Setting Up Your Referrals Program

Turn customer advocacy into your most cost-efficient revenue driver. With a Yotpo Referral Program, you can encourage word-of-mouth referrals through multiple channels including intelligent popups, custom pages, and email campaigns.

This article explains how to set up a link-based referral program. Read about the option of a code-based referral program.

Checklist overview

1. Customize parameters
2. Customize popups
3. Deploy on-site
4. Set up email notifications

After you are done setting up your program you can:

• Manage your analytics
• Do a test referral 

Customize parameters

Create referral coupons

Assuming you want to give a coupon as a reward (to the referring customer or the referred friend, or both) you'll need to create those coupons before the next step.

If you have already created the coupons, (or if you aren't using discount coupons as rewards) you can skip this step and go directly to "Choose what you will offer" (below)

The coupon should be a direct coupon. Learn what is a direct coupon and see instructions for creating a direct coupon

Choose what you will offer

Here are all the settings that define how your referral program will work.

1. Log in to Yotpo Loyalty & Referrals
2. Go to Programs > Referral Program
3. Click Customize Referral Program

• Reward the referring customer when the referred customer spends over…
  Note that this is the total they must spend AFTER any other discounts and/or gift cards. The amount must be paid with currency and not with coupons or points.
    
• Reward the referring customer with… (choose either: points/a coupon/nothing)

Reward the referred friend with… (choose either: points/a coupon/nothing)

• Auto apply Coupon? (Available for Shopify/Plus, Bigcommerce, Adobe Commerce (Magento), and SFCC)
  The auto-apply feature is a great way to increase referral ROI, as the referred friend won't need to copy/paste a coupon code, instead, it will be waiting for them at checkout.
  If you select the auto-apply coupon, it will override any other auto-applied coupon you might have set up. Meaning, our referred friend coupon will remove any previous coupon from the checkout. Example: If you are running a holiday promotion that is worth more than the referred friend promotion, you can always turn off the auto-apply feature for any duration you wish, and turn it back on later.
  Important:

  • Auto-apply will not work if the customer choosesPaypal or AfterPay as the payment method
  • If you're using Adobe Commerce (Magento), the auto-apply action will not work if you set a minimum spend amount

Auto-apply Coupon FAQs

Email verification

This setting adds an email validation step in the referral process to further authenticate the identity of the referred friend.

• If the feature is set to 'Yes',  the referred friend will need to provide their email address in the referral welcome popup in order to receive their reward. This is in addition to the default referred identification method (IP address + user agent). You will also be able to view and edit the email capture screen of the referral welcome popup.

• If the feature is set to 'No', the referred friend identification will be the IP address and user agent only. Additionally, the referral welcome popup will not include the email validation screen and some fraud prevention settings will be automatically turned off. 
• Additional parameters
• Reward text
  Shows the customer what they will receive if they participate in the program.  The Rewards Text will also appear in the customer's Rewards History
• Description
  The Referral Program description only appears under the Rewards Popup “Refer Friends” section.
  • If you are using the Refer Friends module, you will be able to customize it in the module editor.
  • If you're not using a module, see where to update the texts here
• Landing URL
  The URL you want the new visitor to arrive at when clicking the referral link

Landing URL Query Params
This field allows you to add UTM parameters to the URL to make your own analysis of the traffic driven to your site by the referral program. Yotpo has a number of UTM parameters included by default, use this setting to add new ones in addition to the defaults.  See more about Yotpo's UTM Parameters

• Default Message
  The default written message the user will have available when sharing their referral link on social media. If you deploy using the Refer Friends Module, you will edit these texts in the module editor.

Click Save Changes!

Deploy onsite

There are a few options for how to display your program onsite.

Custom solution:
Custom build with Yotpo's SDK (using your own development resources)

Yotpo's ready-made solutions

Referral Welcome Popup (available for all plans)
Rewards Page Refer Friends section (available for all plans)
Refer Friends Module (This feature is available on selected Yotpo plans.)
Rewards Popup (available for all plans)

Referral Welcome popup

This is a basic feature that is used by every referral program.  The welcome popup is what the referred friend sees when they arrive on your site via clicking a referral link.  

To see an in-depth explanation of customizing the welcome popup, see the referral welcome popup guide.

Rewards Page Refer Friends section

This section of your rewards page is where you encourage shoppers to share their unique referral link with friends and get a reward if their friend makes a purchase as a result of the referral! 

See a complete guide to customizing the Refer Friends section.

Refer Friends module

The Refer Friends Module allows you to quickly build a customized and intuitive user experience for your referring customers, without the need for any development. Learn how to customize, and deploy the Refer Friends module on your site.

Post-purchase opportunity

Post-purchase is a great time to convert customers. You can display a post-purchase referral request via a custom build with our SDK, or by deploying an instance of the refer friends module it to your checkout page, Learn more about displaying post-purchase referral popup

Incentivizing popups

Three popups pertain to incentivizing shoppers on your site to invite referrals. These popups can be used alongside or instead of the Refer Friends module.

To see an in-depth explanation of customizing these three popups, see the Customizing Referral popups guide

Set up email notifications

Relevant emails

There are three emails relevant to your referring customers.

1. Referrer Thank You
2. Referral Share Email
3. Referral Share Email Reminder
   
   This email is sent one time to the referred friend if they don't respond to the first "Referral Share Email" invitation.
   
   To control the period of time before sending out the reminder:

1. From the main menu go to Communications > Settings
2. Set a trigger for a Referral share email reminder:

Customize emails

To edit the referral emails, from the main menu go to Communications > Referral Emails. Referral Share Email ReminderIf you are using Yotpo's triggered email feature, see an in-depth guide to Customizing Yotpo Loyalty & Referrals Emails. To see how to upload a custom image header in your emails, jump to this section. 

If you are using one of our Email Marketing Integrations, you'll be able to customize these emails from within the email marketing platform. 

Including names in the Referral Share email

We strongly recommend including the referring customer or the friend's name in emails. This allows the referral to be more personal and increases the click-through rate of the email

To learn more about email personalization, click here. 

Activate/Deactivate your referral program

By default, the referral program is activated, but if you ever need to change it, do the following: 

1. From the main menu, go to Set Up Program > Earning rules
2. On your Referral Program card, click the ellipses icon and click Deactivate

Admin Settings

In your admin settings section, there are several fields related to your referral program. Two you can consider at this point.

Testing your new program

If you wish to do a "test referral" to check that your program is working as it should be, you can use the following guide to do a test referral

Manage your analytics

With Yotpo’s dashboards, you can gain valuable insight into the performance of your referral program and leverage real-time data to gauge ROI and measure the improvements you make.

Dashboards & reports

• Referral Performance Dashboard - The Referral Performance dashboard is a great way to do Tracking With UTM Parameters
• Loyalty & Referrals ROI Dashboard - Use this dashboard to Track the number of customers that are engaged with the program understand how the Loyalty & Referrals program is performing in terms of revenue, view how changes to campaigns and coupons affect your revenue, generate scheduled reports to easily share data with teammates and stakeholders.
• Loyalty & Referrals Reports - The reports section allows you to generate reports on several important metrics.
• Referral funnel dashboard - Referral Funnel dashboard consists of four main categories of metrics that act as a referral funnel, all of which can be found at the top of the screen: Shares, Clicks, Orders, and Revenue

Google Analytics & UTM parameters

UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters are tags you can add to a URL. When a link is clicked, the tags are sent back to Google Analytics.

Use this data to gauge the effectiveness of campaigns and identify new ways to drive traffic to your campaigns. 

We'll cover the UTM parameters included by default, how to override them, and how to add new parameters.

Default parameters

The following parameters are included by default. They can be viewed and analyzed both in your Google Analytics and in your loyalty dashboards:

If you want to see more in Google Analytics, you can add any UTM of your own as well.

Adding UTM parameters

If you want to add UTM parameters on top of the ones that are included automatically, do the following:

1. Click Programs > Referral Program.
2.  Click Customize Referral Program.
3.  In the Landing URL Query Params field, add your custom parameters, each parameter separated by an ampersand (&).
   

Overriding the default parameters

If you save a new medium/campaign/source UTM parameter, it will override the default parameter for that UTM type.

For example: If you add this: utm_campaign=your-new-campaign-name-here, it will override the default campaign UTM which is "&utm_campaign=referral_program"

If you add a UTM parameter type that is not medium/campaign/source, it will be included but not affect the default parameters.