What referral tool do you use?

Hey @emils — Louis, one of the cofounders of SparkLoop here!

Alongside SparkLoop, there are quite a few generic referral tools out there that either market themselves towards newsletters, or have been used by some newsletter operators to try and set up a referral program.

Some of the more common ones are:

• Friendbuy
• Referralcandy
• Growsurf
• Viral Loops

Most of the options above are really solid, generic referral tools. And they'll serve you really well if you're setting up a SaaS or ecommerce referral program. Way better than SparkLoop would.

But — because they weren't built for newsletters — they're just objectively a really bad choice for a newsletter referral program compared to SparkLoop.

Why?

Well, take the four most important "jobs" of any newsletter referral tool:

1. ... has to be easy to integrate with your email platform
2. ... has to have anti-fraud that'll detect the ways your subscribers will try and cheat
3. ... has to make it easy to fulfil your rewards
4. ... has to reduce friction for subscribers (make it easy to share from within the newsletter)

Here's how the tools above stack up compared to SparkLoop on those four points...

has to be easy to integrate with your email platform

SparkLoop has a true, 2-click integration with email platforms. No coding, no Zapier, it just works.

Those other tools sometimes market themselves as having a "X-click" integration. But you'll find out the hard way that it's not really true.

You'll be forced to either do some coding, spend hours and $$$ on zapier, or do a lot of manual work to keep things in sync.

has to have anti-fraud that'll detect the ways your subscribers will try and cheat

The tools above all have anti-fraud. Some of them have really good anti-fraud. But it was built for a very different kind of cheating. For the classic use case of "give a free month, get a free month" referral programs.

The ways newsletter subscribers try and cheat are very, very different. So even the best of those tools above completely fail when it comes to anti-fraud for newsletters. Painfully so.

SparkLoop's anti-fraud system is built for this specific kind of cheating. It's tested to work well even if you have 3million subscribers and a reward of $10'000 cash.

has to make it easy to fulfil your rewards

If you want to use coupon codes or gift cards as your rewards, the tools above will suit you fine.

If, on the other hand, you want to do those rewards and fun stuff that actually works for newsletters, like:

• swag/merch
• secret newsletters
• invites
• "locked" insider sections in your newsletter

... then SparkLoop is the only platform that makes this easy. Eg with our native Printful integration to automatically send out your t-shirts, mugs etc.

has to reduce friction for subscribers (make it easy to share from within the newsletter)

With SparkLoop, your subscribers can share automatically from within the newsletter itself. By copy/pasting the link or sharing with one click on social media.

You can theoretically make this happen with those other tools. But not without a lot of technical work (and paying a lot more than you'd pay for SparkLoop btw).

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Put all of that together, and there's a reason the average newsletter operator gets 230% more referrals (at ~25% of the cost per referral) when they switch to SparkLoop from other referral tools.

LMK if you have any questions!