How long does it take to implement GrowSurf?

GrowSurf can be fully implemented in a few days or less. Many GrowSurf customers get up and running within a day. This includes campaign setup, referral tracking installation, setting up a referral portal, and automating reward fulfillment.

Can I choose what counts as a referral?

Yes. With GrowSurf, you get to choose when to trigger a referral. For example, referrals can be defined as new leads or only when new leads make qualified actions.

Do my users need to sign up separately for my referral program?

GrowSurf will automatically give your signed-in users a unique share link without them needing to sign up for your referral program separately. However, there is flexibility on whether you want this process to be automatic or manual.

GrowSurf is designed for B2C, FinTech, and SaaS companies that want to save time and development resources when building a referral program. By using our out-of-the-box referral software, product and engineering teams can easily create and manage a customer referral program versus spending weeks or months building one in-house.

What kind of integrations does GrowSurf provide?

GrowSurf comes with more than 30 native integrations, including an entire suite of development tools such as a REST API, JavaScript library, and webhooks. Our large library of no-code integrations includes Stripe, Recurly, Chargebee, and Salesforce.

How do rewards work in GrowSurf?

With GrowSurf, you can automate any type of reward -- this includes gift cards, credits, coupons, and cash via PayPal. With our rewards management system, you can automate the entire fulfillment process or manually approve rewards.

Referral Programs Affiliate Programs

Implement your referral program

with minimal dev time

Name: GrowSurf
Rating: 4.74 (47 reviews)
Author: GrowSurf

GrowSurf can be fully implemented in a few days or less. Many GrowSurf customers get up and running within a day. Here is an overview of what it takes to set up a referral program.

Create your referral program in under 15 minutes with the help of our quickstart guide. Then invite your dev team to complete installation.

Follow your program checklist to test, launch, and promote your referral program. With GrowSurf, you'll get guided every step of the way to ensure you find success with your referral marketing efforts.

Real-time analytics and admin dashboard give you powerful insights like who your top referrers are and the engagement funnel for your referral program, while weekly and monthly email reports keep you in the loop.

Set up a referral portal

Track referrals on your existing user signup flow. No need to set up any new landing pages or change your current form and automations that are already in place.

Paste the GrowSurf Universal Code on your webpage to automatically track referrals based on cookies. When you set up automagic form detection, we'll automatically track the form or input fields on your webpage and ensure proper referral attribution. Setup takes minutes.

<script type='text/javascript'>
    (function(g,r,s,f){g.grsfSettings={campaignId:'45hxmj',version:'2.0.0'};s=r.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];f=r.createElement('script');f.async=1;f.src='https://app.growsurf.com/growsurf.js'+'?v='+g.grsfSettings.version;f.setAttribute('grsf-campaign', g.grsfSettings.campaignId);!g.grsfInit?s.appendChild(f):';})(window,document);
</script>

Once installed, GrowSurf will inject your landing page with referral elements to optimize the experience for referred visitors. They will still sign up as they normally would. See a before/after example below:

Before After

Alternatively, use our JavaScript method growsurf.addParticipant() to track referrals on a non-standard web form or single-page application. Your users won't need to enter a referral code. At the bare minimum, just provide email and we'll handle getting the referrer's unique ID automatically based on cookies.

growsurf.addParticipant({
    email: 'gavin@hooli.com',
    firstName: 'Gavin',
    lastName: 'Belson',

    // Optional: Save any custom data as participant metadata
    country: 'UK',
    subscriptionPlan: 'Pro',
});

You can also save any additional custom information as metadata, which can be used for automating rewards later.

Use our REST API endpoint /POST Add Participant to track referrals on users who sign up through your mobile app or if you want a cookieless server-side solution. At the bare minimum, just provide email and referredBy, which can be the referrer's unique ID or their email address — or retrieve it using growsurf.getReferrerId() .

curl -X POST 'https://api.growsurf.com/v2/campaign/45hxmj/participant' \
     -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY' \
     -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
     -d $'{
         "email": "gavin@hooli.com",
         "firstName": "Gavin",
         "lastName": "Belson",
         "referredBy": "richard-h8kp6l",

         # Optional: Save custom fields as participant metadata
         "metadata": {
             "country": "UK",
             "subscriptionPlan": "Pro"
         }
     }'

You can also save any additional custom information as metadata, which can be used for automating rewards later.

Rewards are only unlocked when a qualifying action is completed by the pending referral. We call this "triggering a referral".

Connect to an integration and GrowSurf will automatically trigger referrals. Setup takes less than one minute.

Trigger referrals on new payments

Trigger referrals on CRM deal stage changes

Trigger referrals on anything else (view Zap templates)

Alternatively, use our JavaScript method growsurf.triggerReferral() to trigger referrals on any front-end event. Just provide the email address of the referred friend who completes the action that you deem as the qualifying event.

growsurf.triggerReferral('gavin@hooli.com');

Alternatively, use our REST API endpoint /POST Trigger Referral by Email to trigger referrals on any server-side event. Just provide the email address of the referred friend who completes the action that you deem as the qualifying event.

curl -X POST 'https://api.growsurf.com/v2/campaign/45hxmj/participant/gavin@hooli.com/ref' \
     -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY'

When a referral is triggered, rewards get unlocked. Participants will get notified via email and fulfillment can be automated.

Connect to an integration or use Zapier to automatically issue out rewards.

Send gift cards or money, or apply coupons/credits

Send swag or other custom rewards (view Zap templates)

Integrations support dynamic rewards, which means you can offer different reward values based on specific attributes of the referred friend (such as the pricing plan they signed up for) or referrer (such as their partner status).

Alternatively, use Webhooks as a programmatic solution to automatically issue out any custom reward. If you use reward metadata, your dev team only needs to set up webhooks once and your marketing team doesn't need to involve them again if they ever want to make changes to reward values in the future.

// Node.js webhook example
                          
app.post('/your/webhook/payload-url', function(req, res) {
const body = req.body;

try {
    if (body.event === 'PARTICIPANT_REACHED_A_GOAL') {
        // Write code here to do something when a participant wins a reward
        console.log(`${body.data.participant.email} just won this reward: ${body.data.reward.description}`);

        // If the reward is approved
        if (body.data && body.data.reward && body.data.reward.approved) {
            // Do something

            // Optional: If there is any reward metadata, use it:
            if (body.data.reward.metadata && body.data.reward.metadata["proRewardValue"]) {
                console.log(`${body.data.participant.email} earned an amount of ${body.data.reward.metadata["proRewardValue"]}.`);
            }
        }

        // If this is a double-sided reward, use body.data.reward.isReferrer to determine if this is for the referrer or referred person
        if (body.data && body.data.reward && body.data.reward.isReferrer) {
            // Do something
        }
    }

} catch (err) {
res.status(400).end();
}
res.json({received: true});
});

A referral portal lets your users easily share their referral link and track their referral progress. GrowSurf provides the following low/no-code solutions.

GrowSurf also provides a hosted referral portal, which comes out-of-the-box with every program. Custom domains are supported (e.g, https://refer.yoursite.com).

The GrowSurf window is a popup that will display the user's unique referral link, along with other details like their referrals and rewards. You can make it open when a user clicks on a button in your UI. Simply add the CSS class growsurf-window-open to your button and pass in your logged-in user's email address to the data-grsf-email data attribute.

Copy/paste this code:

<a class="growsurf-window-open"
   data-grsf-email="gavin@hooli.com"
   data-grsf-first-name="Gavin"
   data-grsf-last-name="Belson">
    Give $100, Get $100
</a>

Create your own "Refer and Earn" page and simply paste Embeddable Element snippets onto it to create your own user portal. When your users are logged in, they will automatically see their referral link and can start sharing without having to sign up. If they don't have a referral link yet, one will automatically be generated for them if you pass in their email address in the data-grsf-email attribute.

Referral Link - Embed a referral link widget directly into your user portal

Copy/paste this code into your user portal:

<div data-grsf-block-form
   data-grsf-email="gavin@hooli.com"
   data-grsf-first-name="Gavin"
   data-grsf-last-name="Belson"
></div>

Invite Form - Let your users send direct email invites to their friends

Copy/paste this code into your user portal:

<div data-grsf-block-invite></div>

Referral Status - Display a participant's referral status

Copy/paste this code into your user portal:

<div data-grsf-block-referral-status></div>

Embeddable elements can be customized to match your brand's look and feel. See our docs for more details.

Connect to an email service provider (ESP) integration to display referral links to your users from your own emails.

Display referral links in your transactional and promotional emails

"GrowSurf manages everything to do with our referral program from A to Z — our tech team had to merely paste a small piece of code into our app, everything else was easily set up by marketing. The savings from that alone makes the decision to go with a 3rd party (instead of building things ourselves) well worth it.”

Alex Klein

Co-Founder at Ubindi

"We wanted a cost-savvy solution that could be managed and changed easily without the help of IT/devs. GrowSurf provided us exactly what our business needed! They saved me and our development team valuable time by providing an easy-to-use solution of building an internal system, with minimal coding. With GrowSurf's support, I was able to set up the entire program within a day."

Gabriella Di Fazio

Marketing Manager at SurveyMonkey

Set up your refer a friend program with customer referral and affiliate program software that lowers your acquisition costs, increases customer loyalty, and saves you gobs of time.