The most effective and reliable way to generate strong leads is through referrals. This is because you will typically get referrals from people you trust and naturally feel more inclined to take them seriously. What are some ways to encourage referrals to your moving company?
Add incentives for your customers
The first way to encourage referrals to your moving company is to have some incentive system. Considering your moving company website’s importance, it is pretty easy to build a referral system. Using one that relies on accessing your site through a specific link unique to a registered user is a good choice. This would not only let you build a referral system but also provide you with a gateway into email marketing. And, as the marketing experts associated with Movers Development will tell you, email marketing can produce many positive effects! As such, you can maximize the usefulness of each referral you successfully get. As for the benefits you offer to your customers, they can be simple. Offering discounts or redeemable points to pay part of the moving costs for the referee and the referrer is very effective.
Try to up your customer service quality
If you want to encourage ‘organic’ referrals, then the best bet would be to improve your customer service and the overall quality of your services. After all, people only go out of their way to genuinely recommend a business to their friends and family if they are delighted with the experience provided. If you are the best moving company, people naturally flock to you and recommend your services. The tricky part, of course, is that ‘good customer service’ means a lot of different things to different people. Even if you pander to some, other customers won’t like it. As such, the only real option you have is to enhance the overall quality of your work and then train your customer service staff to handle customers on a case-to-case basis.
Openly encourage referrals to your moving company
Of course, another way to get more referrals is to openly ask for them. Some people don’t think to recommend the brands and companies they prefer. So, if you even make a polite request at the end of their move, they might feel motivated enough to do it. It is hardly a surefire way to guarantee referrals. And it is, in fact, more likely that your request will be ignored. However, unlike most marketing ideas for moving companies, it costs you absolutely nothing and can easily be incorporated into the everyday running of your business. You may want some light training for your representatives, just so they know how best to approach the task and avoid being pushy. But even that can be organized in-house with little to no costs!
Work with complementary businesses
One of the best ways to encourage referrals to your moving company you can opt for is by working with other complementary businesses. This is similar to backlinking we’ve often discussed in one topic or another. And it simply boils down to using the opportunity when someone needs your services to recommend your partnered companies! For example, if they need movers, they might need cleaners too. And if they are in a hurry, they’ll want to hire a professional company to do packing for them. As a moving company, you are in a unique position to push them in the direction of your cooperating businesses. And they, in turn, would do the same with their customers that haven’t hired movers yet. Allowing everyone involved to boost their profits considerably!
Make it easy for customers to make referrals
You want to make it as easy for your customers to make referrals as possible. Now, what does this come down to? Well, first, you should always have business cards to give out. This way, even if the customers forget details about your business, they can hand off the business cards to the person they’re trying to recommend you. Second, try to optimize your website for referrals. The best moving company websites will have built-in referral options, such as an emailing system that lets people send referral links from a registered account to their friends and family. This very nicely synergizes with the incentives we recommended you offer earlier. After all, tracking rewards for referrals is much more accessible through such a system, which would eliminate the need to enter codes or do other complicated stuff to prove you’ve referred someone.
Continue to be relevant to your customers
The final way to encourage referrals to your moving company is to remain relevant to your customers. In other words, you want to keep them visiting your website for as long as possible. This should be relatively trivial if you use a content strategy. This comes with several benefits, too. First, working on content will also improve your SEO for movers, increasing your organic website traffic. You will get more material to use in your social media marketing and other types of online marketing. Finally, you can effectively keep your old customers from drifting off to other moving companies. This is important since it’s one of the few ways to continue building your customer base as a mover.
The sort of effective referrals you need
Remember that even with the ways to encourage referrals to your moving company under your belt, you need to leverage them properly. If a person listens to their friend’s referral and looks you up online, only to come across a mess of a site, they’ll likely give up and look elsewhere. So, ensure a reasonable basis for taking advantage of referrals that come your way before. And make sure of that before dedicating time and effort to getting them!
