Common Questions
This page collects the most popular questions about ReferralHero.
To add a subscriber or a referral manually to your campaign:
go to your campaign dashboard > Subscribers
Click the +Add Subscriber button in the top right corner
In the modal enter the subscriber's information, like the email address and name
Click Add Subscriber
To add a referral make sure to enter the referrer's email address or referral code in the Referrer field. (If you're adding john.smith@email.com who has been referred by john.doe@email.com, make sure to enter john.doe@email.com in the Referrer field)
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ReferralHero's ranking system is pretty simple.
In a nutshell, we give points to people.
When a person signs up on your campaign, we give them 1 point. When they refer a new person we give them another point.
We then use points to calculate the ranking and each subscriber’s position in the list. Example:
Sarah has got 11 points
Tom has got 8 points
Sarah will be 1st on the list and Tom 2nd.
When multiple people share the same number of points, we look at when they signed up, the earlier the better. For example:
Sarah has got 11 points and signed up on Monday
Tom has got 8 points and signed up on Wednesday
Mark has got 8 points and signed up on Tuesday.
Tom and Mark have both 8 points but Mark signed up before Tom. So this is the ranking:
Sarah
Mark
Tom
Given the architecture of our referral system, it’s impossible to answer this question. An example will illustrate this.
Based on our previous example, Mark refers a new person. He now has 9 points. How many positions has he gained? None, because Sarah has still got 11 points.
In other words, referring a new person does not automatically guarantee gaining positions in the leaderboard. On the other hand, it also means no one is ever really out of the game.
Consider this example: On a list there are 1,000 subscribers. Some of them have referred one person, some two, some none. A new person signs up. He invites 3 friends. This person has now 4 points (1 for signing up and 3 for referrals) and is the first on the list despite being the last one to sign up with 1,000 people ahead of him!
Yes, you can choose to give as many points as you want for referrals (and for signing up) by going to your campaign dashboard > Settings > Advanced Settings.
To import your existing users/subscribers in ReferralHero go to your campaign dashboard > Subscribers > Import.
On that page you can upload a CSV file containing the data of your existing users.
Your CSV file must have headers and they must be lowercase. The only two required headers are email and domain. The domain column will be used to create the referral link. So if you want the referral link to be http://mywebsite.com/competition, the domain column should be http://mywebsite.com/competition.
There are other, optional, columns that you can use:
column | description |
name | Subscriber's name |
extra field | Subscriber's extra field (e.g: phone number) |
extra field 2 | Subscriber's extra field 2 (eg: country) |
date | Subscriber's sign up date (DD/MM/YYYY or DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM) |
referrals | Subscriber's number of referrals. Useful if you're importing people who have already accumulated referrals from a previous referral program |
referrer | Use this column to indicate the referrer of a subscriber. The value is the email address of the referrer |
We highly recommend using our example file as a starting point.
Good to know
All imported subscribers will have imported_from_csv as their source.
You can choose to send a Welcome email to your imported subscribers by switching on Send welcome email. The Welcome email will be sent only if you have created one and is active.
If you switch on Subscribe imported contacts to MailChimp, your contacts will also be imported in the MailChimp list specified in the "Integrations" page. If an imported contact already exists in your MailChimp list, we will update name and custom fields.
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Currently it is not possible to have multiple Tracking Code on the same page.
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When people sign up on your campaign, they are put in the "active" list. Optionally, you can move into the "Winner" list. But why would you want to do that?
Imagine you are hosting a competition where every week the top 5 on your list win a prize. Every week you want to reward these 5 people but also remove them from the list so that next week they won't win again. By moving them to the "Winners" list, you remove them from your campaign without deleting them.
You can send people who are moved to the "Winners" an automated email. Check the "Promoted email" in the Automation page.
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To track a sign-up in Google Analytics simply use the afterSuccess callback and choose which events you want to send.
<script type="text/javascript">window.RHConfig = {callbacks: {afterSuccess: function(output) {if (output.response == "subscriber_created") {ga('send', 'event', 'ReferralHero', 'sign-up', 'Waiting List');}}}}</script>
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There could be many reasons why you want to change the referral links of your subscribers:
you put the widget on the wrong page by mistake
you have changed landing on your website
you have changed your website URL
Whatever the reason, to update the URL of the referral links:
Go to your campaign dashboard
Go to Settings > Danger Zone
In the orange box, enter the new URL. It must be a valid URL (eg:
https://mywebsite.com/refer-a-friend, with http or https)Click Update
Good to know
This process will permanently change the referral links of your existing subscribers and can't be undone.
This process will only update the referral links of existing subscribers. If you want to make sure new subscribers use the new URL, set it as default in the Design settings (Edit Campaign > Design > Default Referral URL)
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If you want to redirect people to a separate page instead of displaying the sharing screen
go to your campaign dashboard > Edit Campaign > Design > Optin form,
scroll down to the bottom of the page and click Advanced options
switch on Redirect after sign up
When you enable this option, people who sign up through one of our embeddable widgets will be automatically redirected to the URL you entered.
To make it easy to know WHO has been redirected to that page, ReferralHero adds some parameters to the URL. They are:
Parameter | Description |
rh_email | The subscriber's email address |
rh_name | The subscriber's name |
rh_extra_field | The subscriber's extra field value |
rh_extra_field_2 | The subscriber's extra field 2 value |
rh_code | The subscriber's referral code |
A common use case is to redirect a person to a page and show them their referral link. There are two ways to achieve this:
Use ReferralHero's widget Just embed the ReferralHero widget on the destination page and make sure to switch on Open sharing screen if already signed up in Edit campaign > Design > Extra settings
Use "hr_code" parameter If you have some coding skills, simply grab the
hr_codeparameter from the URL and use it create the referral link. Remember that a ReferralHero-valid referral link must use themwrparameter in the URL. So for example, if you want to create a referral link that points tohttps://mywbesite.com, your referral link will behttps://mywbesite.com?mwr={hr_code}
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IMPORTANT
If you reset your campaign, all your data will be permanently deleted from our database, including all subscribers and analytics data. However, the campaign settings will not be touched. Resetting a campaign is useful if you want to test your campaign with real data before you go live.
To reset a campaign:
go to your campaign dashboard > Settings > Advanced settings
click on the red link Reset all data
Confirm the deletion
After you confirm wait a couple of minutes for the process to terminate and reload your page.
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Campaigns get automatically suspended when no new subscriber is recorded for 6 consecutive weeks. When a campaign is suspended, the form won't work and analytics won't be calculated.
To reactivate a suspended campaign, simply click the Re-activate campaign link at the top of the dashboard page.
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If you're testing ReferralHero by signing up multiple times from the same device you might notice that referrals are not recorded.
This happens because after a sign up has been recorded on a device/browser, ReferralHero attaches some cookies to that browser. ReferralHero uses these cookies to preload the subscriber's info on subsequent visits but also to make sure the same person is not referred twice.
To solve this problem, and test your campaign with all the emails you want, we recommend spinning up a new incognito window every time you want to sign up a new email address.
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ReferralHero's embeddable widgets automatically use the font set for the parent container, however sometimes this means that the wrong font is used.
To change the font of the widget:
go to your campaign dashboard > Edit Campaign > Design > Extra Settings
Enter the following text in the Custom CSS field:
#mtr-optin-form *, #mtr-sharing-screen * {font-family: 'Nunito'}
Don't forget to change 'Nunito' with the font-family you want to use.
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To close a campaign simply go to your campaign dashboard and click on the Stop campaign button.
Good to know
When you stop your campaign your widget will immediately stop working and we'll stop sending all the Automation emails. If you change your mind, you can always resume your campaign by clicking the Resume campaign button.
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