Partnership management platform, Impact.com, has unveiled a new customisable customer referral marketing solution, impact.com/advocate to enable brands to create automated referral marketing programs.

The solution is aimed at helping brands build authentic, profitable, and scalable partnerships with their customers.

According to Australian research commissioned by the vendor, 84% of consumers make purchase decisions based on referrals and recommendations from someone they know. Furthermore, 58% of consumers trust someone they know personally the most for information when purchasing, significantly higher than any other source tested. Traditional advertising channels ranked the lowest in trust at 3%.

"The launch of impact.com/advocate comes when consumer trust in advertising is at an all-time low, but reliance on trusted, personal recommendations is higher than ever," says Adam Furness, Managing Director APAC at impact.com. "Impact.com/advocate allows brands to authentically engage their best ambassadors, their own customers, through tailored referral programs that can manage a diverse range of rewards for the referral and to the referee. Best of all, brands and their agencies can now manage all their partnerships — traditional affiliates, influencers, media publishers, other businesses and now customer referral marketing — from one, unified platform."

The platform offers features such as a flexible and configurable program builder, reward exchanges, on-brand referral experiences, and robust tracking and analytics capabilities. It builds on impact.com’s 2023 acquisition of SaaSquatch, a provider of customer referral software.

Giacomo Bertollo, head of product marketing at Hack the Box, a cybersecurity workforce development platform, claimed a significant boost in revenue and ARR after using impact.com’s customer referral solution.

"Combining our customer referral and affiliate programs to one platform with impact.com has also helped us ease security reviews, reduce costs, and streamline our workflow. We’re excited about the future of this platform which can evolve and grow with us, and look forward to leveraging its full potential to drive even greater results."