Meferral Marketing

Holy coined term Batman, today I would like to put my stamp on Meferral Marketing. Simple yet elegant. Ok, so the term is a little dumb but the lesson is magnificent.

Referral marketing is something we all know and love because it is so good to us (small business's). I live and die off of referral marketing, at Metro Contractors our marketing budget so far has equaled roughly ZERO for the life of the company; excluding Starbucks gift cards and thank you notes. But referral marketing and all of the sexy reading that goes along with it can only take us so far. Not so far in that it ends, but so far in that as a small business owner sometimes we sit back and do nothing (as far as marketing) because we are trustafarians living off of our own trust fund of referrals. Here comes Meferral POW!

Meferral Marketing - two Big Boy examples

Starbucks - You go in and get a latte and they get you to buy that devilish blueberry muffin as well. Fine and dandy, that is called a cross sell or upsell and it's wonderful. Then during checkout they hand you a receipt (now colored yellow so it jumps out from all of the other receipts stuffed in the ashtray of my car) that offers a $2 iced beverage after 2pm that day. WHAT! They did not cross sell me, they turned me into two customers. They referred a customer to themselves, MEFERRAL. They turned me from a once a day customer to a twice a day customer, they just created a customer out of thin air and the best part is they can still cross sell and upsell to that new customer (the 2pm me).

For a while this was my only example, then I was reading a Jack Welch book and I came across this.

GE - In a nutshell, GE Power Systems builds and maintains power plants. GE Capital handles money and finances. GE Power Systems realized that power plants were having a heck of a time handling all of their finances and accounting in house, sent them over to GE Capital and WHAMO! GE just created two clients out of one.

These examples are vastly different in that one company had two offerings and got one client to buy them both (again not upselling in my opinion becuase the two are not related whatsoever) the other company has one offering (my daily d.a.b, delicious addicting beverages) and turned a single client into a repeat client (repeat repeat because I already went once a day).

So what about you, do you (individual or small business) offer two totally unrelated things (life coaching and website design) or can you take your current customer and turn them into two? I bet you can and then you can join the ranks of your best referrers (that one is tough to say!) and starting hitting homeruns with Meferral Marketing.