How to set up a referral program

A referral program rewards contacts for bringing in new ones. Every contact gets a personal referral link. When a friend signs up through it, the referral is recorded, and once the friend has done what your rules ask, both of them get the incentive you've chosen for them.

Find referrals in the dashboard

Referrals is under Loyalty → Referrals, with 4 pages in the menu on the left: Leaderboard, History, Incentives and Rules.

Referrals is switched on for every new account. If there's no Referrals item in the Loyalty menu, the feature has been switched off. To switch it back on:

Click the gear icon at the top right of the dashboard to open Settings, then click General under Account.
In the Features section, open Loyalty and switch on Referrals.
Click Enable to confirm.

Your account already has a referral program, but it gives nothing away yet: both incentives start on Nothing, and the trigger on When a friend signs up. Set the incentives before you tell contacts about the program.

Choose the incentives

On Incentives, Referrer is what the contact who shared the link gets, and Referred is what the friend who signed up gets. They're set separately, so the two can get different things.

In the section you want to change, click Edit incentive, choose a Type and click Save changes:

Credits: loyalty points. Fill in the Points and the Business profile they're credited at.
Prepaid: prepaid credit. Fill in the Amount and the Business profile.
Voucher: a voucher from one of your active promotions. Choose the Promotion, then how the voucher reaches the contact under Voucher delivery:
- Send by voucher recipient system email emails the voucher to them. If you have more than 1 voucher recipient email, pick which one under Email to send.
- Do not send system email only adds the voucher to their profile.
Under Strategy, choose whether to generate a new voucher or use an existing one from that promotion. An existing voucher has to be one that isn't linked to a contact yet, so keep enough of those in the promotion.
Nothing: no incentive for this side.

Set the rules

Rules has 2 sections, and each one is saved on its own.

Reward triggers decides when a referral counts as completed and the incentives are handed out. Click Edit trigger, choose one of these and click Save changes:

When a friend signs up: as soon as the new contact is created.
When a friend gets one or more loyalty transactions: once the friend has had a set Number of transactions, from 1 to 5. Under Transaction types you can count only certain types of loyalty transaction. Leave it on Any type of loyalty transaction to count them all. This option is marked Fraud prevention, because a referral then only completes once the friend has actually been back.
When a friend orders a specific product: once the friend has an order with at least 1 of the products you choose under Products. Choose 1 or more products, up to 100. You can't save this trigger without one. 1 of them in an order is enough, and it counts both as an item of its own and as an extra under another item. The order has to be on the friend's contact. A cancelled order doesn't count, and a return afterwards doesn't take the incentives back. This option is marked Fraud prevention too, because the referral only completes once the friend has actually bought something.

The friend's transactions are counted again each time they get points, and their orders are checked each time a new one comes in.

Limits holds the Referral limit per contact: how many friends one contact can refer, up to 1000. Click Edit limit, enter the number and click Save changes. Leave it empty for no limit. We recommend keeping it below 5. Every referral a contact has made counts towards the limit, failed ones included. Once a contact reaches it, friends can still sign up through their link, but no new referral is recorded.

Give contacts their referral link

Each contact's link opens the Sign up page of your contacts portal, so Register page is visible has to be on for that page in the portal editor. Contacts can share their link from 2 places:

The contacts portal: add a Referral section to the Home page in the portal editor, and fill in its Button label, Subject and Message. Contacts then get a button that lets them copy their link or send it by email, with your subject and message. The section only shows while Referrals is switched on for your account and under Features in the portal editor's Settings tab.
The widget: add the Referral element and fill in the Invitation email subject and Invitation email contents. Logged-in contacts can then copy their link or send it by email. The widget editor warns you while Referrals is switched off for your account.

You can also put the link in your own emails with the contact's referral link tag. See How to use tags to personalize your emails.

A contact's Personal referral code is on their profile: open the contact and go to Loyalty, where it's on the Referral card. The link itself isn't shown there.

Only new contacts can be referred

A referral is only recorded when the friend is a new contact. Someone whose email address already belongs to one of your contacts can't be referred: on the portal they get a login email instead, and no referral is made.

Sign-ups through the portal's Sign up page and through the Leat API count as referrals. Signing up in the widget doesn't, because the widget's own sign-up doesn't pass on the referral link.

Refer someone yourself

Open the contact who's doing the referring, go to Loyalty and click Manual referral on the Referral card. In Refer someone as this contact, fill in the Email address to refer and click Send. This creates the new contact and records the referral.

The friend doesn't get an email from this. Let them know yourself, or build an automation on one of the Referral created triggers. See Automation triggers: every event that can start an automation.

Follow up on referrals

Leaderboard shows your top 3 contacts by completed referrals, and a table with per contact the # referred contacts, the # completed referrals and their Latest referral.
History lists every referral with the Referrer, the contact they referred and the Status. Click a row for its Referral details, including when it was created, the Channel it came through and any Messages about its incentives.

A referral starts as Pending. Once the trigger is met, it's In progress for a moment while the incentives are handed out, and then it becomes Completed.

The status follows the referrer's incentive. If that one can't be handed out, for example because the promotion or business profile it needs is gone, the referral becomes Failed, even when the friend already got theirs. If only the friend's incentive fails, the referral still shows Completed. Either way, the reason is under Messages in the referral's details. A failed referral isn't tried again.

Stop the program

To stop recording new referrals, go back to Features and switch off Referrals. Friends who sign up through a link after that aren't recorded as referrals.

Referrals that were already pending can still complete and hand out their incentives. To stop that too, set both the Referrer and the Referred incentive to Nothing before you switch the feature off.