SocialTwist Referral Marketing: Get your customers to join your Sales team

In today’s flat socially networked world, where people are increasingly discovering friends and getting to know new ones, we are seeing a new high in sharing and trust among friends. According to Econsultancy, 90% of consumers online trust recommendations from people they know and 70% trust opinions of unknown users. Thus, it is no surprise that consumer market surveys and researches have found word of mouth marketing or referral marketing a powerful and inexpensive way to acquire new customers.

The new trend is that marketers are opting to run referral marketing campaigns that maximize the power of word of mouth by supplementing it with direct marketing messages. This delivers results because:

• The referral carries the personal credibility of the referrer and therefore has a higher chance of being trusted.

• The sender has already pre-qualified his friend as a potential prospect.

• The marketer has an opportunity to add an offer to make the recommendation even more impactful.

Marketers require solutions which can help them add referral marketing to their sites without having their development teams to painstakingly build it. One such solution is from SocialTwist called Tell-a-friend which helps product recommendations reach a wide network of friends via email, instant messenger, social bookmarking, blogs and social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Myspace.

The solution can be effortlessly installed and customized to add your brand and have your users get a seamless experience on your site. It supports more than 80 services, and 18 languages and comes with analytics to monitor your viral campaigns.

Apart from a free version, Tell-a-Friend offers a range of premium widgets with which marketers can not only brand the solution, but also make the referrals more product specific by picking dynamic content (including product images, pricing, special offers, customer reviews, links) from the site and add attention-grabbing marketing messages to it.

Their product, TAF4Rewards, takes referral marketing to the next level by incentivizing the referrer. Refer-and-win campaigns have shown a dramatic increase in website traffic and sales.

After having run several successful campaigns for large enterprise customers, SocialTwist has emerged a pioneer in referral marketing products.

by Vijay Pullur, CEO SocialTwist