Participation Is the Spark Needed to Ignite Customer Experience in 2022

Mention Me is a Business Reporter client.

A burgeoning appetite to share and recommend goods and services means your best customers will play key roles in your growth.

For marketers yet to turn their attention to the extraordinary customer acquisition metric of earned growth, referral might be the last marketing channel to come to mind. But for those whose customers are already participating in their brand’s successes, it’s the last marketing channel they’d switch off.

This was true for the head of U.K. marketing at one of Europe’s largest online florists. She knew that the lifetime value that the business derived from customer referral marketing exceeded the value of both paid search and paid social. The business had so much confidence in its referral marketing program as a growth driver that when it was forced to turn off other marketing in May 2020 after the Covid-19 pandemic prompted the first lockdown, referral marketing was the only channel it left running,

The florist grew its U.K. referrals by 800%, despite promoting it at fewer points in the customer journey than it had previously; the business had already racked up the kind of referral results across its eight country markets that gave it confidence in this sole advocacy marketing channel to help navigate a new crisis.

This online florist has generated close to £17 million in sales through customer recommendations alone since launching a referral program in 2014. More than 60% of referrals made by its customers convert into new customers. And of those new customers, 35% go on to refer the brand to their friends and family.

The head of marketing, meanwhile, says her team tests constantly to learn how various markets and customer cohorts respond differently to messaging and incentives through referral campaigns.

Such success stories were once rare for a marketing channel that is now fast growing into its own and becoming comfortable with a more pivotal, strategic status in the marketing stack. Traditional household brands and established retailers are now joining pure-play online businesses in approaching customer acquisition and experience with an advocacy-first mindset.

This shift toward earned growth isn’t a replacement for anything. Comprehensive “referral engineering” programs act as a valuable addition to, and amplifier of, existing marketing strategies.

In another example, a menswear brand put its first-party referral data to work across its paid social channels to target consumers who looked like its most valuable referrers. The experiment saw a 65% increase in conversion rates, a 30% jump in return on ad spend and a 12% reduction in the cost of acquiring new customers.

The trend your customers won’t let you ignore

Crucially, though, none of the above speaks to the single most important opportunity addressed by a move toward earned growth, which is that advocacy—and importantly, the level of customer participation it encourages—is slowly shifting the emphasis of marketing from the brand to the customer.

Referrals are data-driven, but customer-led. Consumers are hungry for autonomy and self-determination, amplified in the past two years by the forced loss of so many day-to-day freedoms that we once took for granted. They want a more direct role in the way they shop for, and engage with, the products and services with which they choose to identify.

Influencer marketing may be big business—with suggestions that the industry was set to grow to $13.8 billion by the end of 2021—but our research finds that almost 60% of people are more likely to buy a product recommended by a friend or family member than by a celebrity or social media creator.

When it comes to influencing, it’s the people we know who have the real power, as opposed to beautiful strangers with well-oiled content-creating machines.

Consumers want to participate—to interact, share and recommend. Your buyers’ e-commerce journeys usually don’t begin on screens. Increasingly, they start with offline conversations—not about your brand or product, but about their interests, their needs and their lives.

What does that mean for your brand? It means that your best marketing in 2022 will likely happen in the most “un-marketing” moments. It means that your effective media channels will include everyday occasions in your customers’ lives: chats between parents at the school gate; picnics and pub nights; weekend walks and barbecues with friends; Sunday dinner with the family. Their participation will become as crucial in delivering experiences that match your customers’ expectations as personalization has been in recent years.

While automation driven by Big Data has transformed customer experience capability, the spreadsheets and numbers that dominate customer experience conversations risk becoming somewhat divorced from the end users they represent.

Abstract scores only tell us so much about customers’ values, their beliefs—their versions of what a relationship with a brand should look like. New perspectives and a shared commitment to combining first-party data with more innovative partnerships will get brand marketers closer to the customer stories that end users recognize, buy into and participate in.

Referral is a rare marketing discipline, carried out in the culture and language of consumers—ordinary people who don’t share the marketer’s vocabulary of “funnels,” “touchpoints” and “conversions.”

Our businesses are drowning in third-party data (though perhaps not for much longer). Yet how much does this data really tell us about customers? There’s an unfilled gap between the customer insight that much of our data promises and the legitimacy of customer participation—like the gap between reading sheet music and witnessing a spine-tingling live performance.

After thousands of years of retail, your customers still sell your stuff better than you do, without even trying. Now that we understand the psychology of referral and the science to drive, track and measure it, you can give your best customers the power to grow your company.

Visit mention-me.com to see how leading brands use referral engineering to acquire new, high-value customers while energizing existing ones.

—Mark Choueke, Marketing Director, Mention Me

This article originally appeared on Business Reporter.

Header image credit: Unsplash/Carlos Body image credit: Unsplash/Cailin Grant-Jansen