Word-of-mouth marketing is generated solely by customer experiences. People trust experiences they hear or read from others and make purchase decisions. One great experience you can provide can return hundreds of customers, increasing the revenue. Bad experiences, on the other hand, will cost you future customers. Therefore having a good customer experience process at hand is crucial for any brand.

Referrals, on the other hand, are good experiences. Customers that promote your brand and who are particularly happy about your service and/or product. And it should come as no surprise that having these people speak about their great experience with your brand is the most cost-efficient and natural type of marketing you can do.

Whether you already have a stable customer feedback process at hand or not (you should start right away), you can include referrals to this process anytime. And surveys are really the best way to ask for referrals because it provides you with the perfect moment and the perfect person to ask for a review.

When your customers or users give you a high NPS® or CSAT score, it's the best moment to ask them to review your brand and service, provide a testimonial, take part in a case study, or similar. You can do this in various ways:
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1. You can add a CTA button at the end of your survey, which directs to your referral site, and use survey logic to show this button only to the customers that have given you a high score.

2. Add a page redirect at the end of your survey and redirect your customers to the page you'd like them to leave a review on. Page redirect action can be found in the thank you screen settings. Again, you can use survey logic to ensure only positive feedback is getting redirected.

3. Integrate Survicate with your CRM platform and send testimonial or review emails to your happy users. You can pass your survey responses to your platform as attributes or tags and use them to set up your triggers, it's that easy!
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Besides asking for referrals right after a happy response, you can also conduct surveys only to ask your customers for reviews on different channels, such as Capterra, G2Crowd, Yelp, Amazon, and Facebook.

While surveying reviews, timing is the most important factor, you need to make sure you are reaching out to the customer at the right moment of their journey. Because if you ask for the review at the wrong moment, you may end up with a negative review. To ensure this, we advise surveying particular moments to elevate your customer referral marketing:

1. From returning customers: if a customer purchases from your brand again, it's because they were satisfied with the service or product! This is the best moment to ask them for a review, and if you realize they are particularly happy about an aspect of the product - you might even consider asking for a testimonial for your front page.

2. From long-term customers: If you have a subscription-based model, for instance, how long a customer has been with your brand is an important factor in whether they like it. You can conduct a review survey for your customer that has been with you for a long time (maybe 5, or 6 months, depending on your business model). You can gather great reviews and upgrade your listings.

3. They have been using your software or have been frequent visitors to your website: When you see a user spending a lot of time using your product or browsing your website, they most likely enjoy doing so. Again this group of people is the best to show a survey and ask for a review. If they really like your product, they would most likely be willing to take a minute and leave a review.

Customer referral marketing doesn't just end with customer reviews. Testimonials, case studies on your website, and reviews on every other channel create a brand perception and greatly affect purchase decisions. If you are still not getting reviews from your customers and not using them for your marketing, you are missing the most effective promotion method you achieve with minimum effort and strengthen your word-of-mouth marketing.

Net Promoter, NPS, and the NPS - related emoticons are registered U.S. trademarks, and Net Promoter Score and Net Promoter System are service marks, of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc. and Fred Reichheld.