Setting up referral marketing¶
GetSocial provides one of the most sophisticated and comprehensive referral marketing solutions for mobile apps. We have automated most of the process so our customers can set up referral marketing in their app with very little resources and time. Since our referral solution makes use of several GetSocial features (like Smart Invites, Push Notification, Smart Flow, etc), we have written this guide so you have all the information you need in one place. Of course, you can always contact our customer service for any questions or doubts you may have.
To implement the referral solution in your app, you will first need to go through the initial setup. Follow the getting started guide to add our SDKs in your app. Once you have done that, come back to this guide.
Set up Invite channels¶
You can find here the Supported Invite Channels and the customization that we support. Some channels like Facebook, VK, and Kakao require extra setup. You can skip this step if you don’t think your users will use those channels for sharing. Do note, these channels would still be available to your users via the Native share option.
Set up push notifications (optional)¶
This is an optional step, however, recommended you set this up. When push notifications are set up with GetSocial you can notify your users when their friends successfully accept their invite. You will also need this if you intend to send reward data to the referrer using our Smart flow (see below for more information). Check out push notifications setup guide
Customizing link, and invite content¶
Once you have done the initial setup, it’s time to prepare the invite content that your users will share with their friends. Along with the invite content, you can also embed custom data in the invite links to pass data from the referrer to the referee (i.e. sender to the recipient). Following are key things you can customize:
- (Optional) Set up your own custom domain for the link instead of the default
gsc.im. - (Optional) Customize the landing page: the landing page is shown when users click on the invite link on desktop and in some cases on mobile as well. Providers like Facebook also fetch data from this to build a rich preview when sharing (i.e. image, description, etc)
- (Optional) Add custom data to the links: In some cases, you might want to attach custom data to the link that you wish to pass from the sender to the recipient user for onboarding or other purposes. At the same time, you can also override some of our default parameters e.g. link redirection, analytics parameters, etc.
- Once you have completed all the above steps, it’s time to compose the invite content. By default, GetSocial takes the invite content that you have set up on the dashboard. However, you might want to change the invite content depending on the content your users are sharing. Follow the steps to override the default invite content.
Sending Invites¶
This is the step where your users will send the invite to their friends. At this point, you need to decide whether you would like to use the default GetSocial Invite UI, which of course you can customize to the look and feel of your app or whether you want complete flexibility and build your own custom UI.
- The quickest way is to use GetSocial UI. Somewhere in your app, you will have a menu item or button for users to initiate the invite process (like “refer and earn”, “invite friends” etc). Once your user clicks on that menu item or button, you will simply open the GetSocial Invite UI which takes care of the rest of the sharing process. Check how to send invite using GetSocial UI how to use GetSocial UI.
- Sending invites using your own custom UI: When you want more flexibility on the layout, you need to build your own custom UI and use our data API for the rest. Check how to send invite without GetSocial UI
Receiving invites and retrieving referred users¶
When friends click on an invite link, they are either deeplinked into the app if they have it already installed, or we take them to the appropriate app store to install your app. Once the app is opened after install or deeplink you can fetch the referral data. Follow the referral data guide to see how to retrieve data attached to the invitation.
At this point, you can also retrieve a list of referred users on the sending device which contains a list of all successful referrals by the user. Retrieve referred users just with a few lines of code.
Rewarding¶
GetSocial enables you to set up a basic app install based rewarding and also complex event-based rewarding. Check out an overview of different rewarding uses cases.
App Install rewarding¶
App install based rewarding can be achieved in the following ways:
- From the client-side using our SDK: As stated above you can retrieve a list of referred users for a given user and use that information for rewarding.
- Alternatively, you can enable the App Install webhook from the webhook section of our dashboard where we send sender and receiver data after every successful app install.
Delayed rewarding¶
In several cases, you might want to delay the rewarding until the invited friend successfully completes an in-app event like registration, subscription, level completed, etc. Delayed rewarding can be set up using our Smart flow feature. You can find an implementation guide on how to set this up, the example in this guide uses level_achieved event which you can replace with the event necessary for your use case (i.e registration_completed, subscription_completed, etc)
If none of the above covers your needs, feel free to reach out to our support team who can guide you further.