How to go viral? Many businesses consider this to be a tough one.
A combination of very good unique content, a story, something that makes users obliged to press that share button.
Agencies will tell you that it takes a lot of work and capital to come up with a viral campaign. However, it doesn’t have to be.
Check out some fool-proof ways to engage your users and customers to genuinely share and promote your products, services and business.
The power of a referral
According to a study by Wharton University, the churn rate of a referred customer is on average 18% lower than that of other customers.
However, the referred customers don’t just stay customers.
They also spend more, customer lifetime value (CLV) is on average 16% higher than for non-referred customers!
Apart from a higher CLV, and a lower churn rate there are many more factors that speak for referral programs but this is a topic which we discuss elsewhere.
Not just for your Loyalty-Program
Ever thought of the referral process outside of an internally run loyalty program?
That’s right, while loyalty-programs work golden for existing customers you can also have leads refer more leads.
Let’s get into the process of how to go viral:
- Prepare a compelling offer (lots of feasible value)
- Advertise offer
- Let leads share the offer for more value
- Reward them with attainable value
- Go Viral
The compelling offer
It all starts here. Let’s be real: you’re not going to go viral with a 5% discount on last years collection.
Going viral takes more than just some ordinary promotion. Just think about it.
What kind of offer would push you to tell your friends and family about it?
Certainly not some sleazy discount, from which you know that the discounter next door is probably selling it at the same price.
Fun fact: This offer doesn’t need to break the bank! You could run a sweepstake Giveaway with great value.
Send users to Messenger
Now it’s time to let the world know you are being so generous.
Let out a newsletter, post it on social media and give it a boost with Facebook ads or any other paid media.
Use growth tools to send the traffic to messenger:
- Use the bar, slide-in, modal, page takeovers, buttons and more to capture your website traffic and send them to Messenger.
- A/B Test separate landing pages to send traffic directly to Messenger.
- Use Messenger ref URL’s to send traffic from other digital sources e. g. a link in your weekly newsletter.
- Use Messenger codes or simple QR codes (with the
ref-url ) to let prospects and customers opt-in from offline sources. - Last but not least: the easiest and seamless way to send users to your bot is through the JSON Facebook ads plugin or the JSON comment tool. As Messenger is part of Facebook, Facebook lets you send messages to prospects directly (without any need to specifically opt-in after they click on your ad)
Now, no. 5 is huge. Facebook makes it super easy for you to collect leads through
Let users share your offer to go viral
So when I say share I don’t mean: Hope and pray for people to click that share button on your Facebook post. That’s so 1995.
Within Messenger we can give the users a unique referral-link (think: affiliate marketing) that they can share directly (think: dark-social) with their friends within Messenger.
Now, with each user sharing their unique link we can track exactly witch friends sign up and preform the actions we want them too.
E. g. enter the competition, sign up for a newsletter or even order a product. (The possibilities are endless – as you can imagine)
By tracking the user and listening to so called “web-hooks” you can track exactly when the referred user completes the desired action.
When completed, we can update the referring customer with an adequate and attainable reward.
This is KEY.
Giving your users a reward for the share
As explained above you should take referring customers serious and treat them like a part of your lead-generation campaigns.
The best part: They don’t even wan’t huge click-prices with 0 outcome, like our friend Google will charge you. In most cases they appreciate a free product in exchange for their efforts.
Considering the worth of a referred customer compared to any other acquisition method this could be way cheaper than what you are currently doing.