Customer Referral Marketing Benchmark Report 2014

Why should you think about Customer Marketing?

It’s an essential strategy for company growth and is used by high-growth companies like Airbnb, Uber and Dropbox.

So you’re not alone if you are considering buying a customer marketing solution in 2014.

You can use customer marketing to build and strengthen your userbase.

Referral programs can drive a repeatable and scalable customer acquisition effort.

An essential strategy to consider as paid efforts like display and retargeting campaigns have steadily rising costs and inefficiencies.

Customer marketing can also be used to improve your customer satisfaction score which can greatly reduce customer churn.

Which is becoming increasingly important for marketers looking to improve their retention metrics and fix their leaky funnel.

In a recent study released by Demand Metric, they looked into the current state of customer marketing.

By surveying over 300 marketing directors and executives they measured sentiment towards 8 key activities like referral programs, testimonial programs and advocacy programs.

One of the key takeaways that we learn from this report is that more and more enterprise companies are adopting customer marketing as a strategy for customer acquisition and retention.

“72% of large companies say they get significant revenue contribution from customer marketing.” Tweet this!

Of the companies reporting significant revenue contribution, 57% use customer referral programs. This data shows us how powerful referral programs can be for companies with a large and established customer base.

The more customers you have, the more opportunity there is for successful referral marketing campaigns. As well as the more time, resources and budget you can dedicate to the project.

The survey showed that large companies are dedicating close to 10 employees to their customer marketing efforts.

“27% of companies are not tracking the results of their [referral] programs.” Tweet this!

Unfortunately, since this is a relatively new industry most of the measurement for these customer marketing efforts is done by hand with a spreadsheet or by tools that are built in-house with no capability for analytics.

As this sector matures there will be an increasing demand from companies for solutions that manage key initiatives like referral, advocate and community marketing.

There are inefficiencies in the way they are implementing, measuring and improving their customer marketing programs.

Companies will start to expect tools that include features and capabilities that they get from similar marketing technology like media buying platforms and email marketing suites.

“Two-thirds of companies are planning to increase their investment in customer marketing in the next year.” Tweet this!

This shows us that companies have recognized the benefits of customer marketing programs and will be looking to increase their time, budget and resource investment towards these campaigns.

Also highlighting the increased spending power that CMOs and marketing executives are getting within their organization.

A growing trend in the marketing automation landscape which shows that CIOs are no longer the sole-decision maker in these software implementations.

“46% of companies are using customer referral programs.” Tweet this!

With nearly half of all companies using some form of a referral program this data shows us that referrals are a key part of any customer marketing initiative.

Along with building up complementary programs like advocate communities, many customer marketing campaigns can be approached like other marketing channels.

Companies are going to need the ability to test and measure the effectiveness of different program placements as well as different creatives and calls to action.

Ultimately, there are plenty of reasons that you should be putting significant time and resources into.

This report shows us that you can unlock significant growth for your company if you plan to scale up your customer marketing efforts.

From customer referral programs to advocate communities these campaigns can help you acquire and retain the right users.

Sources: Demand Metric

Image courtesy of bplanet/freedigitalphotos.net