Right now, the eCommerce market is very crowded. The pandemic has forced many retailers to switch to digital, and thus the competition is fierce here. Maybe you didn’t experience this for yourself, or on the contrary you are feeling the competition’s breath on your back. No matter which situation is closest to yours, it’s useful to know some good ways to support your eCommerce performance.
So let’s assume that, unfortunately, your customers aren’t breaking down your doors right now. It may be a challenging situation, after all you need customers if you are to stay on the market. Why are customers not visiting your store? You have to answer this question yourself. Perhaps, as mentioned before, there’s too much competition in your sector, and you can’t get through potential customers or maybe they just don’t know you are. If you’ve read our text on ways to increase sales, you will know that referral marketing is one of the most suitable strategies in this case. Why not give it a go? It’s worth trying new solutions that will interest customers, and perhaps they will stay for longer and make some purchases.
Now let’s start from scratch. Why should referral marketing be your cup of tea?
Referral marketing in a nutshell
Referral marketing is based on the relationships you manage to build with your customers. In this respect, it’s worth taking care of the customer experience, since almost 90% of customers say that they would be willing to pay for something if they have a good one. By building relationships you can create a community, and this is the perfect foundation for acquiring more and more customers. The support of your eCommerce operation through referral marketing can become really visible, and all this with relatively little effort.
So what’s the drill? First you need to create a program and set the rewards, then let your clients know about it. When customers engage in it and share referral links with their friends, you will most likely see an increase in sales.
If you are wondering if recommendations really have that much power, we have some numbers to back it up. Over 90% of customers trust referrals from their friends over those from other sources, e.g. influencers. In addition, take into account the desire to win a prize. People are competitive by nature, so why not make the most of this. Encourage both your regular clients and those who visit your site for the first time to participate and try to win the referral trophy. You can choose the prizes differently for both groups – the rewards system is up to you.
Thanks to referral marketing, you can also lower your CTAs, extend your reach, and increase customer engagement and loyalty. It will drive up your conversions for sure – referrals can convert up to 30% better than other marketing types.
However, in order to prepare a referral marketing program well, you will need the help of a tool. EarlyParrot may be a game-changer for you! Why is it so great?
Reason no. 1: easy installation and seamless integration
Let’s start from the very beginning, which means the installation process. If you are worried about your IT skills, there’s no reason to be. EarlyParrot does not require any, and the whole process would guide you through it step by step. The installation won’t take you more than 15 minutes.
What to do first? Pasting the code is the most important step. For everything to work properly, you need to have tracking on both the landing page and the share page. You can paste the code manually or use Google Tag Manager. Now click the Verify Installation button.
If you use Shopify, WooCommerce, or Magento, that’s great. For other platforms, you can contact EarlyParrot and they might be able to make it work for you as well. If you have chosen one of the aforementioned three, what you need to do now is to set up a webhook. Thanks to this, the platform will know about every new purchase made on your website. EarlyParrot does its job at this point, which is to detect whether a given transaction was initiated from an email or not. If this criterion is met, a notification or reward will be sent to the referrer.
Now it’s time to create your program, design communication, import and invite your customers, then you can go live. But hold your horses. We will show you some big pros of EarlyParrot before you gain countless new customers.
Reason no. 2: convenient program creator
The program creator is very handy and intuitive. What’s more, it shows you which aspects need more improvement. For starters you can decide on your goal, which in the case of eCommerce would be more sales.
The next step is the reward system. You can choose who you want to reward by picking from the three options Reward Unlocking, Top Influencer, and Fast Lane.
Once you choose your system, you can then create the rewards. Select its criteria, and decide whether it will be a repeat reward or not. If so, define the target. Add more specifics like image, name, and description. You can also write a coupon code in a reward email, in which case you need to create that.
Here you can create emails, invites, and share pages. Another great advantage at the end when you are required to integrate the program with your landing page, share page, and eCommerce platform. You won’t be able to click finish if you don’t configure this properly. What’s more, all changes are saved automatically.
Reason no. 3: personalized communication
If you are worried about your communication, you have absolutely no reason to be. EarlyParrot allows you to define all the details of your communication with customers. You can customize the invitations that your customers will share on social media, and no EarlyParrot logo is visible at any stage.
You have many social media platforms to choose from: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Messenger, Viber Messenger, and Telegram. As you can see, your clients have a wide range of possibilities to spread the word about you and your program. Therefore you should enter a short message that will appear in the post when your client shares the link with their friends or family.
E-mail personalization
Another aspect that can be customized is emails. EarlyParrot will send emails on your behalf, so you should write your customers the highest level messages.
If a customer feels like they have received another bulk email, it won’t do much good. Do you know that personalized emails have an average open rate of nearly 19%, compared to 13% for those that are not. You probably open emails that contain your first name more often than those which don’t. It’s a natural mechanism. Therefore, if you want a customer to feel cared about, personalization is a must. Whether it’s an invitation email, one informing about a reward, or a thank you for their first referral, you should address every user by name. Moreover, don’t forget about the content. First, it should be grammatically correct and spell checked. Typos are the worst possible mistake in the copy, so double check before saving your template. And remember about the title, which should be catchy.
What’s very cool about EarlyParrot is that you can add the kinds of emails you want to send. You can choose to send, or not, an email upon a customer reaching X numbers of referrals, a welcome to the campaign, or every time a new customer is gained from a given referrer, for example.
Don’t forget to add the ‘email from’ field, which is your signature under the message. Also, the address from which your emails are sent is an important aspect, otherwise recipients might consider them to be viruses or spam.
Share page personalization
You can edit the share widget. There are four styles to choose from: full widget, slim, one line, and referral URL. You can edit HTML code if you want to, or choose to leave it as it is.
Reason no. 4: everything at your fingertips
After logging in to your account, you will have all your campaigns in one place. You can view all parameters related to each of them on the dashboard. You can analyze the statistics of each campaign step by step, and also choose the time period you are interested in. Do you want to check how the previous week went, or review the entire last month? No problem.
It’s crucial to have such information at hand. Thanks to it, you can check what types of campaigns work best for your recipients. If a certain campaign is not effective enough, you can refine it or create a new one in its place.
Reason no. 5: support on cue
If you are going to invest in an external platform, it’s essential to be able to count on support. And with EarlyParrot, that’s certainly the case. For starters, you can download a demo version to get to know the whole system. It has limitations though, so if you need more campaigns then you’ll need to purchase paid access – but there is a free trial available. You will always have a chat box on hand where you can ask questions, or search for answers in the knowledge base or the blog.
If you would prefer to contact us by email, you can reach us at [email protected] and you will receive a reply as soon as possible.
As we have already mentioned, if your store uses a platform other than Shopify, WooCommerce, or Magento, feel free to let us know and we will try to find a solution. When it comes to the process of creating the program, you can also count on support for that. The platform dictates the sequence of steps and shows which elements must be refined before the program goes live.
Let’s create a referral program!
Creating a referral marketing program can be a real turning point for you. Regardless of whether your eCommerce is having a hard time or customers visit you in their droves all the time, you can never have too many, right? A solution such as a referral program will build brand awareness among potential and current recipients, which translates into better sales results.
Nevertheless, creating a program without a good tool will be practically impossible. That’s why EarlyParrot comes in handy. It’s an intuitive tool that’s effortless to use, thanks to which you can easily create a program that will bring the desired results. The reasons above are only a brief introduction to what EarlyParrot is capable of, so download the demo and check it out for yourself!