What is a Referral?
On each Event, there is an optional field drop down for Referrals to help you track where customers are discovering your business. This settings page lets you add/remove things from that list. Simply use the "add referral" button to add a new type. You can also edit or delete a Referral Type once it is set up.
How Referral information best viewed
Referrals are useful for determining how you are finding customers. We enable you to collect this information when someone is getting prices on your website or when your sales reps are taking calls. We track the first referral for a customer as well as each referral throughout their history with you so you can make the most informed marketing decisions. Here are some useful reports and charts we allow you to build.
- Origination Referral Count: The first way customers are finding your company. You can count and sort to show you the most popular.
- Event Referral Count: This is the way your customers found your company for each event they booked with you. This can change over time. They may have first found you through an ad and now just remember you because they liked working with you before. Again, you can count and sort to show you the most popular.
- Event Referral Dollars: This is similar to the Event Referral Count but instead of counting the number of events per referral, we are looking at the dollars spent per referral. You can see totals on this as well.
- Empty Referrals: This report would show you what sales reps are not taking referral information or whether you have an issue with your checkout, such that you are not gathering referral information there.
How to filter data to get more Referral information
In addition to these reports, there are many others that you can build yourself to get the information you are looking for. In all cases, adjusting the way you filter leads will help you change the report to show you different information. Here are some examples.
- Amount of Customers Finding You Through Certain Referrals: You could use the Event Referral Count report to see the counts per referral, and if you do not filter on the status of the event or lead (status is often used to determine whether you booked the event or not), then you can see how all customers are finding you. This shows you what channels are sending the most potential customers to you.
- Amount of Customers Booking You Through Certain Referrals: Similar to #1 above with one difference. You can exclude any event that doesn't book by filtering on status to see what referrals are producing the most booked events.
- Date Filtering: Of course when you are filtering, you will be able to choose dates to filter on so you can compare last year to this year. This provides valuable information on the effect of changes in your marketing plan between years. You can also choose different date fields to get additional information. For example, for the Origination Referral Count report you could use the Contact Modified Date/Time or better yet the Contact Last Activity Date/Time (available to CRM module users only) field to filter on so you can see the most recently active customers and what referral channels they came from.
Below is a video showing you how to setup some of these reports and charts.