ReferralMagic
$245 per month
Pros
- Easy to set up and track the referrals
- Clean and minimalist UI
- White labeling options
- Fully featured and easy to use API
Cons
- More native integrations needed, particularly with email marketing tolls other than MailChimp
- Not enough help documentation
There are so many channels to grow an online business.
Some, like content marketing, is free, but it takes a lot of time and effort to build high-quality content. Others, like paid ads, takes less time to gain traffic but require a lot of money which will make it out of the reach of the majority of small businesses and early-stage startups.
Apart from these methods, when you have a good quality product, your own customers can become the product’s ambassadors and word of mouth becomes so effective.
This becomes even more effective when you incentivize your customers for referring the product to their friends, family, or their audience.
This is where referral programs come in.
It is essentially a small reward or a commission or a gift you give to your customers when they refer someone else to use the product.
One of the best examples of a highly successful referral program is the one that was implemented by Dropbox which helped them grow at a huge pace during the initial years.
As good as it sounds, it is not quite easy to implement a referral program and track all the referrals if you are going to code a referral system by yourself within your application.
However, there are some affordable third party software tools that can be used to easily set up a referral program for your product.
ReferralMagic is one of those tools and in this review, we will see how good it is, details on support channels, pricing, and some of the alternatives available.
Dashboard & user interface
Once the initial set-up is done providing the details of your website, you are welcomed to the clean and minimalistic dashboard.
I really liked the minimalism of the dashboard with only the essential elements listed on the top menu bar without any distractions. It makes navigating the UI very easy and intuitive.
Campaign types
There are three types of referral campaigns that you can set-up with ReferralMagic.
- Conversion machine - Both your users and their invitees get rewarded only when the invitee purchases something or upgrades to a paid plan after signing up. In short, a reward is given out only when someone pays for your product.
- Sign-up booster - Both your users and their invitees get rewarded when the invitee just signs up to your product. This campaign type is perfect for lead generation.
- Selfie - This is the campaign type where you become the referrer of your product and all the invitees under you get rewarded based on the prizes you have set up.
The three types of campaigns would cover the majority of use cases of anyone starting a new referral program for their product.
Installation and rewards
Once the campaign type is selected, the next step is to install the javascript snippet on all the pages you want the track the sign-ups or any other actions triggered by ReferralMagic.
You can easily invite someone else, for example, your developer, to complete the set-up for you.
Once installed, the next step is to set up rewards for both the referrer and the invitee. Rewards can either be monetary or something else like a discount coupon, credits, etc.
It is also possible to set up emails to be sent to the referrers for getting their referral codes and also periodic emails on their referral stats. The native MailChimp integration would be of use to implement this easily.
Integrations
The following native integrations are available in ReferralMagic.
Email marketing
- MailChimp
Payments & subscriptions
- Recurly
- Stripe
Website & funnel builders
- ClickFunnels
- LeadPages
- Squarespace
- Wix
Automation
- Zapier
Pricing
There are three plans available, the monthly plan that costs $245 per month, the annual plan that provides a discount of 15% and a self-hosted plan that costs a one-time licensing fee of $4450.
The pricing is quite attractive if you want to start a referral program for multiple websites as referrals can be tracked across multiple domains.
Although it is good that there are no limits on the number of referrals or campaigns, it will be good to have a cheaper plan with limits on both.
The on-premise installation gives access to the source code for customization and is quite clearly designed for enterprise-level customers for more security.
Support
Live chat support is available both on the website and within the application dashboard. Though the response times were not very quick initially, the team was very supportive and gave precise answers to my queries.
However, there is a lack of proper help documentation and tutorial videos which definitely has to be improved.
Best alternatives
While most referral marketing tools are quite expensive, there are some affordable alternatives as well with their unique strengths.
Pricing - starts from $49 per month
One of the strengths of ReferralHero is that it has a lot of email marketing integrations like Active Campaign, ConvertKit, HubSpot, Moosend, etc.
Also, the widgets can be fully white labeled without any "powered by links".
Pricing - starts from $49 per month with commissions
ReferralCandy has an incredible array of e-commerce integrations. Apart from the widgets, it is easy to set up forms and landing pages to promote the referral program.
Pricing - starts from $39 per month
Rewardful is an awesome tool for SaaS businesses to use on the top of Stripe's subscription and billing.
It lets you build both referral and affiliate programs for SaaS products that makes it an incredible value for money.
Conclusion
ReferralMagic makes it very easy for any small e-commerce business or start-ups to set up a referral program in a few clicks.
Although more integrations with third-party tools like email marketing would be good, support documentation has to be improved, etc., the team behind the tool is pretty experienced in SaaS and we can believe they will continue building the product with more features.