Referral Marketing Programs: My Interview With eWORDofMOUTH's Founder

Do you remember the Faberge Shampoo television commercial from the 1980s?

The one in which the woman says, "I told two friends about Faberge Shampoo, and they told two friends, and they told two friends and so on, and so on..."

Now imagine this happened to your product or service....that one buyer told two more buyers, who told two more buyers, and so on, and so on. Your revenues would go through the roof, and with virtually no marketing expense.

Ah, the entrepreneur's dream.

Unfortunately, I actually categorize this as a "dream" because I don't think any company can count on this type of viral marketing. Even if your product or service is that great, there's no guarantee that people will refer it to their friends.

But you CAN change that.

You can maximize the chance that people will refer your product or service if 1) you make it really easy for them, and 2) you give them the right incentives. In fact, employing a proven referral marketing program can be your most cost-effective marketing tool.

To learn more about referral marketing programs and other cool, cutting-edge marketing techniques, I interviewed Trevor Shanski, the founder of eWORDofMOUTH Inc.

I was not only interested in interviewing Trevor because eWORDofMOUTH seemed so cool, but because I knew Trevor was such a great executor. Specifically, in his previous position as COO of Warehouse One Ltd., he helped grow the company from 13 local stores to 108 national stores, and grew revenues to nearly $100 million in sales.

In the interview, Trevor provided some great tips on referral marketing including:

- What you need before you generate referrals: all you need are current customer and/or prospects

-  The key requirement to get people to refer your business to them: they must be satisfied with you or they will not refer you

- How to reward people for giving you referrals: give them something of value; but that something doesn't necessarily have to cost you anything

- Tips to generate the most possible revenues via referrals: give rewards that encourage them to buy even more from you; for example, if you give them discount coupons, redeeming them would increase your sales

Trevor also gave some great tips on improving your email marketing success including citing the importance of personalizing your emails to recipients and to keep an eye on your open rates in order to determine the right frequency of your emails.

Importantly, Trevor gave me a private demo of the eWORDofMOUTH platform which combines email marketing with referral marketing into one, simple-to-use system. The system also allows for text messaging and multi-location emailing (i.e., if you have multiple business locations, you can centrally manage and customize emails to customers of each location) making it extremely powerful.

As  you can imagine, by using eWORDofMOUTH, you can generate a significantly higher ROI on your marketing dollars than traditional marketing methods.

To see a demonstration of eWORDofMOUTH's system for yourself, click here.

Growthink University members can listen to the full interview with Trevor Shanski and/or download the transcript here: http://www.growthinkuniversity.com/members/356.cfm.

Not only does the interview cover referral marketing, email marketing and mobile media marketing, but I got Trevor to reveal his secrets to operational success (as mentioned, as COO of his last company, he grew it to nearly $100 million in revenues) and how he developed a highly-impressive, nine-person Board of Advisors.

To hear a short clip of the interview, click the blue triangle in the player below: