"Refer-a-Friend" (RAF) campaigning is still sometimes seen as email marketing's pyramid scheme, but it is a powerful tool if used wisely as part of a sound marketing strategy. RAF, also known as viral marketing, can very quickly reach your target audience, increase brand awareness and leads, and ultimately deliver a high return on a relatively small investment.
However, there are some basic rules that a marketer needs to keep in mind to produce positive results from RAF. Study your client base - know who your customers are, what they do, where they are and what their key interests are. It would not be wise, for example, to market a designer clothing range to a bunch of 50-something agriculturists.
The promotion has to be enticing. If the offer is almost too good to be true, it will make your customer enthusiastic enough to want to pass on your information to friends or acquaintances with similar interests.
So how does email marketing fit into the picture once you have a sound marketing strategy in place and know who your potential customers are (what their habits are and how they match your demographic target)?
Email is sent out to a group of users (either an existing client database or group, or through an online signup process) that encourages them to signup for a special offer or competition. Offering an additional incentive will encourage them to refer friends to your offer.
RAF email marketing allows the user to send a message that is triggered using real time messaging to one or multiple "Friends" email addresses. These messages can be personalised and the "Friend" can be told who the referrer was. Using RTM (real-time messaging), RAF marketing can also advise the original user whether the "Friend" they referred the message to also signed up or opted-in to the offer thereby maintaining constant contact with your clients and developing a relationship with them. This can all be done quite easily using a custom solution.
Online validation of email addresses provided by the original user can be used to ensure that you have a higher percentage of valid leads. However, the product or service has to be advertised or marketed in a way that recipients will want to share the information rather than fill your forms in with invalid email addresses.
Demographics should also be factored into viral campaigns. Viral email marketing needs to be focused on an initial group of people who are Internet or email savvy. Marketing to home users who may only check their email once every week will not produce results that are as fast and dramatic as marketing to a group of potential customers who access the Internet every day.
The period of time over which the campaign is run is another essential element to consider. Running a campaign over a five-day period will produce less impressive results than a campaign run over a number of weeks. Viral marketing is a grapevine marketing tool - the longer the news is out there the more it will spread itself around.
Providing measurable benchmarks and statistics on viral marketing campaigns is not easy to do since they vary from industry to industry, consumer group to consumer group and product to product, but successful results have been seen in a number of market segments worldwide.
To measure whether the campaign is successful, a number of metrics can be used - for example, you could measure the primary cost per lead of your initial campaign from the number of leads generated from your original lead or seed list. The take-up rate of referrals can be measured against the number of referred leads and the "cost-per-referral-lead". With RAF, the best result would be to have a high percentage of converted valid leads, achieving a low cost per lead.
How exciting or valuable your product or service offering is will determine how successful your campaign will be. Finding the correct target audience, along with a sound marketing strategy, is key to achieving great results. The results can be truly astounding. After all, word-of-mouth has always been a great marketing tool, and refer-a-friend email marketing is simply about giving your customers an easier way of spreading your news.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Liza Virissimo is Email Campaign Manager at Acceleration.
Visit our PRESS OFFICE: Acceleration provides unrivalled digital marketing consultation, outsourced services and technologies to over 300 distinguished clients around the world. We have more than a decade of experience creating customised solutions that optimise digital marketing, automate complex processes, harmonise technology and maximise our clients' return on digital investments.
Headquartered in London, Acceleration employs expert teams throughout North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and maintains strategic partnerships with industry leaders including Omniture, DoubleClick and Epsilon.
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"Refer-a-Friend" (RAF) campaigning is still sometimes seen as email marketing's pyramid scheme, but it is a powerful tool if used wisely as part of a sound marketing strategy. RAF, also known as viral marketing, can very quickly reach your target audience, increase brand awareness and leads, and ultimately deliver a high return on a relatively small investment.
Liza Virissimo is Email Campaign Manager at Acceleration.
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