Since customers acquired through referrals have a 37% higher retention rate, the power of strong referral partnerships shouldn’t be underestimated.
Referrals are some of the most powerful lead-generating weapons in the marketer’s arsenal. With 74% of consumers identifying word-of-mouth as a key influencer in their purchasing decision, it’s vital to wield this weapon smartly.
To fuel the work of your referral partners, keep them happy by building and nurturing your relationship. In order to nurture the relationship effectively, you should focus on adding incentives and value.
Making your CardTapp app highly valuable to your referral partners is part of the strategy. Then, you can make sure tools and resources become indispensable to the way these partners do their job.
Thus, let’s dig deeper into other strategies to improve existing referral partnerships.
Key Basics of Strengthening Referral Partnerships
To lay the groundwork for a healthy, happy, and fruitful referral partnership, you need to start with the basics.
- Value — The first goal of any referral partnership is to provide value. Find ways to contribute to a partner’s business with resources, ideas, thought-provoking questions, information, and more.
- Extraordinary service — When a partner refers a customer to you, give that customer extraordinary service. The way you work with these customers reflects on what they think about your referral partner.
- Unique offering — Your relationship with the referring party is a partnership, not a competition. For example, if your realtor partner includes a staging service, don’t offer or recommend the same service. Avoid competing.
- Lastly, fair reward amount — Setting up clear, fair, and satisfactory referral fees can help you nurture a fruitful relationship without disagreements. Make sure the reward meets your business needs.
Create Mutual Benefit
Mutual benefit is the pillar of any partnership. Referral partnerships aren’t an exception. While taking care of the referred clients, focusing on unique offerings and setting fair rewards, you need to be adding value.
Regularly added value cements your partnership and ensures high returns and steady conversions.
In his book 6 Principles of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini highlights the importance of reciprocity in influencing others to start new or change existing behaviors. Indeed, the old “I scratch your back, you scratch mine” symbiotic relationship brings continued value to parties involved.
Adding Value to Referral Partnerships
Numerous ways exist to add value to the symbiotic relationship with your referral partners. Let’s look at a few of them.
- First, dig deeper — You can promote the partner’s business by donating to their foundation of choice or volunteer in their community.
- Then, join forces — You and your partner can pool resources and plan (or participate in) an upcoming event to benefit both your businesses. You can share marketing costs, organizational expenses, and more, nurturing your relationship in the process.
- Say thank you — Sending thank you cards or small gifts for referring valuable clients can be an excellent way to strengthen a relationship.
- Then, invite — You can invite your referral partner to a networking event to give them an opportunity to grow their business.
- Lastly, make calls — Calling your referral partner to share information or to say thank you can do wonders for a relationship. Any verbal or in-person contact (instead of emails, messages, and letters) is highly valuable.
When managing your referral partnerships, set aside a discretionary budget to help you with the process.
Using Your CardTapp App to Co-Brand With Your Referral Partner
Co-branding adds value to your referral partnership. You can co-brand your CardTapp app with your business partner’s information on your CardTapp app.
Co-branded apps make the business partner more likely to share since it has its information on it too!
- Share data from your app with your co-branded partner, creating new growth opportunities for both.
- Recommend they set up a sign at Open Houses to text your EasyText keyword to 36260 to get your app.
- Have the partners use the new tagging feature to maximize this strategy. With a unique tag (#1401CyprusOpenHouse), you can export Tapper data to share with your partner to help them manage and track their clients.
Putting in the Time
Any relationship requires time, energy, and effort. Referral partnerships aren’t an exception. So, continue to add value even after your partnership is established and fully functional. A smart value-adding approach has an exceptional ROI.
To learn more about opportunities a CardTapp app can offer, please contact us today.