Hey everyone! This is Savvas, CEO of Viral Loops.
This is a starter’s guide for Viral Loops. If you don’t want to read the entire article, feel free to check the video we created for you:
Why we created Viral Loops and why you need referral marketing.
Word of mouth is responsible for up to 50% of all purchasing decisions.
According to research, it’s 10x more effective than traditional advertising.
That’s why we created Viral Loops—a referral marketing platform that helps you capture new customers and grow your businesses.
Here’s the deal: Your success is the basis of our success.
That’s why we decided to focus on the things that can make or break a referral marketing campaign and show you exactly, step-by-step, how to make it successful.
For starters, Viral Loops is a template-based platform, meaning that you can choose one of our templates inspired by successful referral campaigns, and customize it according to your needs.
After studying data from thousands of campaigns, we saw that one of the most significant key factors in getting the most from your referral marketing campaigns is to choose the right template.
Currently, we offer multiple campaign templates.
From referral campaigns and ambassador programs inspired by companies like Dropbox and Harry’s – to prelaunch campaigns and giveaways inspired by Robinhood and Jet.
If you don’t know what the best template is for you, don’t worry! When you’re ready to build your campaign, our app will guide you through all the possibilities – and you can select the right template in no time at all.
It’s easy and effective.
Caution: Before selecting your template, make sure it’s supported by your platform. The following diagram will make your life much easier.
Our Referral Templates
The Milestone Referral
Inspired by Harry’s and the Hustle
You might have heard how Harry’s gathered 100,000 emails in one week pre-launch:
They created a referral pre-launch program where a single referrer could invite up to 50 friends in order to unlock different prizes, as she refers more friends and reaches milestones.
This adds a gamification concept to the referral marketing program that seems to work pretty well with millennials.
With this template the rewards could be anything that you already sell in case of an e-shop or any other kind of swags that have nothing to do with the service you provide like the Hustle did; or even just a title, such as official ambassador or superfan of your product/company.
The e-Commerce Referral
Inspired by Gilt
Designed with e-Commerce stores in mind, this template offers easy integration with leading e-commerce platforms, such as WooCommerce and Drupal Commerce.
You can see how it looks live.
Invitee follows a referral link back to your store so that can get a coupon code for a discount towards their first purchase.
When they purchase, their referrer also gets a coupon for their next purchase. Simple as that!
Refer a Friend template
Inspired by Dropbox
We all know what Dropbox is doing with their referral program: When an invitee signs up, both the referrer and the invitee will get 500MB of free space in Dropbox.
You could now set a referral program that tracks sign ups and just pick a different reward.
Our giveaway templates:
We have created two types of campaigns for competitions:
- The Leaderboard Giveaway
- The Tempting Giveaway
The biggest difference between the two of them is that in The Leaderboard Giveaway the winners will be the ones who have brought the most successful referrals compared to the rest of the participants (so, this is a ranking), whereas on The Tempting Giveaway that is inspired by Mailchimp the winners will be picked up randomly, since this is a sweepstake.
Of course, the more successful referrals a participant has the more chances she has to be the winner, but in this template, one can be the winner even with just one entry.
Here’s a live example of The Leaderboard Giveaway:
For one of our biggest customers, Vision Mobile, who actually requested a user dashboard instead of the default pop-up option, we created a web page.
This comes with an extra cost and includes all the data that are part of the participant’s pop up in this template plus the images that a superfan/influencer could add to his page/blog in order to provide his personal URL created via Viral Loops.
Another example of The Tempting Giveaway could be found on our campaign Viral Loops/t-shirt, where the pop-up default option is used: https://viral-loops.com/t-shirt
Viral Loops recognizes if the visitor is also a participant of this campaign and shows the corresponding message.
Our pre-launch campaigns:
With these campaigns, we could help you find early adopters, that will become the first customers right after you launch and could help you a lot with their valuable feedback since day one!
You could either use the simplest concept of our Start-up Pre-launch template inspired by Robinhood, or request access to our Private Beta template, that is inspired by Monzo and provides you with a coupon system that you could use to gradually give access for your new online product to the participants.
The Wizard
Create and run efficient viral & referral marketing campaigns in a few clicks.
As soon as you know what’s the right template for you, it’s time to build your campaign.
Step 1: Info
You will have to put details about the campaign and your platform like the name of your product, name of the campaign, URL and how many users you have (we’ll use this to calculate user growth).
Step 2: Rewards
This is probably the most important step of the wizard. Here you choose the reward that users will get when they refer friends.
The reward can be physical, digital or monetary. If it’s monetary you have to click this trigger. Below the reward section, we have the notifications, you can toggle them on or off and also edit them as you like.
Step 3: Widgets
Your users should have a referral dashboard like Dropbox has or like any product that uses a referral program. So here, we let you choose the widgets you want to show and also we let you customize them to match your brand. The most popular is the Sharing Widget.
Step 4: Installation
This step provides some technical info. If you’re familiar with that, then go ahead, but you could ping us anytime for help.
If you’re not into that, just hit the “Help me” button and we’ll be more than happy to help you install it. Remember the goal is to create the easier way to launch referral programs, we need your help with that.
When you’re finished with setting up your campaign, you can install it on your website using our code snippet (or handy tool or plugins) – or use our API for more complex implementations.
Another powerful feature we have is Viral Loops Pages.
This is something we created for companies which don’t have a website – or don’t have time to a build a new landing page to host their campaign.
Viral Loops Pages allows you to build a landing page directly into your campaign.
Once you’re done, click finish and you’re ready to go.
The Campaigns’ Dashboard
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.
This is the “My campaigns” section, here you’ll find important information about your active, draft, or expired campaigns. From here, you can go to your campaign’s dashboard or even edit it, if you want to change something.
In the dashboard, you could find analytics for your live campaign, such as successful referrals, shares and see the pending rewards to manually manage winners.
Regarding the installation, we give you the chance to try it even on your local server. This will help you test our widget without being live, ensuring that everything will look exactly how you want them to.
Conclusion
I guess that now, you know everything you need to know in order to start your campaign. As a team, we can only perceive our product being a success when our users get the amount of leads they deserve.
Make sure to pick a template that suits your needs and can work with your platform. I would propose to be super careful with your copywriting (it can have a huge impact on your campaign’s performance) and use creatives that will stick to the eye.
We are here to answer all of your questions ASAP, so don’t hesitate to ask.