What do successful eCommerce brands like Warby Parker, Birchbox, Greats, and Bonobos have in common? Yes, they’re well-known.

They have differentiated from the competition in their niche and built a brand.

Although there are countless other shops that sell glasses,cosmetics, kicks or men’s clothes, those brand names throw a long shadow.

We’re continuing with the AARRR Metrics for eCommerce. So far, we’ve explained the first 3 – acquisition, activation and retention. This week it’s Referral time! (For a quick recap, see this infographic.)

What’s referral as an AARRR metric?

Dave McClure, who coined the framework, doesn’t set strict limitations on what it is and what it isn’t.

In his original presentation of the concept, he puts it broadly: it’s when someone refers someone else to your website and the new visitor takes some action. Just that. They don’t have to be a customer to do the referral, and the action is not necessarily a purchase.

Currently, online retail makes up about 8% of the US market while offline holds the rest.

That’s a lot of money still not coming to you, online sellers.

Although we’d like to believe that e-commerce is the only future, studies show that people still like shopping at traditional stores. The best shopping experience still happens offline:

If you don’t plan on working on retaining customers today, you’re losing money. Every customer you fail to keep has to be compensated for with 5 new acquired (in the US, or 7 in Europe).

The same report claims that about 40% of revenue for US online stores comes from repeat customers, although they make up only around 8% of the traffic.

While customer acquisition is vital in the initial stage, it turns into a rat race if it’s the main source of business. We like to compare aggressive acquisition to dating where you have to always impress someone new as opposed to being in a long-term relationship where care keeps the fire up.

Wherever you look for advice on retention, you see remarketing, extraordinary customer service, reactivating emails and the rest of the usual suspects.

However, we know you need shortcuts too.

If you already do some Inbound Marketing for your ecommerce, you’re on the right track. Well-done inbound can increase conversions up to 10 times.

Too confused to start? Inbound Marketing sounds too complicated?

Worry not, we’re on a mission to debunk that myth. Small ecommerce businesses absolutely can and should have an Inbound strategy in place.

So you want to grow your online store to the next level. The two basic ways are getting more customers and getting them to spend more. This article is dedicated to winning new customers the smart way – with referral marketing strategies.

The ultimate proof that you provide awesome customer experience is that people go out and tell friends and family about you.

Even if they like your brand and product, they have so many reasons not to tell anybody: they forget, they don’t know if the others are looking to buy such thing at all, it hasn’t come up as a topic…

Let’s overcome all those objections with minimum changes and spend on your part.