If you are the individual tasked with brainstorming and implementing referral programs at your bank or credit union, you likely already know that this can be a time-consuming task. Every financial institution is different, and that means the approach toward referrals should also be unique. However, there are a few strategies that seem to work well in most situations. We will be sharing those with you in this article.
No matter what program you’re dropping, you need to pull people in quick. Having a unique and catchy headline is a great way to do this. People will read the headline, be intrigued, and continue to read on. Use your bank or credit unions personality to show who you are and why customers should read on. If you can get them to keep reading, you’re halfway there already.
Your referral page needs to look professional and aesthetically pleasing. You don’t want to force your customer into reading tons of text on the landing page. However, you can incorporate an FAQ section where you go into things in a bit more depth. You can talk about how the program works and answer questions that are common among those who visit the page.
If you can’t offer a monetary reward, or you prefer to go with something different, a donation can be the trick. For instance, you can provide a donation of $20 for every referral that a customer brings in. This is especially useful if you can team up with a charity that makes sense for your bank and its values. Consider your options and what will have the most impact.
If you begin by speaking with your best customers about your referral program, you can go farther than you might think. The people who already trust and enjoy your services will be your best promoters to others in the community. It can take some work to find the right way to ask for referrals, but once you do, this is an excellent strategy for nearly any credit union.
We already talked about having a landing page with FAQ for your referral program, but there’s more to it than that. You also need to be sure that your customers can find that page. If they don’t know the page exists, it’s not likely to do much good. Consider adding a link to emails that go out. Explore it on your blog, if you have one. Post it on social media. Getting the word out is vital to ensure your referral program gets off the ground.
Find a meaningful date that matters to you or your customers. You can choose a holiday, an anniversary of the bank opening, or any other date that makes sense. Then use this date as a time to run a special promotion for the program. You could make it where the reward for referring someone is higher than normal. Or you could incorporate a reward for the new customer coming in. This will make people excited to be a part of things.
Those who work in your bank are a considerable asset so use them. You could have a unique program for only employees, perhaps with a reward for the person who gets the most referrals in a certain amount of time. Make a leaderboard, so people get into competing and have fun with it.
Once you have started your referral program, you may find that it’s complicated to keep track of everything going on. A great option is trying FinancialRefer, a service that is just for bank and credit union referrals.