How to Run a Referral Program with Braze and Voucherify?

Acquiring new customers is vital yet challenging, especially for businesses relying heavily on them. While retaining existing customers is more cost-effective, new client acquisition is sometimes necessary. Referral marketing offers a way to reduce costs and speed up the process. Today, I’ll show you how to create a powerful referral program using just two tools: Voucherify and Braze.

This article is a quick guide – if you need a deeper understanding of referral programs, how they work and what you can achieve with them, follow our thorough guide to referral programs.

Voucherify – how does it work?

Voucherify is an API-first Promotion Engine that you can use to build referral programs, loyalty programs, generate personalized coupons, cart-level promotions, and much more. Each campaign type can be tailored to your needs using the web dashboard or API. 

With Voucherify, you can:

• Build tiered single- or double-sided referral programs. 
• Reward referrers (advocates) and referees (invited friends) with discount coupons, gift card credits or physical products. 
• Create separate tiers for referrers based on the number of referrals they have.
• Use custom events and attributes to personalize your referral program to an even higher level.

Having a well-thought, powerful referral program, though, doesn’t mark the end of the effort needed to launch it – you also need a proper distribution. And that’s where Braze kicks in.

What is Braze? 

Braze is a leading customer engagement platform that empowers marketers to collect and act on data from any source in real time. The platform enables creative customer engagement across channels, supports cross-channel messaging, and optimizes experiences with AI-powered tools. This helps companies build strong, loyal customer relationships that drive growth.

Working together – Braze & Voucherify integration

The general rule of Braze & Voucherify integration is simple: you can build referral programs in Voucherify, generate codes, rewards and tiers, and then pass the vital information to Braze. From there, you can distribute the codes and other referral data (e.g. rewards for advocates or the total number of referrals) using Braze omnichannel messaging features. 

There are five ways to integrate Voucherify with Braze: 

• Connected Content
• Custom Attributes
• Custom API Integration
• Promotion Codes List
• Event sharing

I’ll show you how to use each of these. Remember, though, that you need a valid Braze account and a Voucherify account – the latter can be a free 30-day trial.

And if you want to know exactly how the Voucherify & Braze duo can work together, here’s a real-life example for you: a detailed look on how Pomelo (a fashion brand from Asia) made their promotions skyrocket with two described solutions: read it here >

Connected Content for sharing referrals

The Connected Content method is fully API-based, which means that you can use Braze channels to distribute any data that can be acquired via API. In the Voucherify & Braze integration, Voucherify API shares the information with Braze, and with a simple code snippet, Braze can send a message containing any information pulled from Voucherify’s API. 

What kind of information Braze can pull from Voucherify API?

• Unique referral code
• Number of referred customers
• The tier achieved by a referrer
• Available rewards
• The expiration date of the referral code
• And much more

To use Connected Content, you need to edit the body of your Braze message by adding the following piece of code:

{{CODE}}

{% connected_content

{{URL address of the selected API endpoint}}

:method get

        :headers {

        “X-App-Id”: “{{API key}}”,

         “X-App-Token”: “{{Secret key}}"

        }

         :content_type application/json

         :save {{variable}} 

%}

{{ENDCODE}}

These four bolded fragments are variables you need to replace with valid information in order to get your integration up and running. You can find the complete list of API calls in the Voucherify documentation.

Here is a comprehensive GitHub library with useful Liquid and Connected Code snippets for managing promotions and loyalty programs using Voucherify and Braze.

For example, if you want to publish a code for the user – which means assigning the referral code to a referrer – you need to use the following piece of code:

{{CODE}}

{% connected_content 

https://api.voucherify.io/v1/publications

        :method post

        :headers {

         "X-App-Id": "VOUCHERIFY-APP-ID",

                "X-App-Token": "VOUCHERIFY-APP-TOKEN"

        }

        :body campaign=CAMPAIGN_ID&customer={{${user_id}}}&channel=Braze

        :content_type application/json

        :save publication

 %}

{{ENDCODE}}

Note that I changed the method from GET to POST and added a body campaign section. Don’t forget to include this short snippet – {{publication.voucher.code}} – it will make the actual information visible for message receivers.

Custom Attributes for storing referral data

One of the best practices in using Braze and Voucherify integration is to use the Custom Attribute method, which allows you to store important information about your customers in Braze. To do so, add Braze as a distribution channel in the 6th step of creating your referral campaign and include a referral code there:

With Custom Attributes you will be able to share important properties between Braze and Voucherify, such as:

• Code of a published voucher
• Publication date
• Value of a published voucher
• Customer cockpit URL

Of course, that’s not the end of the list – all the possibilities can be accessed via Voucherify API. All the fields you fill in the “fields mapping” section will then be passed to Braze, allowing you to use the information in Braze messaging by placing the attributes as liquid tags.

To learn more about data synchronization and to get more detailed information about other tools that might help you in creating a perfect referral program, head on to Mike’s article: How to Fast-track a Referral Program with Voucherify, Segment, Braze, and Branch? 

Custom API integration for powerful referral programs

The third integration method – a Custom API integration – is the best way to select the most crucial elements of both platforms and tailor them to the needs of your referral programs. It is possible thanks to well-documented, rich REST API provided by both Voucherify and Braze. Note, though, that such an approach requires a solid team of developers to work on the integration. Voucherify offers 10 SDKs for such occasions.

Referral codes list

The fourth method enables sharing Voucherify referral codes in Braze using the Promo Codes snippet, in addition to Connected Content and Custom Attributes. To do this, first, export the codes from Voucherify, then import them into Braze. Finally, add an email code snippet in Braze to pull the codes from the promotion list. Learn more in our documentation >

Event sharing

Lastly, with Braze's Inbound Integration, you can send custom events from the Voucherify API directly to Braze. This capability allows you to trigger messages through Action-Based Delivery. Additionally, you can sync Braze audience IDs with customer metadata. This feature enables you to create referral programs targeted at specific customer groups that have been segmented in Braze. Learn more in our documentation >

Takeaways

All five methods of integration have their advantages, but they share the same purpose: a possibility to create and launch an omnichannel referral program in a matter of hours. With the powers of Voucherify and Braze combined, you can have full control over your referral programs while being sure that all the referal notifications you’re eager to send out are going to reach their addressees the way you want them to – at a right time, with the right information. 

With such a well-prepared, thought-out refer-a-friend program you’ll be able to acquire new customers for your company easier, faster, and with much more engagement from your customers’ side. 

Here are some useful resources before you start – check out the links below:

• ‍Voucherify Help Center – Braze integration setup >
• ‍Braze documentation – Connected Content >
• ‍Voucherify API documentation >‍
• Braze API documentation >

{{CTA}}

Need a perfect referral program?

Create it now

{{ENDCTA}}