July 06, 2018
UPDATED March 1, 2020
A referral program is a marketing campaign used by businesses to encourage customers to refer their friends to the business to increase sales. sticky.io has integrated with Referral Candy, an e-commerce store plugin that helps businesses get more word of mouth sales.
The sticky.io - Referral Candy integration tracks referred purchases, automatically notifies advocates when rewards are earned, applies a discount when a friend purchases and issue rewards to the Referrer automatically for qualified purchases.
GETTING STARTED
You need to sign up for a Referral Candy platform account.
Next you will need to build out your Referral Candy Rewards program – follow these steps to set up referral candyhttps://answers.referralcandy.com/en/
CONFIGURATION of Referral Candy in sticky.io
To configure Referral Candy into your sticky.io Platform instance, you will go to Settings>Providers and under ACTIONS select Add New Provider Profile.Select the type = Loyalty and select Referral Candy from the drop down.Fill out the required parameters which are outlined below and click “Save”.
Alias: For internal purposes only to help you organize among multiple provider profiles within your Platform
Access ID: This is found in your ReferralCandy account {API ACCESS ID}
New Order Alert: If YES: the email to provide customer their referral link will be sentIf NO: the email to provide customer their promo link will NOT be sent(Best practice is to set to YES)
Secret Key: This is found in your ReferralCandy account {API SECRET KEY}
Void Refund Alert:If YES: the email to indicate a reward is no longer valid will be sentIf NO: the email to indicate a reward is no longer valid will NOT be sent(Best practice is to set to YES)
Save your new configuration and Assignto Campaigns by clicking the ellipsesClick ‘Assign’
You will need to configure coupons in your sticky.io Platform.Click here to go to the help article for Adding Coupons.
CONFIGURATION of Coupons in sticky.io
You will need to potentially set up 2 separate coupon profiles in sticky.io to support your loyalty program.
If you are going to provide referred friends purchasing through a promo link an immediate discount when placing their order, you will need to create a coupon profile in sticky.io.Make sure the coupon profile is defined as a non-expiring and is single use only.You will only define 1 promo code
If you want to reward your Advocates with a Coupon, you should configure your coupon profile in sticky.io as a single use coupon.
Single Use Coupons - This type of coupon profile will deliver a unique promo code to an Advocate each time one of their friends makes a qualified purchase.The use of unique promo codes would prevent non-advocates from "discovering" your coupon code and using it outside of your loyalty program.If using this coupon method, you will want to create at least 500 promo codes in the coupon profile.Refer to this help center article about coupon creation.
Best practices for coupon fraud prevention:
Set an expiration date for your discount coupons.Periodically change the coupon codes that areused in your campaigns. Ensuring discount coupon amounts are set in a waythat you still benefit from every purchase made. Limit the use of referral coupons to newcustomers only. This can be done by checking the email address or shippingaddress of the customer against your database of past customers. If it happens to be an existing customer, display a message on the checkout screen indicating that the referral coupon only applies to new customers.
CONFIGURATION of your Checkout Page
*Please note that a developer is needed to perform the following steps*
Make sure to send the ‘referrer_id’parameter in the ‘NewOrder’ request to allow advocate to receivecredit for the referral. The referrer_id comes from the ‘aic’parameter in the URL of the promo link that forwards to the checkout page. ReferralCandy API documents: https://www.referralcandy.com/api
To issue a discount to customers who are purchasing via an advocate’s promo link, you must use:
Implement a ‘non expiring, single use coupon’in a hidden field on your checkout page.Send the ‘promoCode’ parameter inthe 'NewOrder' request for sticky.ioto applythe discount on the first order of the advocate’s friend.Only use the hidden field when a ‘referrer_id’is present
ReferralCandy Help Documents: https://help.referralcandy.com/customer/portal/articles/374669#DiscountLink