Ask HN: What does everyone use for a referral system? I have a product which asks user to register. I want to integrate an automated referral system into the emails I send out to my existing customers so that if they refer my app to any of their friends and the friends purchase it, both the friend and them get some discount. I checked zferral and hasoffers but both of them are for affiliates. I am looking for a easily integrable referral system like vonage to keep track. Thanks. |
Trusting third parties with the email addresses of all your customers and prospects is not always wise.
Referral marketing uses your existing customerbase as marketing vehicle, affiliate systems tend to focus on other businesses that send you customers in return for a split, and as a rule you would find far fewer affiliates than you would have potential referrers in a referral marketing situation. Referral marketing usually centers around discounts, where as affiliate marketing centers around profit sharing, splits or one time fees for a sale.
The differences, even though there are many are subtle enough that it may be possible to use the one for the other.
I've thought about writing a plugin, but haven't found the time yet. I'm travelling with infrequent connections, so I might not get back to you for a day or two if you send an email.
zferral was actually built to enable companies to easily create their own affiliate or referral programs.
Nearly all of our clients use their custom program to create incentives for their own customers.
Remember, your current happy (paying) customers are your best advocates. We provide the tools for you to reward them to promote your product.
Anyone can feel free to email me with questions (or call). I'm happy to chat.
Over at http://blogsetup.com , I set up Post Affiliate Pro with some custom PHP code to integrate it so the commission triggers upon fill out of a form, then goes into a "Pending" state until we manually verify it. Post Affiliate Pro is pretty flexible and has a good API for this kind of stuff.
I also looked at iDevAffiliate, but ultimately picked Post Affiliate Pro because it has better SEO on the links and, in general, it had better reviews. The general class of software you are looking for is "affiliate software".
1) We have flexible campaigns (change % without changing links) also enable recurring commissions, rev share and large up front with lower recurring.
2) You can create custom currencies (points, t-shirt, gold stars, discounts) you name it.
3) We have an open API for seamless integrate into your HTML/CSS.
4) it's free to start
https://www.toomuchmedia.com/pp_nats.htm?tmmatt=1
The company I work for (not in the adult industry) built its own.
It's actually part of my site, which I can't really talk about yet :)
But the analytics will be a spin-off, so if you can wait 2 weeks you will get it. gregory at gregory dotnet
We recently launched a partner site that isn't industry specific, (RefYo) I'd love to get your input about desired features, etc.
feel free to drop me a line - klochner@gmail.com
A self-managed type is IDEV affiliate: http://www.idevdirect.com/
1) Set up a script that spools all existing customers into Post Affiliate Pro (PAP) and gives each of them a unique ID
2) Set a similar script to run when a new customer places an order (enter new customer into PAP database and generate referral ID)
3) Set up a page on my customer portal that allows each customer to see his/her referral ID and gives a bunch of choices to refer friends (email with a plugin that finds all friends in address book for services like Gmail/Yahoo; banner ads; text link). Pull the link by sending an auth token with the customer ID to the PAP API.
^ In #3 above I'd do this instead of referring them to the PAP customer portal, which seems overkill for this scenario, and would set up a multiple login nightmare.
4) Integrate PAP and my shopping cart/customer database so when a customer refers another customer and that referral is approved, it shows up as a credit in their account.
Of the above, #4 is the tricky part, and depends on their shopping cart/billing software. It may be easier to hire a VA to manage this, at least at the beginning, esp. if the customer database is homegrown.
Disclaimer: PAP or iDev may have easier ways to do this; this is based on my own experience with PAP, which was admittedly a different integration. But as a programmer, this is the working thesis I'd start from.