In its simplest form, the referral hub is a page for each of your subscribers to track their progress in your referral program. Here, they can find their unique referral link, social media share options, details of the rewards they’ve already won, and the next rewards on offer.

To put it simply, your referral hub is a page where each individual subscriber can go to access everything they need to engage with your referral program.

This is what a referral hub typically looks like:

When subscribers click on their referral hub, these are the elements they’ll find:

The rewards: It’s a good idea to let your subscribers see, at a glance, all the rewards they can win for referring their friends to your newsletter. Subscribers should be able to tell immediately which rewards they’ve already won, and how many referrals to go until they can get the next one.

The unique link: The unique sharing link is individual to each subscriber and allows SparkLoop to attribute new referrals to the correct advocates.

Sharing options: Also on the referral hub are a number of sharing options. Subscribers can choose to share their unique referral link via Twitter, Facebook, Email, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, or Telegram with two clicks. They can also add email addresses to invite friends to your newsletter directly through the referral hub.

Referral stats: This is the section that gets subscribers super excited and motivated to share. Here, they can see how many referrals they’ve made to your newsletter in total, how many referrals are still pending, and how many referrals they need to earn to get to the next reward.

In order to display the correct information, SparkLoop needs to know which subscriber is visiting the page.

Which basically means that if you’re sending a specific subscriber to their referral hub, you’d need to add a subscriber_id parameter to the URL of the referral hub.

If this sounds confusing, don’t worry! There is nothing you need to do.

The subscriber_id is automatically generated by SparkLoop and added as a custom field to your ESP. SparkLoop populates this custom field with each subscriber’s unique ID.

If you want your subscribers to have access to their referral hub, all you need to do is go to your admin dashboard, click on Referral Hub, select the “Email link” option, and copy the code to include in your newsletter.

If SparkLoop can't identify the subscriber, that is, someone visits the page without a subscriber ID, the page will show a form where they can enter their email address and sign up to the newsletter (they'll be added into your ESP with a tag of "sl-referral-hub-widget" if your ESP supports tags). They will then be redirected to their referral hub.

If a visitor is already subscribed to the newsletter, they will also be redirected to their referral hub.

You can customize what this page looks like to match your branding and style. Learn how to do that here.

There are two essential steps to getting your referral hub ready for subscribers to use.

SparkLoop offers an array of customization options for your Referral Hub to make it easy to match the branding, style, and tone of your newsletter. We’ve interviewed the biggest newsletter operators and studied the highest-performing Referral Hubs in the business to give you a starting template that offers the best results.

To learn about the various customization options, and how to implement them, read this support article.

You have two options for hosting your referral hub. You can either use a page that is hosted by us, but customized to match your branding and style, or you can build out your own custom page by embedding the referral hub widget or the various referral hub elements individually.

Here are detailed instructions for each of the two options.

Here's a video walkthrough that will help you understand and set up your referral hub:

Once you’ve designed your referral hub, you’re ready to share the link in your newsletter and get your subscribers excited to invite their friends and earn rewards.