impact.com, a partnership management platform, has announced the launch of impact.com/advocate, a customisable customer referral marketing solution that helps brands to engage their customers effectively with tailored offers. With custom, engaging referral programmes that fit their business needs, brands can now build authentic, profitable, and scalable partnerships with their customers, added impact.com.
impact.com says with impact.com/advocate, brands can build flexible, automated referral marketing programmes that are straightforward to manage and easy for their customers to use. The platform streamlines customer referral marketing, known for its ability to drive customer advocacy and community, and attract new customers entering the discovery phase.
The announcement comes when consumer trust in advertising is at an all-time low, but reliance on trusted, personal recommendations is higher than ever, says impact.com. More than 90% of people seek online reviews before making a purchase, with a reported 88% of people finding recommendations from family and friends more valuable than other channels, impact.com continued.
impact.com says its research also reveals that 86% of consumers say recommendations and reviews are important in their purchase decisions, while only 2% consider traditional ads influential in their buying choices. While recommendations are becoming more important, 1 in 5 shoppers say they feel uncomfortable recommending a product only to receive a reward. Instead, 65% of referrers report they prefer it when both they and the person they’re referring receive a reward.
“Today’s modern buyer no longer trusts conventional advertising techniques; they're seeking out reviews and recommendations from people they can trust and searching social media where they can see the product being used,” said David A. Yovanno, CEO at impact.com. “And we’re seeing that referrers aren’t just making recommendations for their own benefit, but they’re altruistically helping their network access great products and benefits. It's a type of partnership that feels less transactional, and driven more by genuine care and connection, which adds a unique depth to our offering. With the launch of impact.com/advocate, brands can access a seamlessly integrated referral partnership solution that empowers them to engage their customers authentically through tailored referral programmes. All while allowing them to manage all their partnerships — traditional affiliates, influencers, media publishers, other businesses and now customer referral marketing — from one, unified platform.”
impact.com says the new solution builds on its 2023 acquisition of SaaSquatch, a provider of customer referral software. The native integration of SaaSquatch’s offering with impact.com’s platform allows brands to leverage customer referrals via impact.com’s existing suite of tools and technologies.
Brands can use the technology to build fully customised referral programmes that not only support their strategic vision, but also the needs and desires of their customers. With impact.com/advocate, impact.com says brands will be able to:
- Build programmes that fit their strategy and business goals with impact.com’s flexible and configurable programme builder.
- Offer exciting rewards their audiences care about and incentivise participation by gamifying their programmes with leaderboards and reward exchanges.
- Create on-brand and easy-to-use referral experiences and embed them at top conversion points in the customer journey.
- Review and optimise a programme’s performance with impact.com’s robust tracking and analytics capabilities.
“Leveraging impact.com’s customer referral solution to enhance our monthly user acquisition has helped our business achieve a significant boost in revenue and ARR,” said Giacomo Bertollo, head of product marketing at Hack The Box, a leading cybersecurity workforce development platform. “Combining our customer referral and affiliate programmes to one platform with impact.com has also helped us ease security reviews, reduce costs, and streamline our workflow. We’re excited about the future of this platform which can evolve and grow with us, and look forward to leveraging its full potential to drive even greater results.”
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