Test Your Referral Marketing IQ

The way some people talk about referral marketing, you’d think they were NASA engineers planning a mission to Mars, or that launching a referral marketing program is akin to solving the international debt crisis. And while the digital age has certainly added a level of complexity, it is still essentially promoting products and services by word of mouth – where the mouth may now be an online share, a tweet, or even an email contact list.

How savvy are you when it comes to referral marketing? Here’s a quick and relatively easy CloudSponge quiz.

1. Who does the referring in a referral marketing program?
a. your customers and clients
b. you
c. your mom
d. your creditors

2. Using a single word, referral marketing can best be summed up as:
a. advertising
b. difficult
c. witchcraft
d. networking

3. Compared to traditional word of mouth programs, the online environment allows for a high degree of:
a. frustration and failure
b. tracking and accountability
c. face-to-face interactions
d. complication and expense

4. Using your customers to invite other customers is:
a. the core principle behind invitation marketing
b. not possible given current technical restrictions
c. best left to your company’s marketing experts
d. evil and unethical

5. Allowing your users to upload their webmail or desktop address books to your website:
a. makes them angry and turns them off
b. is a complicated process that requires your IT team to get involved
c. encourages more sharing and stronger social connections
d. is the single worst thing you could ever consider doing

Answers: 1-a; 2-d; 3-b; 4-a; 5-c

Okay, if you got less than 5 out of 5 on that one, you might want to reconsider referral marketing as a career. Luckily, we’ve made it dirt simple at CloudSponge, so you don’t even have to know an API from a widget to get in on the benefit. You could even have scored a perfect 0 and still turn your users’ email address books into online gold.