With the native ReferralCandy integration in Firmhouse, you can run influencer and referral campaigns with on your subscription customer base.
This guide explains how to set up a campaign in ReferralCandy that rewards your existing subscriber with a discount on their next order or multiple orders, whenever they refer a friend to your store.
Discount-code based vs ReferralCandy native
The Firmhouse integration with ReferralCandy is native. That means that a reward is automatically applied on an Advocate's subscription in Firmhouse.
If you don't use our native integration with ReferralCandy, or if you are using a different referral/loyalty app on Shopify, then usually advocates get a discount code emailed to them. And then they need to apply that discount code to get a reward.
The native Firmhouse integration makes the experience much more smoother: whenever an advocate refers a friend successfully, the reward is automatically added to their existing subscription.
Configuring ReferralCandy in Firmhouse
You'll need to copy-paste a a few things from ReferralCandy into Firmhouse to following the next few steps. So it's convenient if you keep two tabs or browser windows open to configure.
Steps
In your Firmhouse project, go to New Features in the sidebar of your project.
Enable the ReferralCandy Integration feature by clicking the toggle.
Now go to Apps in the Firmhouse sidebar, find ReferralCandy and click Configure.
In a different tab or browser screen, go to ReferralCandy in your Shopify store, and navigate to the Account menu item. It may be that this is initially hidden under a "View more" link that you need to click.
On the Profile tab (this should automatically already be open), scroll down to the API Tokens section. There copy-paste the API Access ID and API Secret ID into the same fields in Firmhouse in the ReferralCandy configuration settings and click Save.
After saving your API tokens, in the ReferralCandy configuration settings in Firmhouse, create and/or choose the Discount you would like to automatically apply to the Advocate's subscription.
Setting up a referral campaign in ReferralCandy
Let's now set up set up a campaign in ReferralCandy:
Steps
In ReferralCandy, go to Campaigns from the menu and click Create new Campaign.
Choose Refer-a-Friend.
Under Set Rewards click Advocate reward and then Edit reward.
Then as Give advocates a free gift reward type choose Custom. This allows Firmhouse to process any advocate rewards generated by this campaign, and apply them to subscriptions.
Save the Advocate reward and go back to setting up the rest of your campaign.
Set up your remaining campaign settings as you see fit, such as the name, identifiers, expiry, target audience, and advocates, etc.
Activate your campaign and use the normal ReferralCandy features to promote your campaign to your existing customer base.
How are rewards awarded to advocates?
Once you've gone through all the above steps, your referral campaign should be good to go! There are a few important things to know to make sure everything works as expected:
Whenever a friend uses a discount code at checkout, ReferralCandy takes 6 hours (or more, depending on your settings) to unlock the reward for the advocate.
Firmhouse checks every hour if there are new advocate rewards unlocked in ReferralCandy, and then applies the reward to the advocate's subscription. If there are multiple subscriptions, the reward is applied to the subscription that has the closest billing date from today.
If a subscriber already has an advocate reward pending for their next order, any new advocate rewards will be automatically queued to be applied for their subsequent orders. This is done by increasing the usage limit of the discount applied on the subscription in Firmhouse.
Where can I see how many which rewards are active on a subscription?
When a configured discount gets rewarded to an advocate subscription, you can find them on the Customer detail page in the Firmhouse portal under the section Applied Promotions.