Do Referral Programs Work When Customers Only Buy Once a Decade?

When Snoball first started working with moving companies about three years ago, our CEO was skeptical of the whole category. His reasoning was the same objection every mover raises: people move rarely, so how much referral volume can a customer base like that really produce? It is a fair question, and the answer turned out to be different from what he expected.

Key Takeaways

• A referral does not require your customer to buy again — it requires them to know someone who will.
• Low purchase frequency is a bad predictor of referral volume — conversation frequency is the real variable.
• High-consideration purchases get discussed more, not less — the rarity is what makes people ask around.
• Start with customers, not partners — the customer program is the low-hanging fruit most companies skip.
• Being memorable beats being frequent — and infrequent, high-stakes services are memorable by default.

The objection, stated fairly

The logic goes like this. A referral program works best when you are in front of customers constantly — a gym, a coffee shop, a salon. Those businesses have a hundred chances a year to ask. A moving company gets one interaction, then the customer disappears for eight years. There is no relationship to maintain and nothing to stay top of mind for.

The same reasoning applies to roofing, HVAC replacement, solar, window replacement, and bathroom remodels. It is not a lazy objection. It is a reasonable inference from how most people picture a referral program working.

It is also wrong, and the reason it is wrong is a single assumption buried in the middle of it.

The assumption that breaks

The objection quietly assumes that a referral requires the customer to be in the market. It does not. It requires them to know someone who is.

Once you see that, the frequency math inverts. Your customer does not need to move again. They need to have one conversation, at some point in the next two years, with a coworker, neighbor, sibling, or friend who mentions they are moving. That conversation is enormously more likely than the customer moving again themselves.

And here is the part that surprises people: high-consideration purchases generate more of those conversations, not fewer. Nobody asks their neighbor to recommend a coffee shop. Everybody asks around before they hire someone to carry everything they own across the country, or put a new roof on the house, or install $30,000 of solar panels. The rarity of the purchase is exactly what makes people seek a recommendation, because they have no personal experience to fall back on and the cost of choosing badly is high.

So the relevant frequency is not how often your customer buys. It is how often someone asks your customer for a recommendation. Those are completely different numbers, and only the second one matters.

What actually happened

Landon has been direct about being wrong here. Coming into the industry he questioned both how often people move and how referable the service really was. JK Moving was one of Snoball’s first clients in the space, and the results settled it — over $200,000 in new revenue within roughly seven months, with referrals converting at 50 to 60 percent and becoming their lowest cost of acquisition across the entire funnel.

Since then the pattern has repeated enough to stop being surprising. Muscular Moving Men generated over 100 referrals and booked 29 new moves in two months. Move 4 Less has produced 422 referrals. Roadway Moving, 437. Stairhopper Movers, 288. None of those companies changed how often their customers move.

The specific lesson Landon draws from it is worth stating plainly, because it runs against where most companies put their effort: do not skip the customer referral program to chase referral partners. Realtors, storage facilities, apartment complexes, and interior designers are genuinely valuable, and building those partnerships is real business development work — outreach, relationship-building, ongoing nurture.

The customer program is easier. Those people already like you. You already have their contact information. There is no pitch required, no relationship to establish from cold. It is the low-hanging fruit, and it is the thing most companies leave sitting there while they go build a partner channel from scratch.

If your customers really do buy once a decade

Three adjustments make the model work for genuinely infrequent services.

Stop asking for repeat business and start asking about their network. “Let us know when you move again” is a dead end for eight years. “If anyone you know is planning a move, we would love to help them” is live from the day the job ends.

Extend the timeline instead of intensifying the ask. With frequent-purchase businesses you can afford to be impatient. Here you cannot. The default should be a light check-in every two to three months, indefinitely, for anyone who has not opted out. That is not nagging — it is being present at whatever unpredictable moment someone asks your customer for a recommendation.

Lean on how memorable the job was. A moving day is one of the more stressful things a household goes through, which means a crew that handled it well is genuinely remembered years later. That is an advantage frequent-purchase businesses do not have. A coffee shop is forgettable by design; a good moving experience is a story people tell.

The single sentence worth taking from all of this: referral volume tracks conversation frequency, not purchase frequency. Everyone who used you this year knows someone who will need you next year. Whether you hear about it depends entirely on whether you are still in touch when that conversation happens.

For what to measure once the program is running, see our referral benchmarks for moving companies. Also useful: whether referral programs work for smaller companies and running a year-round program instead of a seasonal one.

Customer results from Snoball’s verified results data. Commentary from CEO Landon Taylor, August 2026.