You have a great company and you provide highest level of customer service. But as old cliché says: "A happy customer tells a friend, an unhappy customer tells 10 friends." You don’t have to worry about unhappy customer telling 10 friends because you always do a great job and keep your customers happy. But how do you increase number of friends that your happy customers are sending your way?

Plain and simple: You are going to have to reward them.

The reason that happy customers don’t tell many other people about your service is because most customers EXPECT good customer service so companies that provide it aren’t at front of their mind. They have too many other things to worry about on a daily basis.

By starting a Customer Referral Program you will give your best customers a reason to want to tell other people about you. Offering discounts or special incentives to customers who refer another person or company to your business is a win-win situation.

You may have medical licensing boards or other ethics committees for your profession that restrict you from certain types of rewards and rightly so due to conflicts of interest that may arise. But you can always find something that you can do to reward your customers when they refer someone to you.

Here is an example of a Customer Referral Program for a Direct Mail Company and how it works:

It is fairly safe to say that managers should always view web technology in light of whole marketing mix instead of merely as an extension of their existing advertising efforts. I have seen this happen again and again and therefore feel it is my duty to attempted to highlight some of ways that a website can positively impact each of these marketing mix elements:

Distribution (Place)

Ways to enhance your distribution networks may include using web portal to enhance logistics, create new marketing channels (for example affiliate channels) or provide better or faster product access for customers. Be careful however when creating new e-commerce sites as it is important to conduct a thorough online market analysis of your product to ensure that you are also competitive as far as other Internet based competitors are concerned. Internet retailers such as Amazon are growing in size and dominance and should be taken into account when planning any online strategy. Affiliate marketing channels may also be something to look into in terms of gaining more traffic to your site. New incoming marketing and information channels can be easily established by creating an affiliate program which entails other firms listing your site URL on their pages which in turn can equate to more traffic for your site. Look at your existing business referrers; can you enhance or strengthen these channels through use of effective and relevant hyperlinks?

Promotions

The growth of Internet’s accessibility is inevitable and firms would be well advised to start web advertising function as soon as possible. The reason for this is that “staying power” is paramount with more and more people starting to use web. Firms that have been around longest and which have high levels of interconnectivity will always maintain a pretty big competitive advantage over newer entrants. Once a firm’s web page has established a decent ranking and is featured on other related sites, ability for firms to utilize this coverage to reach out to new domestic and international markets can be quite powerful. The success of large Internet advertising campaigns is well documented. For me last US election was a real eye-opener as Internet marketing played a dominant role in key advertising campaigns with staggering amounts of marketing messages being delivered via Internet to target audiences.