How to grow your Mailchimp Audience with a Friend Referral Program

Here is how you easily setup an Email Referral Program for Mailchimp with Firewards.

Firewards And Mailchimp Friend Referrals + Mailchimp Referral Campaign

This guide is showing you how to use Firewards to implement your own referral program for your newsletter and use our Mailchimp integration to synchronize the program with Mailchimp.

Mailchimp Newsletter Referrals

After creating an account on Firewards we ask you to select your current newsletter provider.

Firewards and Mailchimp Friend Referral Integration

Connect Mailchimp

Please follow the steps to connect our system with your Mailchimp account.

The flow will redirect you to Mailchimp and you will have to sign in to your account. We are using OAuth which is recommended by Mailchimp and known to be the most secure authentication method for building Mailchimp integrations. If you are concerned about security, you can read more about the authentication process here.

Click Connect to connect Firewards with Mailchimp

Firewards and Mailchimp Friend Referrals - Connect To Mailchimp

Login to your Mailchimp Account

Firewards and Mailchimp Friend Referrals - Login to Mailchimp

Authorize Firewards to access your Mailchimp Account

Mailchimp Referral Campaign - Authorize Firewards to Setup Referral Program

All-done - You are now connected

Firewards Friend Referral Campaign - Connected to Mailchimp

Connected to Mailchimp - Whats next?

After you successfully connected your Mailchimp account you are able to actually setup your referral program.

The first thing you should do is synchronize your mailing lists.

To do so, go to Configuration -> Subscriber Lists and click on your list you want to use for your referral program:

Firewards and Mailchimp Friend Referrals - Newsletter Overview

Synchronize Your Newsletter Lists

Activating your list kicks off an essential process for Firewards: we are synchronizing your subscribers with our system.

This step is necessary to provide your newsletter service with variables you can then use in your copy.

Depending on the size of your list, this process can take from a few minutes up to several hours. So please be a little bit patient with us.

You will receive an email notification once your referral program is ready to use.

Firewards and Mailchimp Friend Referral Program - Email Lists

Your referral program is ready

Now that you successfully connected your provider and selected the list you are going to use, Firewards is ready for some referral action!

Copy the variables into your next email campaign and activate the full potential of your new referral program.

Firewards and Mailchimp Friend Referrals - Setup Variables to Use in Email Design

Insert The Referral Program into Your Newsletter Campaign

Copy the following example text into your next email issue. The variables (e.g. FW_REFS) are going to be automatically replaced with each subscribers referral status:

                YOUR REFERRAL STATUS

You have a total of *|FW_REFS|* referrals.
Invite *|FW_DELTA|* friend to reach *|FW_NXT_LVL|* status.

Check your reward status and invite your friends here:
*|FW_REFLINK|*

Open the email design in your Mailchimp campaign and insert the text above into a new text-block:

Firewards and Mailchimp Referral Campaign - Paste Referral Merge Tags into Campaign Editor

How the end result looks like

This is how your implemented referral program will look like once you send out your newsletter issue:

Firewards and Mailchimp Friend Referrals - Example Referral Campaign

Other Examples of a Success Referral Campaign

This is another example of how you can style your newsletter copy by making use of the variables Firewards provides:

Firewards and Mailchimp Friend Referrals - Example Example of Friend Referral Campaign with Mailchipm

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