Referral Marketing Best Practices

Create a written referral marketing plan

Maintain a database relationship management system

Expand your network of people you know every day

Hire a referral Marketing Manager

Select a niche and focus ONLY on that one niche

Utilize a Pre-Service Promise Referral Contract

Recognize people for giving you referrals

Ping Your Network every 20 days

Give Referrals and be a "Connector" for your Network

Institute a Birthday Card Referral Marketing Program

Have lunch with a prospective referral source once a week

Incentivize your customers to send you referrals.

Seek speaking opportunities through local organizations

Ask your clients for referrals on a regular business

Consistantly add value and show appreciation to your network

Regularly sponsor client referral events

Thank people for giving you referrals

Create a referral source education program

Help you primary referral sources to get more referrals

Create "pass along" education based tools

Ask your vendors for personal introductions to their best clients

Employ a systematic process for "Amazing Your Clients"

(This great list provided by David Frey of Marketing Best Practices.

Many successful professionals - Joe Girard, Tom Hopkins, Zig Ziglar, Harvey McKay, Bob Burg, and several others - attribute their success to the use of handwritten thank you letters. These handwritten messages can easily be written on personalized note cards. The challenge for most professionals is the time and discipline that it takes to send them.

A good practice is to find a way to automate as much of the process as possible while still keeping the message personal.

For this to remain effective you need to be able to personalize the messge, the message must be in your own handwriting and with your own signature.

Let me give you a referral to a tool that I use. I have sent over 500 cards in the last year. Send a real personalized greeting card for free.

One great way to keep in touch with your "A List" of customers is email. Email marketing when used correctly, can be one of the most effective methods of staying in touch. To get results, each emailing that you send has to be specific in terms of what you want each reader to get out of it. Without a clear understanding of what the purpose is for a mailing, you will not have any way of determining what impact each has on your business. There are a number of different ways to use email marketing, but these three are the overall top-performers:

1. Special Offers
   
2. Invitations
   
3. Keeping in Touch
   

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Special offers like coupons and discounts are classic direct marketing techniques that translate extremely well to email. In order for an offer to be effective, it must provide something of real value to the recipient.

Invitations to events like seminars, conferences, and other special events are another type of highly effective email marketing. Seminars work particularly well for service industries like financial services, insurance, etc. These types of offers can be very effective when sent using email. Repetition is extremely important; sending two invitations spaced apart before the event will increase the number of attendees.

Staying in touch with customers and prospects by providing useful information like newsletters or postcards is the third major email marketing technique covered here. As opposed to offers or invitations, where you are trying to get an immediate response from the recipient, the purpose of sending a newsletter is simply making contact. Keeping the information short, to the point, and most importantly useful is the main objective.