Rather than banner ads or TV commercials, it is often word-of-mouth referrals from friends and family that drive consumers to make a purchase.
But there hasn't really been a way for brands to track those real-world referrals. Nor has there been much of a tangible benefit for consumers to provide them — until now.
A former consultant and eBay executive named Jordan Glazier believes that he has found a way to meld word of mouth with digital shopping. On Wednesday he is rolling out Wildlink, a platform seeking to reward consumers for making recommendations across social and digital channels while driving incremental revenue for brands.
While Wildlink still can't gauge what happens when you recommend a great restaurant or flash sale to a friend in spoken conversation, it can help brands track what kinds of sales result from people sharing recommendations digitally, Glazier told Business Insider.
And the company wants to spur people to make recommendations more frequently — by paying them.
Wildlink wants to turn recommendations among friends into marketing you can measure
According to Glazier, Wildlink can automatically detect product referrals using natural language processing and transform them into trackable links, which can be shared across email, text messages, social media, and other peer-to-peer chat platforms like WhatsApp.
These links, when clicked, allow the sender to make money if the receiver ends up making a purchase from participating brands, Glazier said. All users have to do is download the Wildlink app on iOS or Android or on their desktops.
"People predominantly use the web for peer-to-peer communication, and yet it hasn't been effectively commercialized, and all of the ad formats around it miss the mark," Glazier told Business Insider.
"The purpose of Wildlink is to help people effortlessly get their fair share for the recommendations they make to their friends and family."
Glazier sees the app as being attractive to both brands and users.
Unlike existing rebate services, which give cash back for users' own shopping, it aims to reward users for suggestions they share with others. Those who sign up also have access to a dashboard where they can track the earnings from their recommendations, from which they can make 5 to 25% commission.
Recommendations from trusted friends are still very powerful
On the brand side, Wildlink should help motivate word-of-mouth suggestions (the digital variety at least), which helps influence purchase decisions. According to the most recent Nielsen Global Trust in Advertising report, 83% of people said they would act on recommendations from people they know.
There's also something in it for the biggest tech platforms. Wildlink plugs into the APIs of companies like Facebook, Snapchat, and Slack, so its product links can be embedded and generate revenue.
Of course, it won't be easy for an unknown brand like Wildlink to get its app onto people's already crowded phones. Especially at a time when people are more cautious than ever about sharing personal data or billing information. But neither the platforms and merchants nor Wildlink gets any purchase history or profile data of the buyers, Glazier said, and the attribution is anonymized.
Wildlink is also making adoption easier by trying to weave its way into different mobile operating systems while keeping in mind specific user habits, Glazier said. In the case of iOS users, for example, people tend to share links by finding the share button at the bottom of the browser. So Wildlink can be added into the share sheet, alongside other apps where users tend to share links, such as Facebook Messenger.
"Our goal is to become ubiquitous and make it easy for people to earn from their referrals wherever and whenever they recommend something to friends or family," Glazier said.
While Wildlink officially launches Wednesday, it has been tested by a roster of big-name brands including Walmart, Expedia, Lowe's, Neiman Marcus, and Hotels.com during the past quarter. More than 20,000 brands and merchants are already part of the Wildlink network and are seeing promising results.
"We know that personal recommendations play an important role in travelers' purchase choices," said Todd Schindele, a senior manager of partner marketing at Hotels.com. "It's a powerful platform for driving new bookings for our hotel partners."
The app's parent company, Wildfire Systems, also raised $2 million in a seed round led by Mucker Capital in 2017.
