Leading partnership management platform, impact.com, has launched a customisable customer referral marketing solution that empowers brands to engage their customers effectively with tailored offers.
With impact.com/advocate, brands can build authentic, profitable, and scalable partnerships with customers via flexible, fully automated referral marketing programs that are straightforward to manage and easy for customers to use. Ultimately, the platform streamlines customer referral marketing.
New research commissioned by impact.com reveals more than four in five (84%) consumers make purchase decisions based on referrals and recommendations from someone they know. Further, almost three fifths (58%) of consumers trust someone they know personally the most for information when purchasing; significantly higher than any other source tested with traditional advertising channels ranking the lowest at 3%.
While recommendations are becoming more important, over one-quarter (26%) of shoppers say they feel uncomfortable recommending a product only to receive a reward. Instead, 61% of referrers report they prefer it when they and the person they’re referring receive a reward.
“The launch of impact.com/advocate comes when consumer trust in advertising is at an all-time low, but reliance on trusted, personal recommendations is higher than ever,” impact.com managing director for APAC, Adam Furness said.
“impact.com/advocate allows brands to authentically engage their best ambassadors, their own customers, through tailored referral programs that can manage a diverse range of rewards for the referral and to the referee. Best of all, brands and their agencies can now manage all their partnerships: traditional affiliates, influencers, media publishers, other businesses and now customer referral marketing from one, unified platform.”
The new solution builds on impact.com’s 2023 acquisition of SaaSquatch, provider of customer referral software. The native integration of SaaSquatch’s offering with impact.com’s platform allows brands to leverage customer referrals via impact.com’s existing suite of tools and technologies, providing the most robust and comprehensive partnership marketing ecosystem.
With impact.com/advocate, brands will be able to build programs that fit their unique strategy and business goals with a flexible and configurable program builder; offer rewards their audiences care about and incentivise participation by gamifying their programs; create on-brand and easy-to-use referral experiences and embed them at top conversion points, as well as review and optimise a program’s performance with robust tracking and analytics capabilities.