owners how to build, maintain, and market their own fully search engine optimized websites

and I'm glad that you are here. So in today's video we are going to talk about referral

programs and I love referral programs I really think that every business should have an official

referral program, and if you don't at least take a couple minutes and really kind of think

about it and see if that makes sense for your business so what a referral program does is

it incentivizes your existing customer base to basically talk about you and how cool your

services are now they are probably are already doing that anyway because if they don't like

your service then they probably wouldn't be with you anymore but this is just kind of

an official way to really show them some respect and the fact that you appreciate them talking

about you so it can be something like you know if you refer a friend I'll give you a

free overnight pet sit or I'll give 20% of something, something, something, next month.

It doesn't really matter what the incentive is it's just the fact that you're showing

a level of appreciation now again some of your customers again probably already do this

but the problem with word-of-mouth advertising is that it's not consistent it's hard to relying on

so as a business owner what we want to be able to do it put systems in place to keep

the ball rolling it would be great if you can count on a certain level of referrals

every month so there's 3 reasons why I really like referral programs and we are going to

talk about those right now the first reason I really like referral programs is because

you have increased trust immediately so the way this works is that people feel more comfortable

with the service provider or product if they get a referral from somebody that they already

know so what you're doing is you're piggybacking off of their existing relationships so it

looks something like this so I like Bob and Bob likes you and therefore I am probably

going to like you and we want to be able to take advantage of that piggyback off of that

existing relationship and use that trust. The second reason I like referral programs

is because referred customers are typically less price sensitive. So think of something

like this when you come into a relationship with a customer they call you on the phone

you meet him at his office, whatever the case is, when you start talking to them before

they know the value that you provide it really becomes a matter of price. I get this all

the time with web stuff, people go I've got a kid down the street that can do it for half

the price exactly because they don't know the value that we bring. They don't know the

value you bring but what happened is that when you have your customers bringing these

referrals they've already been chatting you up so they see the value of your service that

means that you're not going to have to dip your prices or offering discounts to get that

person's foot in the door at the great thing for a business owner and the third reason

why I really like referral programs is because they produce better customers I mean really

referred customers are just better people, I'm just kidding they're not better people

but studies have shown that referred customers will not only give you a higher retention

rate they'll stick around longer they also have higher initial cost structures so initially

the rates are little bit higher but there was a study done last year at the Wharton

school which is the business school for University Pennsylvania where they showed that referred

customer lifetime value was about 16% higher than a non-referred customer so that means

you know if you have you have a customer good for $1000 a year a referred customer in a

similar situation would be worth 1160 I don't know about you but I can always use an extra

16% okay so if you don't already have a referral program in place I would I would ask you to

just take a couple of minutes and really think about it and see if that something that you

can get your customers could get behind again increase that word-of-mouth marketing because

those people and gold, they are ready to rock 'n roll when they call you. It's as simple

as that, so on behalf of Black Dog Education and Pet Sitter Marketing I want to say thank

you for stopping by. make sure to check out Pet Sitter Marketing on Facebook, it's just Facebook.com/PetSitterMarketing

for more news, tips, and information to help jumpstart your pet sitting business. Again

this is Mike Linville from Black Dog Education saying thank you and happy sitting. }