Webhooks And Referral Factory: A Full Guide

A webhook is a way for different software applications to talk to each other in real-time. With Referral Factory, you can use webhooks to send referred leads, trigger a qualification, or issue a reward.

In this guide 👇

👉 Why Use Webhooks?

👉 Outbound Webhook

👉 Inbound Webhook

👉 How Do You Send The Referred Users Code OUT

Why Use Webhooks?

There are two reasons 👇

• Every time you get a new referred user (or a new lead) you want to send that user to your already existing business workflows.

• You would want to send the code/coupon back to Referral Factory to qualify a user.

First, you'll need to build your referral program using the campaign builder inside Referral Factory. Once your referral program is up and running, you can then use webhooks to send and receive the data. 

There are two types of webhooks 👇

👉 Outbound Webhook

👉 Inbound Webhook

1. Outbound Webhook

In the case of Referral Factory, you can create an outbound webhook to send the data of your new referred user (or referred lead) to any endpoint – this could be an endpoint your developer creates or an endpoint you create in Zapier,  Airtable, Tray.io, or anywhere else that can receive an incoming webhook. 

Once you have created your webhook endpoint that can receive the data you're trying to send out, 

👉 Navigate to your campaigns tab in your dashboard

👉 Click on the Actions dropdown

👉 Choose Webhooks 

👉 Click on the "Create An Outbound Webhook" button. 

👉 Choose An Event

Follow the step-by-step prompts – start by choosing the event that your Webhook should fire on. 

👉 Endpoint & Method

1. Next, you will need to enter the endpoint that you created earlier. This must be a URL starting with https.
2. You will then choose the request type – in most cases you will choose “Send me POST Request”.

• GET- It requests data from a specified resource.
• POST- It submits the processed data to a specified resource.

👉 User Fields

Next, you need to customize the request fields and choose what information you want to send through. Toggle on which request fields you would like to pass on. Remember you need to use the same naming convention as your endpoint in order to catch the data correctly. For example – if you have named the field email_address in Airtable, you need to make sure you name it email_address in your Webhook setup on Referral Factory.

👉 Hidden Fields

Next, you can use hidden fields if needed.

👉 Headers

👉 Finish

Once you’ve completed the above steps, make sure you give your Webhook a name that you can easily identify and click ‘Save’.

Congrats. Your Webhook is now setup 🙌

Once you have created your Webhook or Webhooks, you can find them by navigating to your campaigns tab → clicking the blue 'Actions' button → and then clicking on Webhooks 👇

Here is an example of how the request body is formatted in the request when data is sent to your endpoint. Data is sent via query parameters to your Webhook URL. 

referrer_id=261470&referrer_code=zgLAYb&referrer_first_name=Jessica&referrer_email=support%2Bjessica%40referral-factory.com&id=261471&code=zruTPh&first_name=Byron&email=support%2Bbyron%40referral-factory.com&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwebhooks.referral-factory.com%2FzruTPh%2Fjoin&source=Referred&date=2022-06-09&referrals_count=0&campaign_id=4815

Read more about the Outbound Webhook in this help guide. 

2. Inbound Webhook

You can use an inbound webhook to allow you to easily qualify your referred users when they convert - simply by sending their unique code to your inbound webhook endpoint. 

We created an inbound webhook so that you can easily qualify your referred users once they convert. You do this by sending their unique code to the endpoint given to you in your account. To find your inbound webhook endpoint:

👉 going to the SETTINGS tab

👉 scrolling down to the webhook section.

Hit SHOW to see your webhook endpoint, and please remember to keep this endpoint URL private. 

You can automatically update the status of a referred user by sending their unique code to this endpoint, which means you will be changing this:  

Qualified = No 

to 

Qualified = Yes

Below is an example of the payload you would use 👇

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

How Do You Send The Referred Users Code OUT

In order to qualify a referred user using their code, you first need to have that user's code in your system or workflow. Below we'll show you the methods you can use to get a user code OUT of Referral Factory, right when they join your campaign👇

• Create an outbound Webhook to fire every time a new referred user joins your campaign - this will send the CODE with the user into your system. Read our help guide on how to do this here.
• Set up the 'New User' Zap to fire every time a new referred user joins your campaign - this will send the CODE with the user to Zapier, and from Zapier you can send it to your system. Read our help guide on how to do this here. 
• Using one of our native CRM integrations, you can send all your new referred users over to your CRM as they join your campaign, passing along their CODES. We offer integrations with many CRMS, but here is an example of how to do that using HubSpot. 
• Using the redirect option which you can select on step 3 of your campaign builder. This allows you to redirect the invited users off to your own website once they have joined the campaign, and pass along their CODE as a GET parameter in the URL we direct them to. Read our help guide on how to do this here. 
• Using the API you can call any direct or referred user by using the 'Get A Specific User' function of our API, you can then view all the information for that user including their code. Read our API documentation on this function here. 

Learn more about Outbound Webhooks.

Learn more about Inbound Webhooks.