SpeedieConsulting

One way to dip your toe in the world of affiliate or referral marketing, to test whether it is a real viable option, is to setup a low cost local solution.   Now we are going to make a few assumptions at the outset:

• The referral will be a completed form online
• The referral will be for a quotation for services (Life Insurance Quote / Link Building Quote) – whatever
• The referral will not be a “Buy Online”  transaction (Although I have an idea for that too)
• The referral partners will be local businesses (Although this could work nationwide)

So the referral activity will be getting other companies to send you referrals for Life Insurance.

You have a website with a quote form, that visitors complete to allow you to quote.  Now if you simply ask all your referral partners to send people to that same form, you will not be able to tell where the referral form came from?  So how will you be able to reconcile and pay referral fees?

No good.

So the easiest way is to replicate the forms and create a unique form for each referral partner. Then change the  subject line of that form to say something like

“Life Insurance Referral  from Joes Real Estate”.

It this way, if you have 10 leads come into your email box you can quickly see where they have come from. So you can now work out how to pay or thank  for the referral.

Now you have each referral form on it’s own page, you can also now add their logo and details to it to make it more “friendly” or include a message on the page some thing like:

“Hey we know you have just been referred by Joes Real Estate.”

Now this only really works with up to say 10- 20 referral partners but if you wanted to set up a referral scheme with a bunch of local businesses, this could be a great way of doing it.

And it is very low cost.  No technical software requirements at this stage, you can build something quickly.  You can even find a bunch of potential referral partners, build the forms for each one ahead of time and when you speak to them you can send them a copy of their form and start asking for referrals straight away.

If you make them worth something too say a commission per form or % commission completed business.

Why would they say no?

If you are looking at trying affiliate or referral marketing on a bigger scale why not give this solution a go first before spending lots of money on a solution that might not be needed.