Getting quality traffic to your website, social pages or landing pages is harder than ever. Over the years, study after study has proven that referral marketing is one of the best forms of marketing when it comes to sales and conversions.

Simply put, viral referral marketing (also called referral marketing or word-of-mouth marketing) is people purchasing products or services based on someone else's opinion or influence. It's a powerful marketing channel because people trust the opinions of other people in their lives and people they respect, whether that be family, friends, social media influencers or big stars.

A classic example was from Dropbox, one of the first to embrace viral marketing. The strategy was simple.

People were already talking about Dropbox, but to ramp up the conversation the company started a viral referral program that offered customers incentives to recommend to others. This one simple campaign permanently increased new users by over 60%. Dropbox also made changes to their product that made it easier for users to 'share their love' with others.

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How it works:

• Give away a 'free gift, coupon or upgrade' for referring to friends and colleagues.
• Each user is given a unique URL to share.
• Stand back while people email and share to their own network.
• Friends and colleagues sign up for their own account.
• The campaign reaches an ever-increasing circle of friends and colleagues.
• The waves spread like a pebble dropped into a pond. This carefully designed viral marketing strategy ripples outward extremely rapidly.

In a recent promotion we ran for a client, we set up a campaign to promote a coupon on an online store. To get access, all users had to do was invite five friends to sign up too. Simple.

We used Facebook ads to send visitors to the offer page, resulting in over 5,000 email subscribers (and counting) in one month.

Because these people are actively sharing the offer, and their friends are doing the same thing, the number of signups continues to exponentially increase.

To find out more about viral marketing, contact the team here and Flourish [email protected]