Using Coupons With Referral Factory: A Full Guide

You can issue unique coupons to incentivize referred leads to join your referral program and reward existing customers for a successful referral.

This is what you can do with our coupons feature 👇

• Issuing coupons to the person invited (the referred user) - often issued as an incentive 
• Issuing coupons to the person referring (the direct user)  - often issued as a reward 
• Qualifying referred users using the coupons that get redeemed

Before we dive into explaining our coupon feature, it’s important to understand the difference between coupons and rewards in Referral Factory:

• With the coupons feature, you upload your own list of coupons into your referral campaign having the value already on them. These coupons are created by you. 
  
  
• With the rewards feature, you can reward users by purchasing rewards from Referral Factory. From Referral Factory you can issue prepaid digital cards, 200+ different gift vouchers, and cash payouts in most currencies! For more information please read our help guide about Issuing Rewards. 

In order to set up and issue coupons, you need to have: 

• Any Referral Factory plan
• A published referral campaign in your account.
• The ability to create unique coupons or discount codes in your business. Referral Factory does not create coupons for you, so you will need to do this on your own system first. You should generate multiple unique coupons from your point of sale, billing software, or your e-commerce store for example. 

This help guide will tell you everything you need to know so that you can issue unique coupons to your users as both incentives and rewards. This is how it works:

Table Of Contents 

1. How to upload your coupons to your referral campaign.
2. How to issue unique coupons to the person invited (often called referred users).
3. How to qualify referred users when they use/redeem their coupons.
4. How to reward the person referring with the coupon, when the referral they made becomes qualified. 

1. How to upload your coupons to your referral campaign

In this video, let’s find out how we can upload coupons to a referral campaign. Please make sure, you’ve built your campaign before you upload your coupons as you will need to attach them to a campaign. 

*Note: Referral Factory only works with unique coupons. You must upload a unique batch of coupons to the system so that we can issue one unique coupon to each user.

2. How to issue unique coupons to the person invited (often called referred users)

Adding unique coupons to your referral campaign is as easy as dragging the coupon into the campaign! If you want to issue coupons to the person invited (referred user), then you would add the coupons into the second step of the pages for person invited and also to the email, the person invited gets when they join your referral campaign. 

These are the places you can issue coupons to the person invited:

1. You can add them to the campaign in the second step of pages for the person invited
2. You can also email the person invited (when they join your campaign)
   
   

3. How to qualify users when they use/redeem their coupons

There are two ways that you can qualify a referred user when a coupon has been redeemed - either manually, or in an automated way. 

1. Manual way

Once the person invited uses their coupon to register for a subscription, make a purchase, or anything else, you can manually mark that coupon as used or redeemed. This lets you know that the person invited has qualified (meaning the referred user has successfully converted). Below you can see how to do that 👇

2. Automated Way

You can also use your Zapier, A Webhook, or our API to automatically qualify referred users by sending us the coupon codes that get redeemed on your system.   Below is a diagram of how this works 👇 

You can either use the "Qualify referrals using coupon" zap to qualify a referred user when a coupon is used.

OR 

You can use your inbound webhook to qualify a referred user when the coupon is used. 

You can use your inbound webhook to easily qualify your referred users - simply by sending their unique coupon to the endpoint given to you in your account. You can find this endpoint by going to the COUPONS tab. 

Below is an example of the payload you would use 👇

curl "https://referral-factory.com/webhook/{token}/qualify" \
    -X POST \
    -d "coupon={unique_coupon}"

4. How to reward the person referring with the coupon

If you would like to also give a unique coupon to the person referring after the person they invite converts, you can do that by adding a coupon in the email notification that gets sent to the person referring when the person invited converts. 

This means the person referring will only receive their coupon after their friend (the referred user) has become qualified. 

*Note.  If you want to issue a different coupon as an incentive, and a different coupon for a reward, that is possible by uploading two batches of coupons and attaching them to the same campaign. 

To enable this email notification, go to the email notifications tab in your campaign builder. Click on the drop-down menu and toggle on the email notification for the person referring when the person invited converts.

Make sure you click on the coupon block on the right-hand side and toggle on the button to show coupon. If you have added multiple batches of coupons, please make sure you select the correct coupon batch from the available options.

The coupon will be added to the email notification with the same styling you chose when uploading your coupons 👏👏👏

*Note.  You get notification when 85% of coupons are issued and again on 95% and again when they expire.