This new, first of its kind, annual customer referral program data report takes an indepth look at where the referral market is at and sets an industry benchmark for everything from referral behavior to referral methods to rewards to sales involvement and the relative conversion rates.

ANN ARBOR, MI – Amplifinity, a leader in referral program software, today announced the publication of a new data report on customer referral programs, The State of Business Customer Referral Programs – Annual Report.

The State of Business Customer Referral Programs – Annual Report is the first report of its kind to provide detailed insight into the success of customer referral programs. The data is aggregated from business customer referral programs run on the Amplifinity platform. A sister report on partner referral programs will be released in the coming weeks.

This first annual report sets an industry benchmark for customer referral behavior, how customers are making referrals and the corresponding conversion rates. Reward types, amount, and success were also analyzed as well as the impact of sales involvement in driving referral activity.

An interesting data point for the market is the average referral conversion rate from lead to deal of 13%. This is over 3X the industry referral average and 20x over the conversion of marketing leads which is 0.63% according to a study done by Salesforce’s Implisit.

But this didn’t shock Trisha Winter, CMO of Amplifinity, “I’m not surprised that customer referrals taking place on the Amplifinity platform resulted in a higher conversion rate than industry averages. Companies that have figured out that referrals are the best way to cut through the noise and reach target buyers come to Amplifinity to enable customers and partners to drive referrals as a channel versus an ad hoc campaign.”

Lisa Nakano, Service Director for Customer Engagement Strategies at SiriusDecisions commented, “Customer engagement is no longer just about fixing broken experiences or sending surveys. When leaders begin to think about customers as their most important resource and source of competitive advantage, they realize that old approaches won’t get them where they need to go. A more modern approach is to move customers beyond just saying they are likely to recommend you to acting on that sentiment via actual referral behavior.”

Lisa Nakano and Trisha Winter will discuss the data on a live webinar June 22nd at 10:00am ET.

Another promising data point was the impact of referral selling on the success of referrals, as it showed an increase from the overall average referral conversion rate of customer programs run on the Amplifinity platform to a 30% success rate.

“It was great to see the data confirming what the referral market has been alluding to for years, that the success of referrals is very dependent on the referral being one-to-one versus one-to-many,” says Winter. “Sales is in a key position to ask for those one-to-one referrals through methods like verbal referrals. This explains why verbal referral was the most successful referral method. This concept also can be linked to why social media was the most used referral method but the least successful according to the data.”

As the first annual report, Winter believes it will be used widely to help companies improve their referral approach. “I’m glad that Amplifinity can provide this benchmarking data. It will be interesting to see how other companies running referral programs align and respond to it.”

To get more insight, download the full analysis, The State of Business Customer Referral Programs – Annual Report.

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