Referral Program Integration Basics

Those of you who may not know me, my name is Michael Longnecker. I'm the head of operations here at ReferralRock. And ReferralRock is a referral software that helps businesses make it easier to get referrals. We work with thousands of customers across many different industries and company sizes, and today we're going to be talking about integrations and primarily what are the main different types of integrations. We need to set up a referral program. This call will be recorded and we'll also be sending the slides over. So feel free to take any notes, but you'll have all of the material after the call. Blake, who's our senior product manager, is also on the call, so he'll be able to assist with any questions you guys have at the end, as well as monitoring the chat. So if there's any particular integrations that you guys want to talk about, you know, make sure to put those in the chat and we'll be sure to address those at the end. So with that, we'll kind of dive into things. So goal for today is to talk about the two key integrations that all referral programs need. Sharing and tracking referrals. We'll talk through some advanced integration use cases. Now there are a ton of different types of integrations that you could use or potentially consider when setting up referral program. We'll talk about some of the most common advanced use cases and then we'll open it up for questions and just have an open discussion. So, you know, integrations are one of those topics that you can go super deep on. So we do want to just leave time. If people have particular integrations that they want to revisit. Happy to. Happy to talk about those in that session there. So getting into it, any different referral program that you want to run, there's really two key integrations that you need to set up. The first is building sharing into your customer experience, or if you know, if you're running like an affiliate program, like building it into those different interactions and communications that you have. And the second is going to be tracking referrals so that you know who referred who when they convert so that you can give that share of the credit for building sharing into your customer experience. This is really focused on how do you integrate the different sharing experiences across any place that you are interacting with what we would call members within Referral Rock. These would be, you know, your customers, your affiliates, your advocates, your employees, how do you build sharing? So that's part of those, like native experiences within reform. We have Two ways to do this. So one is our referral link builder. And these are different links that you place anywhere. We can do this for a variety of different systems. And there's two scenarios here. Known if the contact is known or if the contact is unknown. And we'll talk through that. And then the second is embedding the sharing directly within your own application so that it's native within, like a customer portal, a mobile, a mobile app. This is a more advanced option that requires programmatic access to that person's contact information. And it also requires a developer assistance. But we'll kind of talk through how that works as well. So the program link builder, this is our main promotion, integration, our main way of connecting with those different channels and touchpoints that you have. And there's two scenarios here. One is for known contacts. And so if the contact is known, you can create what we call a one click access link. And the way that this experience works is you send the link, maybe this is through an email, maybe it's part of a form or a checkout experience. They click on that link, that link is dynamic in the sense that it already has the contact information added to it and they open their portal directly. So it's a very seamless experience. Quick link, open, open portal, start sharing. In the other case where it's an unknown contact, there's a couple additional steps. So you click a link, it takes you to a program landing page where that person has been prompted to sign up. So they enter their information, or they sign up through Google Facebook, single sign on, and then they open the portal to start sharing. So walking through, example of what this looks like, I have a interactive demo here just to try to illustrate some of these experiences. So here would be a email that someone might send. That email is going to have a call to action button. This is an example of a known contact. So you're sending the email, therefore you know who that recipient is. You're able to create this one click access button. When someone clicks on it, they're taken immediately to that portal. So it's that sort of one click access to the portal. From the portal, they can see the referrals, check the rewards, they can start sharing. And so it's a very seamless experience here. Now, in the event where the contact is unknown, they click that link. Instead of going straight to the portal, they'll be directed to a program landing page. This is a page where you can tell them a little bit more about the program, how it works, and then you're going to be prompting them to sign up. When they sign up, they can either sign up to email or either Google or Facebook single sign on. And both of these are passwordless experiences. So throughout Referral Rock we've tried tried to eliminate the need for passwords, making it very easy to get within the portal as also return to the portal. So you don't have to go through a complicated registration process, you don't have to remember passwords. It's that seamless experience. If you did want to ask for additional information on the registration flow, this is where you would do it through this particular page. So then once they register, then they're taken back to the member portal where they can share and do everything that we've discussed before. So those are the two different program link exposures. And now we're going to talk through kind of how you'd go about in setting them up yourself. So jumping into the product if you haven't had a chance to sort of play around with this. Under campaigns we have this program link builder tool and it's a step by step process for building your own links. So the way that this works, you build your link, you select the program that you're interested in and then you can select, you know, the different tools that you want. So in this example I'll kind of talk about Maybe you have HubSpot Mailchimp, maybe use a tool that's not on the list. You know, maybe you want your marketing page and like your web app. So you walk, you walk through and then what this is going to do is so HubSpot Mailchimp, these are examples of known contacts. And so what we're doing with this link builder here is we're creating dynamic links that use the merge tags of the system. So HubSpot has this way of having first name, last name email. Mailchimp has a slightly different style of saving that merge tag. If you don't, if it's not on the list or you have your own, then you know, we have instructions for creating these own dynamic links with you know, know replacing the merge tags here. So a lot of flexibility if you want to have a tool that's not on the list. Same with web apps. So any of these options, if the contact is known and you're able to create these dynamic links, you're able to build that one click access experience for like a marketing website where it's an unknown contact, then instead we're going to be driving them to a program landing page and you would just link to that, to that page. Here, that's how the program link builder works. So super simple, great way of creating different links for different systems that you might be interacting with your customers, with your potential members, and all different ways to drive them to that same portal experience. The other option that we have is if you wanted to embed sharing natively within your, within your portal, within your mobile app, within your own experience, we have three different ways to do that. One would be the share Widget. So within your program editor, you design the share widget. Whatever you design there, you can place just that share widget within your application. You can also embed the full portal. So similar whatever you design within the program editor, you can place that directly within your application. Or we offer this third option which allows you to customize the the experience exactly how you want. So this would be through our API and basically you're building it with the various components that we provide. And we can talk more about this in the open discussion if anyone's interested. Otherwise there's links to the integration docs for how you go about setting that up. So trying to bring all of this together. One of the main reasons referral programs fail is because of lack of promotion. And so a big thing we push here at Referral Rock is trying to understand where are the different places that you're interacting with your customers, your potential members, and how can you create seamless experiences that build sharing into those native experiences. And so we talked about known context and unknown context. For the unknown context, things like your website, printed material, maybe you train your sales reps, your service reps to have those conversations. Maybe you're promoting on social media. These are different instances where the contact is unknown. And so you'd promote through our program, landing page links and instances where the contact is known. Things like email newsletters or anywhere else you're sending emails, checkout pages, your own customer portal or mobile apps. These are experiences where you can build those one click access links where it's click button, click link, open portal directly. And then if you have a customer portal or if you have a mobile app, those are the opportunities where you can actually embed the sharing more natively into your own experiences. So happy to kind of talk through any share questions that people have. But moving on to sort of the second key integration that you need when setting up a referral program, you want to track referrals and you want to do this in order to kind of understand, you know, how many referrals were driven from your program, but also so that you can give the person doing the sharing that credit for it. And so when we think about tracking referrals, we're trying to understand the referral journey from first click to convert a referral. And so the way this process works is you have three steps. First step, referral clicks a share link, and they're taken to your website, your landing page, or wherever else you want to drive them. We're then going to track that referral's web activity, the site visits, the page views, what are they doing on your site. And then finally, we want to capture that referral's contact information whenever they convert. And you know, depending on what your business looks like, there's going to be different types of converged like conversion areas. So common examples would include web forms, maybe it's a contact us form or request, a demo, you know, free trial, any application form, you know, any type of form that you might have that someone's filling in their information. Other common examples would be like a checkout page or payment page. Maybe you're asking people to schedule calls directly so you can use like a scheduling tool. Alternatively, if you don't have any of these set up, you can use our hosted landing page, which is a Native experience within ReferralRock. And you're kind of building your own referral capture mechanisms there, but just talking about integrating with your own experience on your website. One of the steps that you'll go from through is first you want to set your referral destination. So this is basically telling ReferralRock, hey, when a referral clicks on a shared link, where do you want that referral to go? So you set your referral destination, you install the referral SDK which allows you to track referral web activity, and then you capture referrals from your website. There's a number of different methods for capturing referrals, but the main one, or our recommendation is just to request assistance and let our team help you with that. So we will open up the program editor and we'll kind of talk through what this looks like. So for anyone who has not seen this, this is the program editor. This is where you go to create a referral program within Referral Rock. So you have, you know, your sharing steps, like what the share experience looks like, what's the referral destination? This is where you determine where that referral goes. Do you want to send them to a landing page, a website you can control? That redirect there rewards the portal experience, emails, and then launch. Launch is where you go to set up your tracking. So within here we have the SDK this needs to be applied to your website. It can be done through like a tag manager, such as Google Tag Manager. Your developer could do it manually. So there's a number of different ways to apply the SDK. So once that's applied you can verify it. So this is just a way of checking if it's verified when it was last verified. So a very nice way of confirming that it's been installed. And if you have help, if you need help, just request assistance. Our team will walk you through exactly how to do that. Then the third and sort of final step here is adding conversions. So once the SDK is installed, setting up conversion will be what captures that referral's information and then sends it back to ReferralRock. We include a number of methods here, but what I would recommend is just request assistance. So this is a really nice service that our team provides that either allows us to actually set up the integration on your behalf or give you exact instructions on what you need to do. So you can go here, click conversion tracking complete. The forms tell us where you want us to capture that information, any additional data that you need, if you know the platform, great other contacts. And then when you hit submit, this sends a request to our integration specialist and then we'll follow up with detailed instructions or in many cases actually set it up for you. So definitely check that out if you're having any trouble with conversion tracking. So that's the track referral experience. And again, happy to answer any questions there. I'll kind of end with just talking through some advanced use cases that are probably relevant in many for many businesses, depending on kind of your needs and workflows, but might not be relevant for everyone. So the first of these, and this one is pretty common is automating reward fulfillment. So a very text heavy slide. But what we're trying to show here is there's a number of different rewards that you can fulfill automatically through referral Rock. The way you do this is first you configure your war rules which I'll show you how to do in just a second. And then you set up one of these payout types for automatic fulfillment. I'll share the links to the slides. So like this will have if you, if there's one that you want to questions on, click on the link. It'll take you straight to like the supporting documentation for that but a high level overview. So what we do first is we create the reward rules. This is where I'll just go ahead and open this up. But this is going to be where you determine when, determine what you're rewarding. So within the program editor, under the reward rules, go to hit new reward or if you've already set it up, you can hit existing ones. You're going to then select the reward type that you want. And for many of these, like gift cards, PayPal wise, which is bank transfers coupons, we can do the fulfillment automatically. For more like custom rewards, you know, we have options to be more of like a digital ledger or we can actually set up an integration for fulfilling customer rewards automatically. So first step is basically setting up the reward type the that you want to have us fulfill. And then the second step is going to be around determining when you want that reward to be issued. So for many businesses, you don't necessarily want the reward to be issued on that conversion event. So when that referral comes in, you know, if it is something like a demo where then it's qualified by a sales rep and then the customer purchases later on or maybe it's, you know, a free trial and then after the fact the customer purchases things like jobs like quotes and then fulfillment of those jobs applications. There's a number of different types of businesses which have different sales processes that don't necessarily want to reward on referral conversion. So in these cases, instead of rewarding off of like that conversion event, you want to reward off of something later on. And so what we want to do is we want to set up an integration with your CRM or other system of record so that we can actually process that reward at a later event. And so to do that we can go back to our reward rules and we have this trigger win item. And so within referral rack you have three different referral statuses. Pending, qualified and approved. The pending status is used for like that initial conversion event. So referral completes a form, they're going to come in as a pending status. If you want to send a reward on that point, great, you can automatically move them to approved. You can process the reward off of the pending status. But for those businesses that want to reward later on in their process, you know, we offer two, two different trigger moments. One is the qualified status and the approved status. So let's say we're going to reward off the approved status. That's going to be customer makes a purchase within the reward rules, you go ahead and select approved status. You know, if you want to set any additional conditions, you can, but this will be the logic that determines, hey, I want to send this reward only when that referral becomes approved. So that's the first step and then the second step is going to be actually updating that referral status. So within Referral Rock, you know, we have those different statuses, pending, qualifying, approved. This referral update integration is what's going to tell our system when to move that referral from like a pending to an approved status or to a qualified status. And I'll just open up our HubSpot integration to kind of showcase what this could look like. If you use HubSpot, great. We have a native integration for that. If you use other systems, maybe like a Salesforce, we also have a native integration and then we work really well with zapier and a number of other different integration options for other. So if there is a particular system that you have a question about, let us know in like the chat and we can definitely talk about that one. But using HubSpot as an example, what we're doing here is we're defining what are the objects within the CRM, you know, contact, dealer, opportunity, what's the property on that object and what's the value of that property. And so think about this as a sort of trick triggers and events. So if this change happens in your system, that'll trigger the referral to update in ReferralRock. So in this example, if the deal stage is close one, go ahead and set the referral to approved. So whatever is that logic, whatever those fields are on your side, we can trigger updates to the referral status on our side, which then combined with the reward rules allows us to send rewards based off of whatever process, whatever trigger moment on your side. So that's the reward update piece. And finally, the third integration sort of use case that we often see is around syncing data between Referral Rock and your system of record. And so we talk about data enrichment in this case, two primary reasons people want to do this. Maybe they want to send emails or other communications from their system, or maybe they want to do more advanced reporting that combines the referral data with data from their other sources. And so the way you would do this, ReferralRock, we take kind of the HubSpot example, but again can be used for other systems as well. There's two objects in ReferralRock, you have members and referrals. So members are the ones doing the sharing. There's a number of different data that we have on members. And, and essentially what this integration does, if we open that one up, is it will allow us to sync information from like, so this one's the member. So anytime a member is updated, especially around like member stats like referrals, rewards, we can then pass that information over to your system. So maybe you want to do your own emails or follow ups. This is a great way to do that. If you want to do advanced reporting, mostly we're sending over the member data, the referral data, we can pass that over but oftentimes this is actually captured based off your referral tracking so it's less of a of an issue. Again, happy to speak more to that as well. And so yeah, so that kind of is a quick overview of integrations. Happy to dive into, into anything more. I guess the final thing I'll kind of end with is we do have this request assistance. So I already talked about this in the call but like if you run into any integration issues like just like let us know. You know, fill out the conversion track. King, if you have questions around like referral updates, just a really great way to give our team some integrations and it's a direct line to our integration specialists. So great, great source. If you're not familiar with it, definitely take advantage of it.