How to Create a Roofing Referral Program: Tips & Strategies

What Is A Roofing Referral Program?

This is a marketing strategy in which existing customers are rewarded with incentives such as discounts and gift cards for recommending your roofing services to others—friends, family members, schoolmates, etc.

For example, a roofing company may offer a free roofing inspection or a discount on roof repairs to any homeowner who brings a lead that converts.

Referral programs help roofing companies achieve two vital goals simultaneously. 

Apart from being a great way of attracting valuable new customers, they help strengthen your relationship with existing ones and boost brand recognition among residents of your service area.

Although referral programs are sometimes used interchangeably with word-of-mouth, they differ significantly. Unlike word-of-mouth, which happens organically, referral programs involve companies actively incentivizing customers.

Additionally, referral programs can morph into word-of-mouth marketing in the long term as they grow loyal customers who may gladly recommend your services to others for free. This continuous stream of organic leads will help grow your revenue as time passes.

What Are The Benefits of a Roofing Referral Program?

Every effort and resource dedicated to creating roofing referral programs produces multiple benefits for the company, including leads, higher customer retention, lower customer acquisition costs, etc.

A constant flow of new customers

Unlike other trade industries like plumbing, roofing is an occasional purchase since roofs are typically replaced once every 15 years. Roofing companies need a low-cost method to build awareness during this long dormant period and be the first person customers think of when repairing or replacing their roofs.

Referral programs encourage customers to remember you and recommend your services to others whenever their roofs are due for repair or replacement. This generates a consistent flow of customers at little or no cost.

Quality leads

According to research, referred customers have the highest research-purchase ratio. This means that any person a customer refers to your company is almost guaranteed to book an appointment for two key reasons:

• Referred customers usually feel accountable to referrers and prefer to hire you for the roofing project rather than disappoint them.

• They transfer the trust they have for the referrer to your company. Therefore, the trust barrier that often stops people from using service companies is largely removed by the time they contact your company.

Channels like referral programs with a high lead-to-purchase ratio are valuable in the current climate, which is characterized by low customer demand.

Lower customer acquisition costs

Referral marketing is one of the cheapest customer acquisition channels since you only pay when the lead converts. This is better than paying a specific amount to display a TV ad to thousands of viewers, mainly people who will never convert.

Higher customer lifetime value

Customers who come in via referral are 18 percent more likely to buy repeatedly than others because they feel accountable to the person who referred them. This lowers customer acquisition costs and boosts profitability.

Enhanced brand reputation

Customers talking positively about your company to others strengthens the brand image. This causes prospects to view your company positively, perceive you as credible, and hire you to fix their roofs.

How Can I Build A Roofing Referral Program?

Setting up referral reward programs requires minimal technical expertise. However, it still requires adequate preparation to succeed. You must define the ideal referral, goals, and incentive and promote the program via the right channels.

Here’s a deeper dive into the steps for setting up referral programs.

1. Define the ideal referral

Defining the ideal referral is crucial to attracting people primed to convert. 

First, collate the profile of current clients, taking note of details such as demographics, income levels, common roofing needs, and recurring complaints. This will inform the messaging used to create the referral message templates and the offer to convince prospective clients to act. 

For example, a roofing business that discovers its current clients always complain about the difficulty of finding experienced roofers can use the tagline “find experienced roofers at a discount” in its referral message template.

2. Set clear goals

Goals serve as benchmarks for gauging success. Without them, a referral program may fail and not influence a company’s bottom line.

Here are some goals to set for your referral program:

• Generating a specific amount of revenue within a set period.

• Increasing signups to maintenance agreement programs by a certain percentage.

• Growing local brand awareness by driving traffic to your website and social media handles.

3. Create an irresistible incentive

Before customers can sign up for a referral program, they must find the reward appealing. However, the reward should also be within your budget.

What’s the way to find the right balance between keeping to the budget and appealing to customers?

The strategy is to use the details gathered in the first step and collaborate with a financial expert to design a reward structure that appeals to customers' interests while still bringing in profit.

 4. Promote your program

Once the referral program is up and running, the next step is to promote it in areas and platforms where customers can find it and sign up.

Here are some channels roofing companies can use to promote their referral programs:

• Social media platforms

• Email newsletters

• Website navigation menu and footer

• Flyers

• Direct mail brochures

Later, we’ll explore factors to consider when choosing the platform to promote your referral program.

Roofing Referral Program Best Practices

Generally, referral programs have some best practices you can implement to ensure their success and help you achieve business goals.

Choose the right roofing referral rewards

Referral programs are effective to the extent customers find the incentive appealing. Great incentives motivate customers to participate in referral programs, while unappealing ones do the opposite.

When picking incentives, we advise roofing companies to avoid tying referrer incentives to their services, given the infrequent nature of roofing purchases. For example, a 10 percent roof replacement discount will not convince homeowners years away from changing their roofs to participate in a referral program. They’ll prefer a reward they can enjoy immediately.

Some examples of appropriate incentives you can offer include the following:

• Coupons for local hardware stores

• Free tickets to sporting events and roofing trade shows

• Commissions on the referred customer’s first purchase

• Gift baskets filled with groceries and company merchandise

Know when to ask for referrals

While promoting referral programs to customers is important, timing is everything. It’s vital to ask at the right times without seeming pushy, inconsiderate, or self-serving so customers don’t feel pressured to participate.

The way to do this is to suggest participation in the referral program to the customer at specific moments in the job cycle where they are more receptive, such as the following:

• Immediately after they leave a glowing review.

• When they mention your brand on social media or leave a favorable remark on a post.

• After a post-job call where the customer expresses satisfaction with the job.

• Beneath a customer satisfaction survey.

• After they’ve recommended your services to a customer unprompted.

Make the sharing process seamless

To increase the odds of customers promoting the referral program, remove any friction from the sharing process so they can easily spread the word. This will boost the program’s reach and make them willing to participate.

So, create a pre-drafted referral message template that customers can customize with the referral’s information. The message should explain the process and how people can sign up.

Here are other ways to make the referral process seamless:

• Include social media share buttons in messages and landing pages promoting the referral program.

• Create a dedicated landing page that explains the program’s guidelines.

• Allow customers to create unique referral links.

• Design a referral form with fields for only essential information to not overwhelm referrers and referrals. Collect the referrer's (the roofing customer) email, full name, and phone number. Then, add extra fields to accommodate the referral’s name, email address, and phone number.

Promote your program efficiently

Customers can’t sign up for your referral program if they are unaware it exists. Therefore, the program should be promoted across every customer touch point. 

Include it on your website, invoices, social media handles, and email signatures. Additionally, run targeted email campaigns to remind customers about your program.

Before using any channel, acquaint yourself with the channel’s nuances to use the right messaging and content format. What do customers visiting that platform expect to find? What does other content on the platform look like? How can you tailor your promotion to resemble it?

ServiceTitan’s Home Services Marketing platform can help manage referral program promotion. The tool has features roofing companies use to create, manage, and track marketing campaigns from one hub instead of subscribing to multiple roofing tools.

For example, Marketing Pro – Email software allows you to create audiences that fit certain criteria using data stored in your CRM (customer relationship management) platform. This ensures emails resonate with customers’ current needs, marketing funnel stage, and expectations.

For example, you can build an audience of only those customers who have purchased more than twice in the past and send them emails promoting a referral program. This increases the likelihood that they will sign up and recommend your services to prospects like them.

Learn how Guardian Roofing uses ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro to make the phones ring incessantly.

Track and Measure Results

Invest in a system for tracking and evaluating your referral program's performance to determine if and when you should change the promotion strategy and incentives.

Overall, any system you use should track metrics such as:

• Customers generated through the referral program and the people who referred them.

• The amount the referred customer spends.

• The date and time the referral came in.

• The time the salesperson followed up on the referral.

One reliable way to track referral program performance is to use ServiceTitan’s Field Reporting software to track the impact of your referral program on revenue.

The cloud-based software lets you track daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly business revenue performance using dashboards and reports from anywhere in the world. This allows you to identify the conversions the referral program generates in real time.

Guardian Roofing tripled its revenue to $30 million in just seven years of using ServiceTitan's FIeld Reporting software. The company uses the software to monitor revenue performance, deliver an elevated customer experience, and streamline business processes.

“I can't even imagine going back to pre-ServiceTitan because of how archaic it was and not having real-time information,” says Lori Swanson, co-founder of the company. 

“Having to wait until the end of the month to know your metrics is just not scalable. It's really hard to grow that way. You find yourself reactive.”

Sign up to the platform to achieve the same or even better results.

Listen to this interview with roofing industry leader, Lance Bachmann, to learn more ways to incorporate technology to grow your company.

Additional Roofing Referral Program Ideas to Inspire You

Here are some extra roofing referral–program strategies that we’ve found to work:

Use two-sided incentives

Earlier, we explained why roofing companies should not incentivize customers with rewards tied to booking an appointment since roofing purchases are infrequent. However, this advice does not apply to the referred customer, especially when using a two-sided incentive structure.

A two-sided incentive referral program rewards both the customer and the referred customer. It comprises an incentive to encourage the customer to participate in the program and another to prompt the referred customer to book an appointment.

For instance, a roofing company might want to drive revenue using a referral program. The company could offer the referring customer a gift basket filled with merchandise, while the referred customer would get a percentage discount on their new roof. It would be a win-win for both parties.

Donate to a worthy charity

An excellent way to boost the reach of a referral program and get more people to participate is to tie the rewards to a social cause aligning with customers’ values and social concerns.

First, find local causes most customers support and include them on the referral form and dedicated landing page. Then, give a certain percentage of every purchase the referred customer makes to the local charity they choose on the referral form.

This will motivate customers to refer people to your company.

Focus on increasing your referral rates

Increasing referral rates—the percentage of total income tied to referral purchases—boosts revenue. This is expected as it encourages more people to book appointments.

Generally, aim for a two to three percent referral rate since the global average is currently 2.35 percent. That means three out of every 100 work orders should come from referrals.

Here are some tips to implement to achieve this:

• Frequently remind satisfied customers to enroll in the referral program.

• Amplify the program’s visibility by advertising it across all customer touchpoints.

• Be transparent with the program’s guidelines and rewards.

• Use two-sided incentive structures. Plus, reward both the referred and referring customer handsomely to encourage participation.

• Reward customers and non-customers who refer people to you.

One other way to boost referral rates is to use affiliate programs.

Try affiliate programs

Affiliate programs use influential people in the roofing industry, marketers, and other external partners with large audiences to encourage customers to book appointments. Just like a double-sided incentive, the external partners and the customers that came from them get a reward.

This strategy is an excellent way to leverage the trust and community external partners have built with their followers. You’re essentially circumventing the hard and time-consuming process of building an audience from scratch.

Before picking who to partner with, scrutinize their audience base to ensure it overlaps with your target audience. 

Pay attention also to how much engagement their posts or articles prompt, to get an idea of whether you’ll get a good return for every dollar you invest in the affiliate program.

Back to You

Referral marketing is an excellent and cost-effective customer acquisition channel. The benefits it delivers extend beyond just lead generation, to awareness, positive brand reputation, customer loyalty, and recurring revenue.

Use the tips and best practices explored above to set up your referral program for success. Pick the right incentives, build a referral persona, structure the program to attract such people, and pair the program with other low-cost marketing strategies like roofing SEO.

Finally, use roofing company software like ServiceTitan to promote your referral programs and measure their performance. Create, measure, and track each marketing initiative from one hub and visualize its impact on the company’s revenue.

ServiceTitan is software roofing companies use to manage and streamline every aspect of their operations. Whether it’s marketing, invoicing, dispatching, or scheduling, ServiceTitan can do it all. Join over 100,000 contractors across the nation using the software to boost revenue.