How To Engineer Viral Social Proof
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Referral Marketing, Startup, Viral Marketing, Marketing

Step 2: Install Viral Loops

The Viral Loops home page.

Viral Loops is an out-of-the-box referral marketing tool that lets you build rewards campaigns without having to write a single line of code. After signing up for a 14-day free trial, follow their step-by-step process to quickly get up and running.

Viral Loops uses tried and true templates for referral marketing based on campaigns run by successful startups. Let’s say you want to build a pre-launch waiting list before your product’s ready to go out the door, like us. You can take advantage of The Startup Prelaunch template that Robinhood used to get one million users before they even launched.

Tried and true templates for referral campaigns, offered by Viral Loops.

If you’re not sure which template is best for you, the Viral Loops blog has a ton of useful advice. They even provide an entire handbook on referral marketing, as well as a number of actionable case studies that informed their templates. Those studies include Robinhood’s incredible pre-launch as well as other successful campaigns like Harry’s razors getting 100,000 emails in a single week or Dropbox’s 3900% growth.

Create Campaign

After signing up, hit the big red Create Campaign button to get started. After you do, you’ll hit a page where Viral Loops will recommend specific campaign templates based on your use case.

Template options based on other successful startups.

If you want to ignore their recommendations and just see all your options, click All templates in the top left corner next to Recommended. Switch back to Recommended if you want to go back to using their suggestions.

For the following walkthrough example, we’re going to use the general rewards program that fueled Dropbox’s growth with our new software recommendation blog, Scale Combo. Scale Combo seeks to empower entrepreneurs with software combo recommendations to help them move faster, aim higher, and build better companies using the right resources. It’s pretty much all the things we wish we knew back in January 2018 when we first started as entrepreneurs. If we had, we would have saved months if not years of time.

Viral Loops and Proof are both a core part of our marketing stack and are also the first Scale Combo we’re recommending to entrepreneurs.

Start by filling out some basic info.

You can use your own existing website for the referral campaign, but Viral Loops also offers its own landing page builder if you don’t already have one. Since we’re just launching Scale Combo, we’re going to use Viral Loops pages.

Add Rewards

Next up is everyone’s favorite part — adding in the actual rewards. As mentioned above, if you’re pretty cash-constrained, you can choose rewards that work directly with the product you’re already building. For Dropbox, that led to a two-sided referral campaign where the referrer and invitee both received 500 MB of free storage up to 16GB.

Two-sided referral campaign in Viral Loops.

For Scale Combo, we decided to offer different rewards on the invitee and referrer side. We’re giving free Scale Combo stickers to all invitees. In addition, we’re taking a page out of Dropbox’s book and offering a free three months of a premium subscription to all referrers.

This kind of referral program is known as a two-sided referral program. By incentivizing both the referrer and the invitee, it promotes a continuous flow of referrals from Day 1 to Launch.

Next, you’ll have the option to customize your widgets, notifications, and integrations, but we’ll skip over those for now. How you personalize those to fit your campaign is entirely up to you and how you want to build your brand.

Installation

If you want to use Viral Loops’ own pages, this step is already done! But if you want to use your own website builder, Viral Loops offers easy installation instructions for the following website builders:

Personally, we recommend using Webflow, a no-code website builder that offers customizable design capabilities second to none. Even if you already know how to code, Webflow offers a best-in-class designer that designers, developers, and laymen like me can easily navigate with the help of Webflow University. (Webflow University also doubles as a perfect way to get into design and front-end web development, and actually served as my first introduction to software development.) Unfortunately, because it’s still new, Webflow isn’t one of Viral Loops’ supported website builders.

Lucky for you, we went through the semi-wayward process of installing Viral Loops on Webflow, so we’re attaching our own guide here.

Webflow Installation

Navigate to Settings for your project.

Go to the Settings tab in your Webflow dashboard, then click Custom Code. From here, scroll down to Footer Code. This section can be a bit tricky to find because Viral Loops tells you to look for </body> tags. Webflow heads this section with Footer, with a much smaller subheading reading “Add code before </body> tag.”

The Footer Code section, a.k.a. the </body> tag, is the one you’re looking for.

After copying the Viral Loops code in, hit Save Changes and Publish and you’re all done!