Top Referral Marketing Software Tools to Look at in 2023

Referral marketing involves promoting your products or services by using referrals from your existing customer base. This is usually done by word-of-mouth and can be a highly effective form of marketing. As with most types of marketing, you can simplify your workload by automating the process, using specialist referral marketing software tools.

We have looked at a selection of tools here to give you an idea of some of the referral marketing software now available.

Top Referral Marketing Software Tools to Look at in 2023:

1. Referral Factory

Referral Factory has built an incredibly easy to use referral marketing solution that is geared at helping you get more referred customers. Their solution allows you to ‘build your own referral program in under 5 minutes’ by giving you access to over 1000 pre-built referral program templates that you can duplicate and use as your own. You can either copy a referral program from one of their templates, OR build your own referral program from scratch. 

What is unique about Referral Factory is that you don’t need to install any tracking scripts on your website – which means that marketers don’t need the help of developers to implement their basic solution. Their referral software comes with a built in ‘page builder’ so you can build your own pages to capture referrals, and these can look and feel 100% on brand. 

Once you’ve built your referral program you’ll need to onboard referrers – which you can either do by uploading a database, or by marketing your referral program to your customers. You’ll then be able to track and monitor all the users in your referral program from your client dashboard – with the option to export your data, sync it to google sheets, or collect it in real time from a secure webhook.

The reason there are so many ways to interact with your data is because of the flexible reward structure – meaning that you can offer literally anything as rewards to your customers, because you will need to manage the redemption of those rewards. This gives you complete control over how and when you will reward your customers for their referrals. 

4.9 out of 5 stars

Referral Factory is a one-stop shop for your referral marketing programs. Invite referrers, offer different types of rewards, run competitions, and more with Referral Factory’s features.

Ratings

Features & Pricing

Pros and Cons

Ratings

Features

4.8

Ease of Use

4.8

Support

5.0

Overall Score

4.9

Features & Pricing

Referral invites & notifications

multiple referral program types

1000+ referral program templates

landing page builder

social media sharing buttons

fraud and user verification alerts

integrations

Price starting at:

$95

Pros and Cons

Flexible features

Chat and video support on all plans

CRM integrations minimize data entry

Maximum user numbers have been reduced on each plan

Customization can be difficult on the lower plans

Have to pay extra to use your own domain

Best for: Flexible referral software for any business of any size.

4.9 out of 5 stars

Referral Factory is a one-stop shop for your referral marketing programs. Invite referrers, offer different types of rewards, run competitions, and more with Referral Factory’s features.

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2. Refersion

Although primarily an affiliate marketing network, Refersion also acts as a referral marketing tool and an influencer marketing platform. If you are involved with eCommerce, you can integrate Refersion into your online store, either with a special app (for Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento, Stripe, and Chargebee) or using a custom integration with Refersion’s API.

Once you’ve set up an eCommerce integration, you enter any existing affiliates and influencers into Refersion.

Refersion includes a marketplace where you can publish an “Offer,” where you give specifics about what you need and what you are willing to pay. You can include trackable links and coupon codes. In addition, Refersion helps you set up a targeted landing page. Refersion is flexible enough to help you structure your offers in a way that makes the most sense for each campaign. For example, you can set a flat rate commission or set an elaborate highly tiered performance payment scheme.

You can go beyond just setting up simple referral rewards. For example, you can structure offers requiring a conversion to meet specific requirements to be considered payable. Refersion can then make sure that the sales it tracks conform to these requirements. Refersion refers to sales that don’t meet these requirements as Unqualified.

Refersion’s reporting function is all focused on sales. You can see the data from various angles, and you can request customized reports from the Refersion team, breaking the data down in different ways.

4.6 out of 5 stars

Stepping into the influencer marketing landscape is a natural fit for this affiliate marketing app. Refersion helps brands build vast affiliate marketing networks, simplifying management, reporting, and training. Influencers as affiliate marketers is a logical progression.

Ratings

Features & Pricing

Pros and Cons

Ratings

Features

4.8

Ease of Use

4.5

Reporting

4.5

Overall Score

4.6

Features & Pricing

Automated Recruiting

Content Library

E-commerce Tools

Product/Gifting Tools

Forms and Compliance

Price starting at:

$99

Pros and Cons

Really easy way to manage affiliates at scale

Multiple ways to structure commissions

Content library connects directly to affiliate websites (edit locally, advertise globally)

Limited types of on-demand reporting

Not easy to organise influencers/affiliates according to performance

No on-platform payment processing

Best for: Medium to Large Size E-commerce brands

4.6 out of 5 stars

Stepping into the influencer marketing landscape is a natural fit for this affiliate marketing app. Refersion helps brands build vast affiliate marketing networks, simplifying management, reporting, and training. Influencers as affiliate marketers is a logical progression.

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3. CrewFire

CrewFire is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that specializes in ambassador and influencer marketing. The program helps in generating more likes, comments, and views on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and other social media channels. The platform enlists brand ambassadors to generate more buzz around the brand, compensating them for contributing to the growth of the business, and fostering a healthy ambassador community. 

One of CrewFire’s primary services is referrals and word-of-mouth marketing. CrewFire provides services beyond affiliate marketing. Instead, the platform offers an all-inclusive solution for hosting your affiliate program and rewarding your army of ambassadors for producing UGCs, sharing content and resources, and taking part in your social channels. 

Using the CrewFire platform, you can provide your brand ambassadors with exclusive discount codes and referral links that they can use to drive revenue and earn passive income. You can also create your own discount coupons for certain events or campaigns, such as a Black Friday promotion or a product anniversary. 

You can present your ambassador with a unique coupon code that is only valid for a limited time and offers a larger profit share and discount. Your advocates can easily check their earnings and transaction history. The platform can also redirect your ambassadors to PayPal or ACH to cash out their rewards. 

CrewFire also gives you the option to set up a reward shop packed with great rewards and goodies that ambassadors can redeem in exchange for referral points. Because CrewFire has a customizable incentives feature, your brand can write the script and dig into what motivates your ambassadors to perform tasks, stay engaged with the campaign, and grow with your brand.

Key Features: Influencer Relationship Management, Team Collaboration Tools, Content Review, Campaign Management, White Label Reporting, Payment Processing, Influencer Content Amplification, Ecommerce Tools,

Channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter

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4. Friendbuy

Friendbuy helps you launch your referral program quickly and easily with lightweight code snippets to get the program live.

Friendbuy widget templates are mobile-friendly and optimized for encouraging, easy sharing. You can activate referrals anywhere on your site or in your mobile app.

Friendbuy automates fulfillment for any reward type: coupon code, account credit, loyalty points, gift cards, and more. With robust algorithms for fraud detection and flexible reward criteria, it evaluates every purchase to ensure quality reward eligibility.

You can optimize user referral with easy A/B testing for every part of the referral funnel. Experiment with different offers, creative, and messaging, and discover what drives more sharing and conversions. Friendbuy makes it simple to create variants and measure gain for all your key performance indicators, and quickly pivot when you identify a champion.

Friendbuy equips you with email templates to maximize an automated program, plus the flexibility to design custom communications. You can easily set event-based triggers and reports to power more communications to customers and prospects.

You can track real-time performance through each step in the referral funnel.

5. InviteReferrals

InviteReferrals is powerful, yet simple-to-integrate, referral program software that helps to grow your business and acquire new customers through referral marketing. It integrates with multiple eCommerce platforms, including WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, MailChimp, and many more.

It works across all devices and platforms. Referral Program Widgets automatically adapt themselves according to the platform.

Customers can use the InviteReferrals mobile application to invite their friends through the referral program. Friends who accept the invite then install the mobile app.  InviteReferrals then sends coupons to the referrer over email for driving a referral install.

InviteReferrals provides detailed customer referral program analytics, including invites filtered by referral channels. They track every step of the program, from shares to clicks to successful referral conversions (registrations, sales, mobile application installs). This helps you to identify your most influential referrers and track data to the individual customer level.

All campaigns are WYSIWYG, meaning you can design the complete campaign without the help of a designer or a coder.

6. Mention Me

Mention Me provides a refer-a-friend platform tailored to your brand. It uniquely captures word of mouth sharing. 

You can A/B test by cohort, testing all elements of your campaigns, typically resulting in an uplift of 3-7x during the first six months. The Mention Me platform offers “Name Sharing” to capture real-world conversations. Friends can access discounts just by entering the name of the friend who referred them.

Mention Me delivers rewards to new customers and the friend who introduced them. You have control over every element of your campaign and can see real-time results in your referral dashboard.

7. Genius Referrals

The Genius Referrals platform makes it easy to create and operate a referral program. They break their system into seven basic steps:

1. Sign up for a free program and get your program running in minutes. This mainly involves configuring the program to customize it for your business. You can create new referral campaigns with multiple restriction and tiers, choosing and designing templates using the Genius Referrals design center.

2. Create a program and campaign for your referral program. Indeed you can even run multiple marketing campaigns in parallel, configuring multiple tiers per campaigns

3. Define the default contents to be published on social media using a Wizard to create widget packages. 

4. Choose and design the perfect template in the design center. They provide multiple options depending on the type of referral program you implement.

5. Install the referral program on your website. You use the codes snippets generated on the Design Center to install the referral program template.

6. Notify your prospects and customers via email and social media.

7. Monitor, manage and optimize your programs. Analyze and tweak your referral marketing program easily with the tools Genius Referrals provides.

8. Ambassador

Ambassador’s strength is that it is all-in-one referral software. You can use it to handle referral, affiliate, partner, influencer, and advocate programs on a single platform. All of these types of marketing follow a similar pattern:

1. Identify your ambassadors – customers, affiliates, influencers, partners, employees, and others

2. Enroll your ambassadors in targeted and personalized referral campaigns

3. Track your ambassadors and monitor their key performance indicators

4. Reward your ambassadors with customized incentives and automate the reward process

Ambassador offers multiple referral marketing opportunities. You can tailor specific referral programs based on customer type, deliver unique rewards and messaging while tracking and analyzing every segment and all activities. They provide out-of-the-box eCommerce, CRM, and billing integrations – plus JavaScript & Open API.

9. Referral Rock

Referral Rock is referral program software, helping firms to set up word-of-mouth on autopilot. It enables you to customize the look and feel of your referral program to match your brand and customer experience. It provides your advocates and referrals a seamless experience so they’ll want to engage and participate.

You can control the design, copy, creative, messaging, and more. You build the referral program directly into your customer interactions and marketing channels to provide a seamless experience across all touchpoints. 

Referral Rock includes a dedicated advocate portal to easily share and track results, with pre-drafted messaging to make sharing easy and on-brand. Customization goes as far as providing personalized advocate codes and unique links. 

You give your advocates multiple ways to join and share. These include integrating your email marketing tools to join with a single click, a website referral widget for easy access, automatic enrollment when behind a login page, and single sign-on via Facebook and Google. Advocates can share via email, social, SMS, unique links, and codes.

With Referral Rock, you can get set up in days, not weeks, with an iterative approach to quickly launch and optimize your referral program. They have personalized the onboarding to make it easy for you to get up and running without needing complicated integrations.

10. Referral SaaSquatch

Referral SaaSquatch is a marketer-driven platform that provides marketers the power to create referral and partner programs. Designed specifically for digital businesses, SaaSquatch acquires customers and increases lifetime value through referrals, special offers, and incentives for brands to utilize into their referral strategies. 

Specific features of the platform include, but are not limited to: 

• Multi-program and multi-campaign functionality 

• Tiered and purchased based programs 

• Success coaching and engineering support 

What makes SaaSquatch a reliable referral marketing software tool to look into? Apart from its award-winning customer service and reliable tech systems, SaaSquatch has: 

• An observational engagement engine that allows you to create stunning widgets and customizable program rules 

• The resources to track the widest variety of user behavior like purchases, in-app actions, and custom objects or events 

• Conversion triggers that let you run referral and loyalty programs that reward users for actions like app install, first purchase, and more

Referral SaaSquatch even allows you to automatically issue the most reward types, build custom rewards and manage all of your incentives and rewards.

11. Revetize

Revetize is a referral marketing software tool that lets you hit multiple birds with one stone. If you’re looking for the one-stop-shop for everything lead generation, customer communication, and reputation management, Revetize is the platform for you. 

What makes Revetize different from other referral marketing tools? It allows you to leverage your happy customers and quickly acquire referrals, reviews, and repeat business. It also helps you send personalized, purposeful business texts and generate leads without having to lift a finger. All of your marketing efforts are organized into one spot. 

The software tool allows brands to quickly generate hundreds of online reviews from authentic customers, create and distribute promotions straight from the platform, and even send personalized messages to a mass list of customers.

12. Yotpo

Yotpo’s eCommerce marketing platform is one of the best tools in the market. Because it offers one of the most advanced solutions for customer reviews, visual marketing, referrals, SMS marketing, and more, it’s no wonder companies like Google and Shopify utilize all of its benefits. 

Yotpo integrates seamlessly with your entire marketing stack. By helping you accelerate growth and accomplish your goals in your overall digital marketing strategy, Yotpo is a great tool for: 

• Increasing sales 

• Standing out on search engines and social media 

• Understanding feedback at scale 

• Building a better buyer journey 

Sounds too good to be true with Yotpo, right? What’s even better are the available plans it offers. You can vouch for the Premium plan, which provides you custom monthly orders, multi-channel content generation, advanced content management, and more. But you don’t have to pay for ANYTHING if you’re just starting out. The Free plan includes 50 monthly orders, on-site widgets, basic customization, and more.

13. TapMango

Who wouldn’t want the most comprehensive and feature-rich customer loyalty and online delivery platform on the market? That’s exactly what you’ll get with TapMango. 

TapMango gives you all of the tools and resources you need to build and run a loyalty program your customers will be telling all of their loved ones about. With TapMango, you get amazing features like: 

• A comprehensive marketing portal to manage your campaigns, customers, and more 

• A customer-facing tablet to provide an out-of-this-world customer experience that will have your competitors seeing green

• Your own branded mobile app for customers to keep track of their points, offers, and deals 

• Branded key tags that double as gift cards 

What makes TapMango a fantastic referral marketing software program to invest in? The tool’s fully automated POS integration lets you start converting sales transactions into loyal customers. TapMango integrates with major POS systems including Toast, Lightspeed, Square, and more.

14. Talkable

Are you an eCommerce brand trying to invest in a referral and loyalty marketing program? Talkable is a great resource to look into. 

Talkable allows you to acquire and manage high-value clients at a low cost, increase retention, and grow revenue through targeted referral and loyalty programs. 

Through the power of Talkable, you’re able to access a team of growth experts in a results-focused company with 9 years of eCommerce industry expertise. Talkable integrates smoothly with any platform so you don’t have to. When you unlock powerful customer insights, you will get a better understanding of your target market, and what they love, what they don’t love, what makes them tick, and more. It also doesn’t hurt to unlock growth thanks to A/B testing and ongoing campaign optimization.

15. ReferralMagic

Through the magic of ReferralMagic, you can turn your users and customers into referral magnets. How is that possible? It’s not just the easiest way to integrate referral tracking software into your website. You build the right referral program directly into your SaaS, rebrand and resell to your clients, and customize based on your business needs. 

So why should brands and businesses look into using ReferralMagic for their referral marketing? ReferralMagic has a variety of features that make it stand out from other marketing software tools: 

• It helps you leverage your existing customer base. 

• It effectively tracks all kinds of traffic through your site. 

• It’s completely customizable depending on what your needs are. 

• It welcomes cost-efficiency. 

• It is customer-centric. 

• It is dedicated to your specific goals. 

ReferralMagic makes referral marketing magical.

16. Hello Referrals

Hello Referrals is web-based referral tracking software that helps firms work with their network to send, receive, and track business referrals and sales leads. It provides tracking and reporting tools and gives you a place to organize your trusted partners in business.

Their website emphasizes the broad canvass of potential users for Hello Referrals, including:

• Chambers of Commerce

• Rotary Clubs

• Small business associations

• Trade associations

• Business networking groups

• Groups of friends

You can use Hello Referrals to send and receive business referrals and word-of-mouth leads. You can also track your referrals and manage your leads. 

It provides centralized communication with your referral group that keeps your networking activity in one place and always up-to-date. The platform allows you to send messages to partners, stage meet-ups, and create events to help each other throughout the sales cycle.

You can pick from three pricing tiers (at $49, $99, or customize your referral program) that vary according to the number of members in your group.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the best referral marketing tools?

In this post, we have given you an idea of some of the referral marketing software now available. Examine the features and benefits of these products to find one suitable for your needs. The tools we have analyzed are:
1. Referral Factory
2. Refersion
3. Friendbuy
4. InviteReferrals
5. Mention Me
6. CrewFire
7. Genius Referrals
8. Ambassador
9. Referral Rock
10. Referral SaaSquatch
11. Revetize
12. Yotpo
13. TapMango
14. Talkable
15. ReferralMagic
16. Hello Referrals

What are the best referral programs?

Referral marketing involves promoting your products or services by using referrals from your existing customer base, usually by word of mouth. But how should your referral program look? One idea is to look at some of the best referral programs other businesses operate. Some of the better known high performing referral programs are:
PayPal – gives cash for referrals
Dropbox – gives free storage for referring friends
Airbnb – gives cash for referring people (and more when they rent out their places)

How do you market a referral program?

Most of the referral marketing software tools we have looked at in this post could help you market your referral program. Some other methods you can use to market your referral program include:
1. Promote your referral program with email marketing
2. Share your customer reviews
3. Make sure you have social share buttons
4. Include your referral program on the homepage of your website as well as a dedicated landing page
5. Include in your customer accounts
6. Find a brand ambassador

How do you reward clients for referrals?

You can automate many of the tasks involved in rewarding your clients for referrals by using one of the referral marketing tools that we have covered in this post. For example, some tools automate your rewards, whether they be coupon code, account credit, loyalty points, gift cards, or something else. Some of the most common rewards for referrals are:
Discounts
Cash/cash back
Store credit
Swag
Gift cards
Free subscription period
Donations

What makes a good referral?

You can determine how good a referral is by whether it meets the CARE elements of a good referral. These are:
C (Consent) – although many referrals are given blindly, they are only useful if everyone involved does it willingly. In some cases, referrals can lead to inappropriate connections
A (Actual) – a real opportunity must exist
R (Relevant) – a connection must be relevant for all parties
E (Exit and Evaluate) – the referrer will disappear from the transaction once the connection is made

How do you create an effective referral program?

The referral marketing software we have covered here will help you create an effective referral program. Some other important considerations include:
Provide exceptional products
Put your customers first
Make sure you have clear marketing goals
Keep your referral messaging clear and easy to understand
Make it easy for people to refer
Figure out who to reward
Determine what reward to offer
Decide on a reward structure
Use reviews to boost your referral marketing
Implement analytics and tracking