This is an overview of how a business with existing clients can set up a referral program to reward already-paying customers for referring their friends.

If you’ve reached this page, you probably know the benefits of having a referral marketing campaign, but as a refresher, here are the main benefits we have identified from almost 5,000 campaigns built with Viral Loops:

Now, imagine you are the CEO or CMO of a software company.

Your product is a “web app”, and you already have about 1,000 paying customers.

Your customers are happy and loyal. You notice that some new customers come through recommendations of existing customers — costing you no money in ads.

Now, consider creating a long-term referral program for every paying customer of yours so they can be more motivated to invite their friends — the goal is to get more customer referrals.

We developed Viral Loops precisely for that purpose.

To create a Viral Loops referral program for your brand, understanding the flow you need to build is essential.

A referral campaign is not just a form where people copy a referral link or code — it is a complete viral loop looking like this:

This article provides the steps needed to design and deploy this complete flow.

There are some essential aspects of your referral marketing strategy for your campaign before you start the technical set-up. Viral Loops cannot help you with these as they depend on your goals and business.

Key question:

Will every user get a referral link automatically (auto opt-in), or will they have to join the referral program themselves (manual opt-in)?

For our example, because you want to make the referral process fast and easy, you want all users to have a referral link they can copy from their app dashboard. You prefer auto opt-in.

Key question:

What results do you expect from the referral program? In other words, what will trigger a successful referral? Free trial users? Paying users? Email subscribers?

For our example, you want to get more paying users out of this campaign. You want a successful referral triggered when the invitee becomes a paying customer.

Key question:

Do you want to reward the referrer and the invitee? Only the referrer? Only the invitee?

For our example, you want to reward only the refer for every referral they make.

Key question:

What rewards/incentives will you offer your customers for referring friends?

You want your rewards to give more product value to your customers, so you want to offer subscription discounts for every referral.

Because you want to count successful referrals when invitees pay for your product (a custom conversion), you have two template options:

For our example, you think the milestone flow will be more effective for your type of customer, so you pick the Milestone Template.

Set your campaign name for internal use only and specify the URL that the referral link will take people to.

Here, you “tell” Viral Loops what Milestones you want to offer and when each milestone is achieved.

You should send a confirmation email when every milestone is reached. You can do that through Viral Loops or integrate your email platform with Viral Loops and send it from there.

These are the elements your customers will interact with to copy their referral link, and check their progress.

For the form widget, you should ignore the Joining State since you will auto-opt-in your customers to the referral program.

It is highly recommended you customise the widgets so they appear like a core part of your brand in terms of fonts and colours.

(If you want fully custom designs built inside your app, you can skip this section completely and refer to the API and SDK documentation to find out how you can get all the Viral Loops data to populate your custom elements)

Viral Loops integrates with various tools in three ways:

If you want to exchange data with any of these, select them and follow the instructions inside.

Now that the campaign properties are ready, it’s time to make it real.

In context, we now want to:

This step concerns how your existing users get their referral code. As decided in the beginning of the campaign:

You want all existing users to get a referral code. Instead of asking them to opt-in using the joining state widget.

To do that, you have two options:

Since you want to avoid bothering developers with marketing stuff, you prefer CSV Import.

Now, Viral Loops has given all these people a unique referral link—but this is still inside Viral Loops only.

A lot of customers will come through customer referrals, but quite a few will also come on their own without a referral.

Since both types will be customers who might refer friends, you want them to automatically get a referral link, too — to become referral program participants.

To do that, you have two options:

In this article, we assume you do not have a Zapier account — let’s do it with the API.

To register new participants to the campaign, you need to make a POST request to [https://app.viral-loops.com/api/v3/campaign/participant] with the necessary information. View complete documentation here.

Make sure you create a condition that adds a new participant’s referrer if they have one.

Alternatively, using the Viral Loops SDK, you can also do it from the front end. This is useful to parse the referrer’s code from a URL parameter or the localStorage.

The information you want users to see are:

We recommend adding all elements containing this information to a dedicated page — a referral dashboard.

A dashboard with the Viral Loops widget can look like this:

Alternatively, if you spend time making custom designs and manually parsing data, a fully custom referral dashboard can look like anything, for example:

For this example, we’ll only use the Viral Loops widgets — preferable if you do not have the resources to do fully custom works.

Let’s say you want the referral dashboard to live on the Profile page inside your app.

Go to your page and add the Viral Loops snippet in the <head>

Because you automatically give everyone a referral link, you do not use or want the joining state of the Viral Loops widget. Everyone is a participant, so they should only see the sharing state.

Because of this, you now need to write some code to display only the sharing state:

Then, make a campaign.identify() call when the page loads and parse in the user email. This will “tell” the form widget to show only the sharing state with the referral link of that person.

Now, it’s time to define what makes a successful referral. In other words, what actions will close the referral loop.

As you initially decided, you only want to measure paying customers who came through referrals.

To do that, you need to trigger a conversion using the API.

To set this up, you need to make a POST request with all the invitee information to [https://app.viral-loops.com/api/v3/campaign/participant/convert] when the invitee makes a purchase. View the complete documentation here.

If everything has been set up correctly, you can see which participant deserves a reward in your Viral Loops dashboard.

It is entirely up to you to reward participants. Viral Loops does not deliver gifts or directly communicate with your business processes to distribute your rewards.

You have two options to reward your participants:

Similar to previous steps, we assume you don’t have a Zapier account, so you prefer the manual way.

Usually, our customers create a small routine where, once a week or so, they check their Viral Loops dashboard and export the participants that deserve a reward.

Then they go to the corresponding system, like Stripe, and give them the reward, like a discount.

Viral Loops automatically identifies which participants might be exploiting your campaign and creates a list ordered by Fraud Risk.

It is entirely up to you to evaluate this fraud risk and decide if you should ban that participant. Please check the referral they’ve made yourself for potential fame customers.