that your customer knows their friend better than you could ever hope to. As a result, they know which will benefit from an introduction to your brand. This superior match is more likely to generate a loyal long-term customer.

As highlighted in The Loyalty Effect by Frederick Reichheld, a brand with loyal customers benefits from:

✓ Increased spending
✓ Increased profits
✓ Increased referrals
✓ Higher retention rates
✓ Less price sensitivity
✓ Decreased cost of servicing
✓ Decreased initial processing costs

If a happy customer leads to loyalty, referrals, higher profits and lower costs, how can the average company go about turning their existing user or customer base into their very own referral army?

Referral Tracking

The Ambassador end-to-end solution automates referrals and makes the entire process from initial referral to action tracking as easy as possible. Not only does it encourage customers to promote your brand, Ambassador helps you measure social ROI and allows you to obtain the actionable metrics needed to continue growing this valuable acquisition channel.

Offered as software as a service (SaaS), there is nothing to install on your server and Ambassador’s extensive API allows for easy and seamless integration with your shopping cart, lead/signup form, or anything else you wish to track.

If you are familiar with the traditional affiliate model, you will see that Ambassador is a cool and modern twist to this tried and trued model. With consumers using social media and publishing blogs, you no longer have to rely on referred sales from affiliate webmasters. Anyone with a Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr account can now easily refer users and sales to your brand and receive credit for doing so. Ambassador provides the advanced tools to track these actions and reward the referrer.

Now that you are armed with this information, you can take action by using a powerful tool such as Ambassador to grow your sales through referral marketing.

If you found value in this article, it would mean a lot to me if you hit the green recommend button below! ☺