Customer Referral Program
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A customer referral program has been a staple of business commerce for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years. Few businesses can compete, let alone survive without procuring and taking advantage of referrals by current customers to seek out and integrate new prospects into mailing lists and eventual new sales targets. The little coffee shop around the corner gives out business cards to hand to friends for a free pastry at the bakery next door. The travel company offers a free cruise passage for every ten friends booked on the same cruise. A customer referral program can work in almost any type of business and can be quite lucrative for the one with plenty of friends and coworkers.
An affiliate partner networking plan is the new take on the traditional customer referral program in the arena of ecommerce. The dilemma of doing business on the Internet is the almost fathomless size of its territory. Newest estimates are that five billion pages of information and advertising rest within its borders. How can a business person possibly ever get his business to be known among all these pages? The answer is that probably he can't unless he is the first to mass market a car that runs on water. Instead the entrepreneur can rely on a customer referral program where he will never meet the people who are referring customers to his website.
For example, a small patio furniture manufacturer has developed a line of very contemporary deck chairs that are being gobbled up by nearby retailers in the towns surrounding the factory. Sales are brisk and the factory is humming along at a nice pace, but the owner wants more, a lot more. So a website is developed picturing the whole line of out of the box designed patio furniture. The owner of the factory then begins to look for the perfect network affiliate plans, the high tech answer to speeding up the old customer referral program process. These high tech and Internet savvy plans best work when a company joins an affiliate program that has a common theme related to its business. In this case, companies that deal in recreational, leisure and travel issues would be best suited for patio furniture manufacturer.
An Internet affiliate network program, the new customer referral program is easy to spot. Go to almost any website and look at the sponsored links, balloon ads, banner ads, pop-up ads and other sometimes irritating but eye catching ads. When one looks closely at the subject matter of the ads being advertised, they are related in some manner to the host website. They may or may not be direct competitors with the company and may not be pushing the same type of product, but they will probably be related somehow. The next door ice cream parlor may be referred by the sandwich shop and the tire company may be referred by the auto travel club. And that is a reminder that in the world of the Internet, competitors may refer one another because comparison shopping on the web is a given anyway and anyone knows that one hamburger chain loves to park next door to another.
In the case of the patio furniture manufacturer, the affiliate partner program that the company joined allowed text only links on other websites. Balloons and banners and crawlers were considered too gauche for the clientele sought. So off to the side of over six hundred websites dealing with leisure and relaxation and home decor was a link that read oneofakindpatiofurniture along with others companies' links to other sorts of leisure products. And yes, there were links to other patio furniture manufacturers on some of those six hundred websites. By the way, has anyone ever harmed your reputation or physically or emotionally hurt and you are holding unforgiveness in your heart? Jesus said, "For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your heavenly Father forgive your trespasses." (Matthew 6:14-15)
The compensation for an Internet customer referral program is built around three tried and true methods. The first is called pay per click. This first method of compensation would have the furniture company pay the six hundred websites a small fee each time a visitor clicked on the oneofakindpatiofurniture link sending the surfer directly to the company's website. Pay per click can range from a few cents to tens of dollars for just one click. Of course, websites with huge traffic to begin with can demand a higher pay per click compensation for their affiliate network plan participation. The second method of compensation is called pay per action and this method has the sponsored link pay when a customer visits its site and fills out information such as email address and name. The final method of payment is the straight commission which is usually reserved for big ticket items such as cars, loans and other more expensive items. If a click can shown to be the beginning of a loan process or the purchase of a particular automobile, the fees to the host website can quite handsome.
In today's business, a customer referral program is not done because it's just a nice thing to do. The plans are conceived for one thing, and that is to generate more capital for one's own company. Some companies can make as much as fifty thousand dollars a month hosting links to other companies. The downside to all this is that the reputations of these linked companies may not be as sterling as the host might desire. Unlike the decades where a person would not recommend any other business without personal knowledge of the quality of the work, it really is all about the money. Times, they are a changin'.
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