Referral marketing
Referral marketing is the strategy of encouraging satisfied customers to recommend a brand to others, often through organised programmes with incentives
What it means, how it is used and where it comes up, with its related concepts.
What it is and how it works
It builds on the trust that personal recommendations inspire and turns it into a managed process: a referral link or code, a reward for the referrer, the new customer or both, and a system that measures how many new customers arrive this way. Such programmes are common in financial services, telecoms, subscriptions and apps.
It differs from word-of-mouth marketing, which includes any spontaneous recommendation, and from influencer marketing, in which the recommendation comes from creators with their own audience. Schemes such as “pay with a tweet”, which unlocked content in exchange for posting a message, were examples of their time.
Topics