The Complete Guide to Mastering Referral Marketing Software Selection

Customers tell their friends about the products they’re most happy with, right? Sure, but 88% of Americans prefer to receive an incentive to do so. Hello, referral marketing — one of the most cost-effective marketing tactics for attracting new customers and retaining old ones. 

But once you get the ball rolling, tracking your referred customers, referees, and rewards is hard. Referral marketing software helps you keep tabs on your referral program, track metrics, and identify strategic improvements to keep the revenue coming. 

We’ll cover the must-have features of a referral marketing platform, examples of companies that successfully use them, the top referral platforms on the market, and why your brand needs one. 

What is referral marketing? 

Referral marketing entices customers to refer new people to a brand’s products or services with rewards like gift cards, discounts, or cash value. Referral programs lay out the parameters for a customer to receive a reward. Brands will advertise their referral programs deliberately to power more customer referrals and, thus, more sales. 

It sounds a lot like affiliate marketing, right? Both are great growth tactics, but they achieve results in different ways. 

Referral marketing vs. affiliate marketing

The main difference between referral and affiliate marketing is the person doing the referring. Affiliate marketing is a tactic where brands pay commissions to affiliates who refer customers to them.

While affiliates can be existing customers, they’re usually more professional, with wider audiences, followings, and niche authority that can bring even more potential traffic and conversions to a brand. Affiliates might be influencers with vast Instagram followings, high-traffic bloggers, or even world-famous online publications like the New York Times. 

That’s why it’s common for affiliate commissions and rewards to be slightly more generous than referral rewards. 

For example, the most common referral program reward is a $10 cash value. More expensive product referrals might garner higher referral rewards. At the same time, marketing commissions range from 5 to 50%, amounting to hundreds of dollars, especially for more expensive subscription-based businesses. 

5 must-have features for referral marketing software

Referral software tools tend to have the same overall function — track referrals from your customer base and analyze overall progress and revenue. But the right features and functionality make all this possible and more. 

Here are five essential features of customer referral program software: 

Analytics dashboard

Are you wondering how many customers you’ve referred to date? A referral software’s analytics dashboard should give you a quick peek. This dashboard provides a bird’s-eye view of your referral program and displays important metrics like daily referrals, referral values, numbers of customers referred, and overall trends in your program. 

Analytics dashboards should feel accessible and digestible. They should be easy to interpret and gather valuable insights about your program with minimal time and research. 

But if you want to dive deeper?

Detailed reporting

Your analytics dashboard gives you a quick view of your program. On the other hand, detailed analytics and reporting give you a zoomed-in view of particulars within your program.

Curious if a particular product promotion attracted more referred customers? Did your latest referral reward increase affect your returns? These are more specific metrics you can look at with detailed reports and filters. 

Additionally, some reporting features help you assess referral performance against the rest of your marketing strategy. 

Let’s say you have a customer referral program and a more robust affiliate marketing program working in tandem for your business. Care to know which affiliates bring you the most revenue compared to your existing customer base? This is where referral marketing software comes in handy. 

Custom rewards

Imagine one customer refers two new people to your SaaS brand within a year. Not too shabby, right? So, you send $10 to your referee for each new customer. 

What if another customer refers not two but twenty new customers to your brand within a year and repeats the pattern for another four years? Should you award $10 a piece, amounting to $200 each year? Think about all the value those new customers bring. Surely, this high-performing referrer deserves a little extra. 

That’s where custom rewards come in. The best referral software allows you to create custom rewards for specific referrers. This might look like volume-based increases like the example above. Or, you might offer higher rewards depending on the value of the new customer a referrer brings you. 

For affiliate marketing programs, these look like flexible commissions. Tapfiliate lets you adjust commissions to be flat-fee, percentage-based, recurring, or lifetime. Plus, you can toggle the commission amount and trigger automatic increases based on performance. 

Third-party integrations

Marketing is a tedious business for any brand. You’ve got blog posts and social media schedules to maintain, along with email and referral marketing campaigns, and customer relationships to build and monitor. 

Of course, the right tech stack — customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, email software like Mailchimp, and project management tools — can help. And if you’re an e-commerce platform? Integrations to tools like Shopify are a godsend (that’s why Tapfiliate offers unique e-commerce integrations to platforms like WooCommerce and Shopify). 

The best way to leverage a referral marketing tool is to integrate it with the rest of your software. Third-party integrations help you automate cross-departmental tasks to save you time and precious budget dollars. 

And if you don’t see your tech stack on an integration list? Look for custom integrations that you can build with help from a little developer code. 

Referral program builder

Some software tools offer referral program builders (sometimes known as link builders) to streamline promotion for your program. These create unique links that you can start sharing with your customers, who can in turn share them with new potential customers. 

Other referral software tools have automated referral recruitment features to get your program on the road faster. For example, Tapfiliate’s partner recruitment features help you trigger automated emails to recruit your existing customers. 

On top of that, our multi-level marketing (MLM) functionality helps brands recruit sub-affiliates to grow their program even further. SaaS brands, to the front! You’ll need highly qualified affiliates within your niche to convince traditionally indecisive VPs to buy your product. And the best way to find them is through your existing affiliate network. 

Accurate tracking and attribution

We mentioned detailed reporting and analytics to record progress. But how does a software populate all those data fields? They’ll need laser-sharp tracking capabilities to capture every single referred customer and dollar that came from it. Real-time tracking is a must — and you should always check reviews to make sure all referrals are actually captured. 

As for the method, you might come across software that offers referral links. But suppose you don’t want to burden your customers. In that case, you can easily track referrals with coupon codes or cookie tracking, which records actions taken after viewing a referral email or other content. 

Here’s a quick checklist for your reference: 

• Analytics dashboard
• Detailed reporting and analytics
• Custom rewards
• Third-party integrations
• Referral program builder
• Accurate tracking and attribution

5 successful referral programs 

Referral programs are for every business. Whether you’re in SaaS, e-commerce, dropshipping, or any other field, you can leverage referrals to boost sales and revenue for a fraction of the traditional marketing costs. 

Here are a few referral programs from brands in various niches: 

• Preply: Language-learning app where you can have video lessons with people all over the world; $15 USD reward for every referral 
• Expedia: Travel booking website; $30 discount on hotel stays for every referral
• Frank & Oak: Fashion retailer; $15 credit for the referred customer and referrer
• Lyft: Ridesharing app; $10 per referral 
• Tapfiliate: Referral marketing software; 30% referral reward

Now, let’s check which referral platforms brands like the above use to optimize their referral programs.

5 examples of referral marketing software

Not all referral marketing software looks the same regarding features, industry specialty, and pricing. Let’s look at a couple of examples. 

• Referral Candy is referral software that caters to over 3,000 e-commerce companies. Its most basic plan includes unlimited customers and campaigns at a modest $59, but it charges a percentage-based fee on sales as well. Any premium features cost a minimum of $299 monthly plus a commission fee. Features include referral templates, automation, e-commerce platform integrations, and analytics. 

• Referral Rock is a customizable referral software for building custom programs with email communication templates, branded portals, and automated link sharing. It also features diverse reward options like 50 different kinds of gift cards and cashouts — though those come at a steep $350 per month. 

• Referral Hero specializes in referral marketing management for B2B and B2C brands, specifically in the fintech, crypto, and SaaS spaces. Its features include campaign builders, anti-fraud notifications, referral links, guided onboarding, analytics, and custom branding for subscription packages ranging from $100 to $400 monthly. 
• Upviral: This referral platform lets you track up to 100,000 leads from referrals, with customization features to personalize your offerings, like branded interfaces and personalized email templates. Pricing isn’t listed on their website. 
• Tapfiliate is a powerful referral and affiliate marketing platform that specializes in program management for e-commerce, SaaS, dropshipping, and subscription businesses. It has automated customer referral programs to help brands create programs from scratch. Beginner plans are affordable at $74 per month, but premium features like bonus systems and product-specific commissions come at an affordable $124 per month. Finally, we have a white-label option to help you merge your brand’s messaging for your customers and affiliates alike. 

Tapfiliate is a great option for brands at any referral or affiliate program stage. We have scalable programs with accessible, convenient features to help you launch, manage, and grow your referral programs. And if you have 1, 2, or 200 programs or products to track? No problem — our robust tracking and attribution can help you track it all. 

Are you a SaaS or e-commerce brand that wants to join hundreds of companies like yours and reap thousands of dollars in referral revenue? See why Tapfiliate is the best option for every brand’s referral program with our free 14-day trial! 

Choose your referral marketing software today!

Referral marketing helps you tap into a relevant yet completely unattainable audience without your existing customers. Plus, you get to reap the benefits of referrals with a much cheaper investment than your average marketing strategy. 

But referral tracking software is a must for the most successful referral campaigns. It helps you stay aware of the latest developments in your referral program. Plus, it identifies trends to monetize that you’d never see without a software’s detailed analytics and reporting. 

Bottom line? Referral software gives you the most efficient path towards boosted revenue from your customer base.