Yesterday, our friend forwarded us a link. It read some alien codes and a few mishaps of words, where we could only recognize the word ‘Perplexity AI’.
We clicked on that link, and it directly led us to the AI. Turns out, we have been given the Pro Version of the program for one whole month for free. Our friend is so generous – we thought till we saw a little notification popping up in the corner.
‘Want to refer this to your friends? If they accept your invitations, you get one month of Perplexity Pro Version for free! That’s when it hit us.
Our friend was using a referral link, and that ended up helping us altogether.
And why are we telling you this?
This is a real-life phenomenon that has been happening around the world, proving that referral plugins yield some of the best results of all time. This helps the user and potential users without involving some artificial marketing, and that’s why it is loved by the company and the users.
Our friend got the free months, and we got a new, useful tool. When we shared it, our other friends got a useful tool for their daily lives too. All natural and organic.
If you are still confused about how to make the most out of it, or even what it is, we’ve got your back. We’ll be talking about Referral plugins, why you need them, and listing some of the best referral plugins for you to choose from.
Table of Contents
- What is a WordPress Referral Plugin?
- Why Use WordPress Referral Plugins for Businesses?
- Best WordPress Referral Plugins For You to Check out
- InviteReferrals
- Wrapping up
- FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions):
What is a WordPress Referral Plugin?
A WordPress referral plugin is a direct tool that helps you create a referral program that you can use on your WordPress website. The purpose of this tool is to make your customer refer your services to their friends and family.
The whole process is made in a way that your happy customers can refer your services using a referral link or code to their loved ones. If that helps your business, they should get something in return for it.
So, the company (you), honors your customer with discounts, coupons, gifts, or something that they can be interested in. For example, when my friend referred Echorewards Pro to me, they received one month of Echorewards Pro for free, and they could multiply this by referring it to ten others.
If we were to wrap it up, Referral Plugins turn your customers into little brand ambassadors, and the result is only happy and loving customers in an automatic, trackable way!
Why Use WordPress Referral Plugins for Businesses?
Personally, it would be ideal because of its cost-effective, hassle-free approach to attract customers. If I list the reasons –
- WordPress Referral Plugins save you the money you had to pay to brand promoters, marketers, or any sort of people to bring your customers. Here, the customer is your brand ambassador. So, no extra money is spent. Also, the payment is only effective when they bring in customers.
- People are more likely to try something out when it is referred to by someone they know. Who knows you better than a friend!
- Since a friend has recommended this program, there is already an increased trust. This leads to higher conversion rates.
- When you reward someone for their actions, there is a tendency to come back for more. So when you offer gifts, discounts, coupons, etc, to your customers, this makes them engaged and they keep coming back with more people!
- Plugins are designed to handle and track links, discounts, rewards, and the analytics that are related to performance. So, you basically just have to sit back and enjoy the numbers.
Best WordPress Referral Plugins For You to Check out
There are hundreds of plugins available in the market right now, so it’s easy to get confused.
Choosing the right one for your WordPress site can feel overwhelming, and that’s why we have created a list of the 7 Referral Plugins that have impeccable features and proven performance.
EchoRewards
EchoRewards beats everyone in this game in terms of features. It helps to generate unique referral coupons for your clients to share with their family and friends.
And the best part?
The referrer and referee both get some kinds of rewards. If not rewards, EchoRewards also supports coupons and reward points as incentives.
But if you want to customize that, it lets you decide how you want to interact with your clients and what the discount type should be (fixed or percentage). You can set the discount capping, a minimum purchase quantity or can control whether only logged-in users can only use the offer or not.
One of the most common problems of referral codes is that it can sometimes get unnoticed. EchoRewards makes sure that your code gets noticed with a floating floral widget on the front end. It also shortcodes and uses widget supports to show referral links, cards and other info.
Wondering how you’d get the analytics? With EchoRewards, you can see the top referees, the quantity of referral orders and admin can also review and refuse rewards if necessary.
We recommend EchoRewards for its easy setup for beginners. Beginners often gets confused with coupons and points so it is the best for keeping track. Most users have said that it is good for controlling and customisation while also supporting digital product discounts.
But it comes with drawbacks like any other product and the first one is the cost. With added customers, you need to have premium ones for more admin work. Also, the setup might be too simple for big businesses.
InviteReferrals
Our second best choice has to be InviteReferrals, a well-known referral plugin in the community that eases sending your friends and family easy invites to try out the product. This SaaS-tool works through a plugin and can support multi-channel referrals through email and other social media platforms.
Like any other referral program, you can customize this with personalized images, texts, and rewards. The platform gives you a real-time dashboard to keep a track of your invitations, sign-ups, clicks, and successful conversions.
As you can already tell, we love its customizable options, multiple sharing options, and amazing ability to track every important movement of the plugin.
The reason why it is extremely popular within the community is its strong protection towards fraudulent activities. You can install this plugin and can sleep in peace knowing that it can detect fake or spam emails so that there is no false entry.
Another strong point is that it has strong multichannel ability and you can know which referrer is the most effective one so that you can plan rewards for them afterwards.
InviteReferrals is also good for beginners as it has a clean design/UX.
But we also recommend this to shop owners who want a SaaS-style support and plugin integration. Even though we didn’t find a prominent drawback of this particular one, since it relies on SaaS, you might have to pay recurring fees and have less control over data. The pricing may also be an issue in some cases.
ReferralCandy
ReferralCandy is the best for online stores because of its fully automated tracking and rewarding its customers. Most of the online store owners in Shopify and WooCommerce use this one and we are not a tad bit surprised by this statistics.
One of the major reasons is how it integrates Shopify, WooCommerce, and other popular marketing tools for the smoothest transition for rewards.
It rewards the customer who can bring new users through creating personalised links and emails when necessary. Everything is automated here, and you can track referrals, rewards, discounts to integrate with their marketing tools.
Since they have an advanced tracking system, they come with anti-fraud technology so you know you are not getting scammed anywhere near this tool. Also, they use performance analytics to optimize campaigns from time to time.
We would recommend this if you prefer something that is fully automated and gives you the full reliance on fraud and customer tracking. Not only that, it is the best in reporting in the whole list. Since it is fully automated, it is very easy to use and to follow through.
Good things take time, but this time, it costs your wallet too. The only drawback is it requires a monthly fee. The one without advanced features has limited customisation that eventually compels you to buy the one with high-tier plans.
WP Loyalty
Enough of boring reward points collectors, we want something different now. Previously, we have recommended business tools that are anti-fraud, are fully automatic, and can keep a record of the analytics. But this time, with Gratisfaction, we can offer and track loyalty points too!
Like any other referral plugin, it allows personalised reward structures for referral, new customer shares and most importantly, completing personal goals like sharing a review or for birthdays.
The plugin is self-hosted, custom reward structured, and uses real-time performances to monitor the next step. So why should you choose this over the other ones?
If you want one single referral program that has both referral and loyal programs, this is your call. But don’t worry, it is the easiest one yet to set up and works amazing for WooCommerce and membership sites. Other than that, it has custom pop-ups, central reward dashboards, and widgets.
The drawback? You can already guess. It has a whole lot of features to deal with so naturally, it looks clustered on the interface and can be overwhelming for some users. Also, you cannot just install and forget about it, it needs active maintenance for proper results at the end of the analytics.
In short – if you want loyal programmes and reward programmes to work together, get this without any second thought. The pricing plan is affordable than most that offer similar services.
GrowSurf
Whenever someone says they have a subscription-based business, we have only one SaaS tool that comes in our minds for referral links and it’s called ‘GrowSurf.’
While all the other referral plugins are focused on referral links and rewards only, GrowSurf helps to generate automatic referrals for SaaS. It doesn’t end here, GrowSurf can also generate links for online services and memberships.
If generating was not enough, it does an amazing job to track down referral milestones so that you can plan rewards after. While you plan those rewards. GrowSurf offers cash or credit rewards and connects it with CRM.
And the best part? It is not only the best for WooCommerce or WordPress, but also for any digital platform. It is also automated, so you do not have to worry about the numbers in any platform that you are hosting on.
If we go through who should use this one – if you are someone who needs a fully automated, hands-free process that supports milestone-based and single-tier rewards, this one is for you. It also supports great analytics by tracking everything in real-time and is really easy to work with marketing tools.
There are some drawbacks that you can already guess, it is SaaS-based so no self-hosting. So, the pricing might be a little less relaxing for the small businesses. SaaS is great for all but it might still lack direct integration with WooCommerce.
ReferralHero
This one is a tad different in the list. Ever played contests that won you rewards on certain websites?
The little reward show that keeps happening for discounts? This tool helps you manage, track, and improve that. This is for the creators, the SaaS founders and the business wonders who are in search for simple yet powerful referral tracking that helps you create referral links.
But it doesn’t end there. You can run contests and reward your customers based on that or for every signup and each new customer/purchase they bring in.
Among the best referral links, we are yet to find a referral plugin that supports contests or has single-tier game supports. So when we stumbled across ReferralHero, we were more than happy to include it in our list. Not only that it creates a record of the contests and the points, but also has leaderboard-based referrals, where users can compete for higher scores and top ranks.
It delivers built-in widgets, email automation for sending rewards, and landing pages. You can also integrate it with tools like Mailchimp, Zapier, etc.
We recommend this only if you are ready to use ready-to-launch templates for your reward programmes, giveaways, and referral programs.
Like every other referral program in the list, this one has real-time tracking and anti-fraud technology with automated emails. It also helps your personalised custom widgets.
If you are looking for in-store programs, this might not be your best choice as it is not integrated with WooCommerce. Otherwise, this can be your best friend of a couple of years.
Coupon Affiliates
While searching for the best referral plugins, we came across plugins that are good for both affiliate and referral reward systems. In this system, they give their customers a personalized coupon code to grab rewards. They can share it with their friends and family to avail that commission and discounts.
While this may seem like a normal referral plugin like we have mentioned, this actually stands out from the crowd for one big reason.
The reason is none other than its advanced tracking dashboard and the clients can see all their performances in there – the clicks, conversions, and their earnings so that it all becomes a measurable quantity for a performance-driven system.
The prime feature that pulled our interest was its shareable personal coupon codes.
While the tracking dashboard is an overall win, we still love the fact that we get to have our own coupon codes. But in that dashboard, each person can have detailed reports on their activities and rewards on them from time to time. There is transparency for users using their powerful tracking tools.
This is what the influencers are looking for in general.
So, if you have a store and you want hybrid functionality of affiliation and referral functionality – this one is your call. The drawback is it might be a little too much on the affiliate side even though it claims to be both, so make sure you know what you are getting yourself into.
Refer A Friend for WooCommerce by WPGens
If you want a minimalist yet powerful plugin where the referee and the referer both are rewarded through discount coupons, this can help. Here, the coupons are automatically generated so you do not have the hassle of tracking and making scopes of rewards.
Most of the automatic plugins have this problem of counting incomplete transactions. But this one makes sure to record or it is only triggered after a completed task or order. This simple task helps to prevent fraudulence and abuse.
You may think if it is so amazing, it must have something that holds it back. Perhaps, a complex setup?
Well. you would be right in most cases. But here, we are more than happy to prove you wrong. This one right here, is lightweight and fast. It is easy to install, beginner-friendly and most importantly – it does not slow down your site. No unnecessary bloat for the users, no bulk!
It also runs locally, removing the complexity of numbers and analytics or dashboards. So if you are someone who is looking for a minimalist, clean board, this one is for you.
We recommend this to small to mid-size businesses as this might be too simple for people with too many customers. As you can guess, its only drawback is that it might be too simple for businesses looking for in-depth analysis.
MyRewards
Suppose you have a business and you want to create long-term connections with them. Whether it is coupons or discount codes, you want them engaged and around because you know they can convert and can make other people convert.
While other referrals are only focused on one-time transactions, MyRewards gives them the opportunity to build long term relationships and customer engagement.
The amazing features don’t end here. As it promotes both the referral and loyalty benefits – the customers can get rewarded for both refereeing their friends. If that’s not possible then they can get rewards by completing store activities and that makes the long term customer engagement happen.
They keep a track using the points system which are earned though sharing reviews, suggesting a potential customer, and purchases. Among all this, there is an option of gamification where the customers are motivated to add levels, badges and achievements by engaging themselves into various contests.
The custom rewards may include points, discount coupons, free products or exclusive discounts/perks only for the users. The customer can also keep a track of their points history, user activity and can see their success rates for their referrals. This inspires them to try more and that’s how they play the long game – by keeping them hooked.
It’s the best to build loyalty and community but if you are looking for a quick discount-based referral programme – you can skip this one.
Join in if you want to increase customer lifetime through continuous engagement.
Coupon Referral Program for WooCommerce by WP Swings
As the name suggests, this plugin specialty is its complete focus on the coupon ecosystem of WooCommerce. Because of its simple structure and prime focus on WooCommerce‘s strengths, it is more consistent, trustworthy, and lightweight and this is said by the users, not us.
It is perfect for business owners who love simplicity and want to add another layer for the customers without wanting to deal with too much hassle of coding.
It follows the double-sided rewards structure when both sides receive discount coupons. Each user receives their unique referral codes and it then helps to keep a proper track of each user’s activity.
You can also select the coupon type, lifespan, and pending rewards from time to time. Once you are done setting this up, you can automate the referral invite and reward them for their activities.
Oh, the activities. You can also use real-time tracking and monitor the overall referrals. However, you should not opt for this if you are looking for a multi-tier, influencer, or affiliate-ish tracking style – this is simple, best for beginners wanting no hassle.
Naturally, we wouldn’t recommend this to big businesses and large company users too.
Wrapping up
Referral programs are not just a trend – it is a sustainable tool that has been existing for years. It has been there in our everyday lives so we are the living proof of its marketing power.
Whether you want to increase sales, increase organic traffic, or encourage word-of-mouth marketing, a plugin is always there for your needs. It is simple, sweet, and easy to start with (better than the affiliate ones)
You just need to choose the right one at the time. How will you do so?
In this article and our list, we have listed the features, pros and cons, the targeted user and the people who should avoid this – your answer lies there.
Further Reading: Check our ultimate guide on creating referral coupons in WooCommerce to elevate your referral marketing program.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions):
Q1. What’s the difference between a referral program and an affiliate program?
A referral program is where your customers are your brand ambassador. They are the ones who do the marketing of your products and services in exchange for rewards that directly help them.
For example – your friend sent you a referral link where you both get rewarded for purchasing. On the other hand, affiliate programes are paid partnerships where you pay other people for the purpose of promotions of your service.
Q2. Are referral plugins beginner friendly?
Absolutely, we have explained this in many of our products. Most of them are beginner friendly and are built for the ease of use with zero need for coding.
Q3. Can I run both referral and affiliate programs together?
Yes, but you need to have prior idea or experience to pull this successfully. Referral marketing is always necessary for loyalty programs and organic growth. But affiliate marketing can get you access to a higher level of audience and also within a short span of time if done correctly. Just make sure to keep separate track records of both.
Q4. Do referral plugins work with all WordPress themes and page builders?
Yes, most of the modern ones do. For those who don’t, we have mentioned the alternatives with pros and cons in this list.
Q5. How do I choose the right referral plugin for my business?
It usually depends on the size of your business, your goals, and your budget of your goals. We have explained everything for each plugin in our list, you can skim and find out which one’s the best for you in a matter of minutes.
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