marketing, lean-startup, target-market, financeI’m starting a markeplace(selling services) and I would like to have some kind of referral program. However, we don’t have enough money to keep a refferal program like “invite 5 friends and get a service for free”.
I was thinking something like a loyalty or cash back program. For example. Every time a customer buy our services, she earns X points. When she accumulates enough points, she can change the points for a free service. Is this too cliché? I mean, everyone does that, right? So maybe that is not a strong sales point for our acquision phase. Is there any other way?
I’ll assume you take a portion of the money each vendor earns. For example, if Carl Customer pays Vanessa Vendor for Vanessa Vendor’s services, you take 20% of the money that Carl Customer pays to Vanessa Vendor.
For a referral program, you could tell Carl Customer this: “If you refer your friend Robert Referral, and Robert Referral buys a service from any vendor, we’ll give you (Carl Customer) 20% off of your next purchase!” You, as the business owner, would not lose any money since you got 20% of Robert Referral’s purchase, and that would make up for the “loss” from Carl Customer’s purchase. Plus you would get Robert Referral as a new customer!
You could also split the deal between those 2 customers: Carl Customer would get 10% off his next purchase, and Robert Referral would get 10% off his first purchase.
If your vendors charge different amounts for their services, you should say that the discount applies to a service of equal or lesser value.
All content is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.