What triggers a referral?

Triggering a referral is what unlocks rewards, sends out New Participant Reward emails, and fires off integrations like Webhooks or PayPal payouts. Rewards will only be unlocked if the reward requirements are met. For example, refer a friend, and both of you will receive $10 off your subscription when they subscribe to a paid plan. In this scenario, the referrer will only receive referral credit if the referred friend subscribes to a paid plan.

There are two scenarios you can choose from in which to trigger a referral. You can configure this in the Installation step of the Campaign Editor.

1. Sign Up + Qualifying Action

In this scenario, for someone (a referred friend) to count as a referral, they must do two things. First, they must access your site through a participant's referral link, then submit their email address on your website. Second, they must complete a specific action defined as a qualifying action. For example, the action could be making their first payment or if your sales team marks a deal in your customer database as successful. To make this work, you must tell GrowSurf about your chosen qualifying action.

• Example #1: Imagine your sales team moves a referred lead in your customer database to the 'Won/Closed' stage, like in HubSpot or Salesforce.
• Example #2: A new trial user who was referred to your SaaS has their first payment processed (e.g, Stripe)

2. Sign Up

In this scenario, the only thing the referred friend needs to do to count as a referral is access your site through a participant's referral link, then submit their email address on your website.

• Example #1: A referred friend signs up as a lead on your website
• Example #2: A referred friend subscribes to your newsletter

Please note the following:

• Unless you are using the REST API, in both scenarios, a website visitor will need to visit your site using a participant's referral link (e.g, https://yourwebsite.com?grsf=participant_unique_id -- notice the grsf URL parameter that contains the participant's unique ID).
• A referral is not the same as an impression. An impression is a pageview of a participant's unique share link. For example, if a website visitor visits a participant's unique share link, this will count as one impression for the participant. Click here to learn more.
• If you are using a referral credit expiration window and manually assign a referrer to an existing participant, the time is based on when the participant was initially added to your campaign, and not when you manually assigned the referrer.