In July 2024, we released a new feature called the Viral Loops Rewards.

It aims to connect Viral Loops with reward providers to let any business run referral campaigns with advanced rewarding schemes without having to manually distribute the rewards for referrals or set up complicated flows with code and APIs.

At the moment, Viral Loops Rewards connects with Tremendous for e-gifts and Stripe for account coupons and credit.

This article explains why we created this product, how it works, and what possibilities open up for tech products, media companies, event organizers, and business services.

Why we created it

Viral Loops has been helping businesses build referral programs since 2016. Over the years, we've noticed a common pain point: the manual distribution of rewards. This process was time-consuming and often prone to errors, especially as referral programs scaled to more than 2000 participants.

So far, one has to check their referral marketing software about who deserves a reward, then go to another system, find that person, and send them the reward manually.

Small companies waste time and big companies invest a lot in automating. Both risk erroneously  rewarding particiapnts.

After talking with many customers, we realized that a new solution was needed. Businesses wanted an automated process for  reward distribution to focus on optimising their campaigns rather than getting bogged down in logistics.

It started as a simple idea. Add a button within the Viral Loops dashboard labeled “Reward this person” and when pressed, a predetmined reward to be given to them. 

We found that egifts and account credits have been some of the most popular referral rewards among Viral Loops campaigns and we set out to build integrations with the top providers of both.

How it works

Viral loops rewards is built around two main integrations:

1. Tremendous: This integration allows for automatic distribution of e-gift cards and other digital rewards.
2. Stripe: Through this integration, businesses can offer coupons and discounts as rewards to their existing clientele managed through Stripe so the rewards can feel already applied to their account.

After a Viral Loops campaign goal is reached and that person qualifies for a reward, you can forward a reward to them with your preferred platform by pressing an approval button. That can be either for every referral or when a referral milestone is reached.

Step 1: Set up  rewards and conditions

The first step to setting up Viral Loops Reward for your campaign is to decide what people get and what is required to get it, within your  Viral Loops campaign settings. With this you configure the rewards you want to offer the referrers, invitees, or both.

Important: At the moment Viral Loops Rewards is intented for automating the referrer rewards, invitee rewards still need your attention to be distributed.

For the referrer rewards (for people who invite others) you have the following options:

1. Unlimited reward: Give a reward for every single successful referral they make.
   For example, you can tell your customers: “For every friend you bring you get $5”
2. Tiered rewards: Give different rewards as people invite more friends (aka. Referral milestones).
   For example, you can tell your customers: “When you make your first referral, you get $5. When you invite three people, you will get $40, When you invite six …"
3. Combine Unlimited and Tiered rewards: You can combine both to create a very generous campaign but effective campaign.
   For example, “For every friend you refer, you will get $5, and when you reach the tier of 4 invited friends, you’ll get a free product, when you reach 10 referrals, you get an iPhone.”

These rewards set the rules for your campaign. It’s what people see in the widgets elements within their referral dashboard and act as the conditions for someone to deserve a reward. 

At this point the set up only informs that someone should get a reward in some way.

Step 2: Assign a fullfillment platform and item to each reward

With the campaign settings sorted, you can connect a platoform and a corresponding “actual” reward to the ones set as campaign rules.

Navigate to the Viral Loops Dashboard of your campaign, and go to the Rewards Management tab. Then you can follow the steps in the Rewards Distribution table to connect your platform(s).

Once you’ve made the connection successfully, you can select a platoform that will handle each kind of reward, and within that platform, you can assign the corresponding item.

You can have different platforms for each reward, allowing you to combine many types of referral incentives.

What possibilities open

1. Fast gratification: This integration feature let's you be way faster with fulfilling the pending rewards to referrers, which then keeps people happy and increases your chances of even more referrals. It was not uncommon for businesses to redeem rewards every once a week or so in batches — it helped with operations, but hindered the referral momentum.
2. ‍Global campaigns: Using Stripe's currency-based coupons or credit and Tremendous' region-specific reward option, one can tailor their campaigns for different markets. This helps brands big on localisation that run a separate campaigns for each region satisfy referrers even more.
3. Better ROI estimation: Combing the revenue-generation data from Viral Loops and costs from Tremendous or Stripe, a business can better calculate customer acquisition costs and the marginal value added with each referral.
4. Better reward A/B testing: This integration solves a great customer request of testing different incentives while the campaign is running. Having the ability to do it from a single dashboard make it faster for decision to materialise and not wait for automations to be updated across three apps.