Powerful Mention Me Features for Boosting Your Referral Marketing

Read time:  8 mins

Referral marketing is much more than just an acquisition strategy; it's the heartbeat of sustainable business growth. 

Your existing customers are not just buyers—they're potential brand champions, waiting for the right moment to share your story with the world.

On top of that, referred customers are 5x times more likely to refer onwards, creating a virtuous referral cycle.

So, how do you find, nurture and activate this hidden segment of valuable customer advocates? How do you pinpoint the opportune moments in their journey that’ll get them to advocate for you and bring in more people like them? And how can your entire customer base become a lever for growth, helping you build a robust referral network?

In this article, we explore how Mention Me’s AI-powered Customer Advocacy Intelligence Platform not only boosts your referral marketing but also strengthens your community of customer advocates, turning them into a driving force for your brand’s growth.

The Power of Referral Marketing

As evidenced by the sharp increase in new customer referrals shown in the graph post-launch of Mention Me, referral marketing's potential to drive customer acquisition is undeniable.

Though, the power of referral marketing goes far beyond this traditional focus; It can drive significant impact across your revenue growth and profitability. 

Referred customers not only spend twice as much but also show deeper loyalty and bring high-value customers into your network through their personal connections. 

Making Impact with Mention Me

When looking at referral marketing solutions, you typically have two choices: 

Choose a plug-and-play referral widget that may seem like a quick fix for boosting short-term customer acquisition, but often it yields only marginal results. This approach overlooks the potential of first-party data and valuable insights, leading to a continued reliance on costly paid channels to drive second purchases.

OR 

Enhance your customer acquisition efforts and harness the power of advocacy data generated by referrals. This approach empowers you to make smarter marketing decisions and drive organic growth directly through your customer base.

In a marketplace where top brands increasingly recognise the value of customer advocacy, this approach becomes a key driver of growth. Mention Me harnesses the power of your brand fans, equipping you with the tools you need to make your customers your biggest growth driver. 

Let’s dive deeper into the tools you need: 

Seamless Integration: Embedding Mention Me into Your Ecosystem

What good is a referral marketing solution if it doesn't mesh with your existing MarTech stack? Seamless integration is key for syncing data, simplifying workflows, and supercharging your marketing efforts.

Embedding Mention Me into your marketing ecosystem seamlessly integrates advocacy data at the very heart of your marketing stack. Our platform is designed to effortlessly connect with your essential customer platforms, enabling you to activate, nurture, and retain a larger community of loyal fans.

Mention Me seamlessly connects directly to leading martech platforms, including Emarsys, Klaviyo, and Attentive, providing instant integration. For those requiring additional support, we collaborate with leading agencies to facilitate the integration process. 

Our flexible connectivity options allow integration with almost any customer platform through our comprehensive webhooks, ensuring Mention Me fits perfectly within your existing marketing infrastructure.

Drive More Value from Your Base with Integrated Advocacy Marketing

Integrated advocacy campaigns drive better results, faster. Here’s how:

• Commerce and Data: Unlock the potential of hidden networks of fans within your customer base using advocacy data. Target new customer segments or enhance your existing Recency, Frequency, and Monetary (RFM) segments for more effective marketing.
• Automation and Personalisation: By incorporating advocacy insights into your personalisation strategies, you can significantly increase engagement, conversion, and retention. Deliver the right message through the right channel, resonating more deeply with your audience.
• Reviews and Community: Utilise community and review data to pinpoint existing promoters in your customer base. Transform them into loyal brand advocates with targeted strategies.
• Paid Channels: Create more efficient lookalike audiences for your paid campaigns by basing them on the profiles of your most enthusiastic fans, acquiring higher-value customers at a lower cost and better return.

Proven Successes:

• BrandAlley achieved a 25% increase in repeat purchase rates by leveraging pre-built tactics with Emarsys.
• Wild experienced a 27% rise in new database contacts by incorporating first-party referral data in Klaviyo.
• SPOKE enhanced its conversion rate by 65% by targeting referrer lookalikes on paid social.

Referral Offer Customisation for Brand Consistency

Understanding the importance of brand consistency in establishing trust, recognition, and customer loyalty, Mention Me has designed its referral offers to be fully customisable across various customer experience touchpoints and marketing channels. 

A/B Testing and Optimization for Maximum Impact

Regular, strategic A/B testing is key to running a successful referral campaign and Mention Me’s feature yields measurable results. Our personalization options extend to sharing images, complete with dynamic copy, which have been shown to boost purchase rates and referral conversions by up to 17% and 14%, respectively.

The Campaigns overview page is designed to provide busy marketers with clear insights into test results and campaign performance, enabling them to pinpoint actionable steps for achieving even more impressive results.

Share Message Analysis

Share Message Analysis is a new tactic unique to Mention Me, aimed at enhancing customer experience by providing insights into what customers say when they recommend a brand. 

It allows monitoring and analysis of customer-to-friend communications, offering an understanding of what resonates with the audience and instant feedback on the brand's unique selling points. 

This tool helps in refining your brand's tone of voice and marketing campaigns, leading to improved conversions and increased brand loyalty.

Multi-Channel Referral Options with Mention Me

Creating a flexible, seamless process for your advocates to refer their friends is vital to drive up conversion rates. Mention Me’s innovative 'Native Share' feature enhances mobile sharing for both iOS and Android mobile users. It allows customers to share referrals through any app, including Instagram, thereby improving share rates and overall conversion by up to 15%.

Customers can even leave a personalised message for their friend when they come to share.

Personalised Referral Journeys: Tailoring the Experience

Mention Me’s Propensity to Refer Prediction feature is a game-changer in how brands approach referral marketing. This clever tool allows you to serve the right offer at the right time, based on a customer's likelihood to either refer or re-purchase. 

With the integration of this feature, your referral program transforms into a precision-engineered tool, revealing your truly most valuable customers – your referrers.

But it’s not just about identifying these potential advocates. The real power lies in what you do with this information. 

The 'Propensity to Refer®' feature is at the heart of this strategy, enabling you to predict each customer’s likelihood to recommend your brand. This insight allows you to tailor your marketing efforts, nurturing more advocacy across your entire customer base. 

In essence, Mention Me enables you to not just collect data, but to harness it in driving tangible results, transforming your entire customer base into a network of brand advocates.

Segmentation Strategies for Targeted Referral Campaigns

'Smart Experiment', powered by our 'Propensity to Refer®' technology, segments customers based on their referral propensity, serving them content designed to drive the most effective action.

For customers identified with a high propensity to refer, the focus is on encouraging them to introduce more high-value customers. These referred friends are five times more likely to continue the referral chain. 

On the other hand, for those with a lower propensity, you might explore other engagement avenues, like prompting a newsletter signup or an NPS survey, nudging them towards advocacy.

This strategic approach goes beyond traditional marketing methods. It avoids the need for costly experimentation in paid search and social channels, significantly reducing your cost per acquisition (CPA). 

By leveraging AI-powered segmentation and rich first-party referral data, Mention Me helps you to tap into the full potential of your customer base, driving advocacy and reaching ambitious growth targets.

The system also allows you to redefine your approach to re-engaging lapsed customers outside their buying cycle. For instance, if a customer is actively referring friends despite not making recent purchases, they should not be categorised in the lapsed segment. In this example, you might consider pausing generic campaign emails for a customer who has recently made a referral. 

Automated Communication Sequences for Referral Nurturing

Brands can and should enhance their referral programs with automated communication sequences, designed to nurture customer advocacy. 

Emarsys Tactics users are able to integrate Mention Me referral data, streamlining customer engagement through our efficient, pre-built workflows. Emarsys's powerful platform enables brands to engage their customers rapidly and effectively, tailoring communication to drive key outcomes such as increased acquisitions, boosted engagement, and elevated repeat purchase rates.

One example of a pre-built workflow is a 'referee coupon reminder', designed to prompt potential customers to utilise their newly acquired coupon codes, obtained through referrals to your brand.

Aligned with the objective of engaging active customers, this bolsters two key strategies:

1. Encouraging Initial Purchases
2. Elevating the Average Value of Orders

When a friend introduces someone to your brand, the new prospective customer receives a coupon. If they haven't made a purchase yet, the workflow sends them a reminder via email and/or SMS to encourage them to use their coupon.

Here's what an email only workflow looks like:

Source: Emarsys

Here's what an email + SMS workflow looks like:

Source: Emarsys

Delving deeper into the workflow, here's an example of one fully customisable 'referee coupon reminder' email:

Mention Me also partners with Attentive, specialists in SMS marketing and personalisation. This collaboration enriches your referral strategy with the immediacy of text messaging, harnessing its speed and personalisation capabilities. You can leverage Attentive’s SMS workflows to promote your referral program, remind referrers about their rewards, and personalise your strategy by enhancing segmentation with advocacy data.

However, the core principles of engaging fans rapidly and effectively are universally applicable. By focusing on targeted activities through preferred channels like email and SMS, you can drive crucial goals: increase acquisition by encouraging new referrals to make their first purchase, boost engagement by motivating advocates to share more, and elevate repeat purchase rates by reminding referrers to redeem their rewards. 

These automated sequences ensure that every brand can consistently nurture its referral program and maintain a robust connection with its customer base.

Referral Fraud Prevention and Security Measures

Sometimes, customers attempt to claim rewards without actually bringing in new customers, a practice commonly referred to as gaming. This tends to occur more often when the rewards are cash or cash equivalents, such as Amazon vouchers or account credits.

At Mention Me, ensuring the delivery of genuine new customers is a key part of our commitment. To combat gaming, we employ data analysis and specific rules designed to identify and prevent gaming behaviours.

Applying the strictest anti-gaming controls across the board can result in a poor UX for all users. Therefore, we offer customizable tools that allow you to tailor your approach to managing gaming in a way that best suits your brand.

Mention Me employs three key tools to manage gaming effectively:

• Velocity Controls: These controls limit the number of rewards a single account can earn or distribute within a specific timeframe. If a user exceeds their limit, further referrals are subject to manual approval.
• Gaming Controls: Our algorithm evaluates each referral considering factors like IP address, cookie data, email similarities, and disposable email addresses to prevent self-referral.
• Eligibility Controls: These ensure only qualifying purchases are eligible for referral rewards. Rewards can be delayed until specific criteria are met, such as a new customer receiving a service or completing a trip.

Manage your vouchers efficiently and maximise revenue 

With Mention Me’s enhanced voucher management process you have the ability to upload and manage vouchers and reward codes at any time, without delay. To keep you fully updated, you now have the ability to receive notifications when your vouchers are running low and track their status through the newly introduced rewards hub.

Incorporating Social Proof for Trust and Credibility

Social proof should be genuine and tailored to both the touchpoint and the customer's requirements.

‘Social proof for the referee’ is a Mention Me feature which displays the number of rewards given out in the previous calendar month. It appears on several of the referee pages. When tested, it’s driven between a 10-20% increase in purchase conversion rate.

If you've already promoted customer reviews and social media interaction as part of your referral marketing, gather this social proof and integrate it into your email campaigns. Incorporating reviews and testimonials from your devoted customer base into your email campaign can amplify their impact. This strategy not only shows customers that they are part of a like-minded community but also serves as a pivotal moment in fostering a network of brand advocates.

Understand what your customers really think about you

Gaining insights into customer sentiments towards your brand is essential for the sustained success of your advocacy program. Mention Me’s Sentiment Analysis feature employs advanced AI to deliver authentic feedback from your customers. 

This not only enhances your referral campaigns but also fosters increased advocacy throughout your customer base.

Mention Me Case Studies: Real-world Success Stories

We’ve delivered $2bn revenue for customer-obsessed brands. With an engaged customer base that's excited about your brand, you can successfully create a referral marketing program that not only attracts new business but also turns your loyal customers into passionate ambassadors for your brand. 

Discover how 45 top brands have launched referral marketing program with Mention Me to drive revenue, lower acquisition costs and strengthen connections with their most important customers: Read now.

To truly understand the impact Mention Me can have on your referral marketing efforts, seeing it in action is key. We invite you to request a demo and explore how our platform can be tailored to your specific needs, driving growth through the power of customer advocacy.