Sending gift certificates, good towards the purchase of your products and, yes, services too, can be a great way to stimulate additional purchases. It’s also a great tool to use for referrals. Send out gift certificates to customers and ask them to give them away to someone who might use it. Then give your customer additional credits for each one of those gift certificates that comes back by way of a new customer.

PayPal has a feature that makes creating online and printable gift certificates for your products and services pretty simple. Here’s an example on Duct Tape Marketing (Just an example execution not trying to trick you into buying gift certificates – although people have asked!)

The only real downside is that to redeem the certificate the user must be or become a PayPal member.

If you are an existing PayPal merchant the process for creating gift certificates is as simple as completing a form and pasting the buy button into your web page code.

Another promising looking online referral tool is ReferNow. This service allows you to create referral campaigns that make it very easy for customers to refer. The service creates the tools that make it very easy for you to motivate referral sources and track referral activity.