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Is appreciation referral motivation enough?

Written by: John Jantsch

Article Overview: I talk to lots of small business owners and marketers about referrals. One of the burning questions always revolves around the topic of motivation. In other words, how do you motivate someone to refer your business when the time comes. Or, the perfect situation, how to do you get them to proactively evangelize your business.

Is appreciation referral motivation enough?

I talk to lots of small business owners and marketers about referrals. One of the burning questions always revolves around the topic of motivation. In other words, how do you motivate someone to refer your business when the time comes. Or, the perfect situation, how to do you get them to proactively evangelize your business.

The tried and true approach (although while it’s tried I’m not sure it’s really true) is to offer incentives. You do this I’ll give you free service or $10 bucks. This can generate some business, but I’ve found that over time it won’t create evangelists, in fact, it may turn evangelists off.

Highly motivated referral sources do it for two reason - 1) they think you offer a good deal, good service, something of value and 2) they know, like and trust you enough that they want to help, want to see you succeed, want to connect at a deeper level and be a part of what you are doing - particularly if that can help a friend.

So, can see how payola could actually demotivate that second reason.

I did two interviews this week with successful business owners who had moved their entire marketing focus to systematically generating referrals. In both cases, they had started with traditional pay for referral approaches and quickly realized (in some cases with direct input from the referral sources) that appreciation was all that was needed. In other words, keep us in the loop, thank us, send us the occasional hand written note or unexpected gift - and keep providing over the top service to our friends.

Mike MeDerment with FreshBooks.com says that his most successful referral tactic for his online business is to make personal thank your calls and invite local customers for a dinner when he’s on the road at a conference.

Zane Safrit of Conference Calls Unlimited sends referral sources the occasional stunning bunch of flowers from out of the blue. That bouquet sitting on the desk does more to generate word of mouth than all the 20% off your next purchases in the world.

So, when designing your referral system consider making creative appreciation a big part of it?

What have you successfully done to motivate referrals?

I would love to interview you if you have a great referral success story. Send your idea to me at john@ducttapemarketing.com

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  Getting Referrals

Article Tags: bouquet, bunch of flowers, burning questions, direct input, evangelists, friends mike, hes, incentives, marketers, out of the blue, payola, perfect situation, referral sources, referrals, small business owners, successful business, tactic, unexpected gift, word of mouth, zane



Related Forum Posts
Viral Incentive - One way I found extremely effective is by making viral reports that generate back end revenue for referrers. What I do is whenever I want to promote a site, I use Viral PDF to create a report for anyone to change their links to attach their referral IDs embedded within the report. They give away the report, and when new members are generated as a result of their referral, it helps them gain commission. For this website, there is something we all gain from. I haven't really paid attention to it since I have been here, but I believe Evan splits Google Adsense revenue with people who come to visit this site as a result of your referral. We can create a report, make the link brandable to whoever want to pass out with their referral IDs. I need to look into how the referral program worked one more time to configure it. But this way, it gives you the incentive to pass around the branded report because it's a soft-sell on your end. The key to make this successful is we need to come up with great, useful report. Things like helpful links, helpful information, collection of popular threads even work -- this is the hardest part of it all. We'll compile them into a PDF, I will sign them to add tags you can download to change them into your own IDs. That usually takes two buttons to push. Then let the visitors pour into the site. This is great because there are quiet observers in the forum that are seemingly inactive, yet visit the forum often. Even those people will feel compelled to spread the report. Regards, Takuya
Re: Do we show enough appreciation? - I'm not sure you can ever OVER appreciate, so I say the more we can do to show our appreciation (whether it's monetary or physically, etc.) the better off we'll be. It will definitely build your business.
Re: Why Did You Become An Entrepreneur? - Hi members, This is a great post by Evan and I am late getting on board but I thought I would ad my few cents worth, LOL. I must say that wanting to be an Entrepreneur or work for myself has never ever meant that I wanted to have my own company, that has never been my motivation. My motivation has always been to work from home and be in control of my life, nothing else. Just to be able to organise my life around working from home would be a dream come true for me and is something I am striving for. I have always been a fairly organised sort of person so the old trap of giving myself too much time off would probably work just the opposite for me. I would be so frightened of failure I would probably work too much. There is an old saying which goes something like ’If you love what you do then you never do a days work in your life’. It is something like that anyway and for many of us, working from home would seem like that, it certainly would for me, regards, Mal.
Re: Anyone good with CPA affiliate here? - ok - share. I have no idea what this is. Can you explain it a bit for us? is it a referral fee situation??
Simple contest? - I agree with Brandon. It would be better I think to have a smaller contest to start off and show some appreciation for the people who are posting on the Forums (and not paying attention in class to do so!). can we do a marketing competition on a small scale or do something in the forums?


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