If you have any interest in referral marketing, you might have heard of UpViral. This UpViral review is going to cover all aspects of this referral marketing tool so you can determine if it’s right for you.

Referral marketing is a marketing strategy where businesses incentivise their existing customers to refer new customers to their products. Referral marketing is pretty effective and feels kind of like an affiliate marketing program, but for consumers.

For example, a few years ago, I referred Rakuten, a savings and online coupon site to my sister. That referral earned me $10, and it earned her $10 too!

That’s a prime example of referral marketing in use! 

UpViral is one of the top players in this space. This UpViral review will talk about how this referral marketing tool works, including:

• Features
• Pricing
• Alternatives

UpViral Review

UpViral is a referral marketing platform that helps businesses and marketers create and run effective referral marketing campaigns. It enables you to create viral campaigns that encourage your customers to refer their friends and family to companies. 

Referral marketing is a super powerful marketing strategy.

What Is Referral Marketing?

Referral marketing is one of the best ways to call attention and create a viral buzz about your company! 

Here’s how it works:

• Offering incentives: Businesses get a chance to offer rewards to their existing customer base to incentivize them to refer others in their network, like family and friends. Examples of rewards include coupons, downloads, freebies, and cash rewards. 
• Sharing referral links or codes: Each customer gets their own unique referral link or code they can share with others. This tracks the referral and links them back to the customer. 
• Tracking referrals: Someone who clicks the referral link or code and buys will be tracked and linked back to the person who shared the referral link/code. This usually happens with tracking cookies or tracking pixels. 
• Rewarding referrals: Once the referral is verified, the referring customer earns their incentive reward, whether it be a coupon code, gift card, cash, or other reward.  
• Encouraging word-of-mouth marketing: Referral marketing uses the power of word-of-mouth to fuel marketing efforts. 

Did you know that 23{d0d8c9a3780aae347a3c0ec9b539f6350131b27bfcedb699d8911923448b0bae} of people talk to their family/friends about their favorite products?

And 78{d0d8c9a3780aae347a3c0ec9b539f6350131b27bfcedb699d8911923448b0bae} of people talk about their favorite experiences with people they know at least once a week!

People often tend to trust recommendations from friends and family, which makes referral marketing and word-of-mouth marketing one of the most powerful forms of marketing to use.

There are many ways to implement referral marketing for your company. Here are 7 of the best referral program ideas to try.

With UpViral, you can create giveaways, sweepstakes, and viral waiting lists which can create a lot of excitement and drive tons of leads to your business.

Customers are encouraged to share the content with their network, referring friends and family for a chance to earn rewards.

In UpViral, referrals can be tracked by customers so they can keep track of their progress. Companies using UpViral get access to detailed analytics and reporting so they can measure and track the success of the campaign. 

Next, let’s go over UpViral’s features and options to explain what’s offered and how these tools work.

UpViral Review: Features

UpViral offers three core features as a part of its viral referral marketing service: sweepstakes, rewards, and waiting lists. 

Let’s break down how these features work…

Sweepstakes

With UpViral, you can easily create sweepstakes to attract new leads and customers. Sweepstakes can be customized to include your:

• Branding
• Custom rules
• Prizes

Tons of design templates are available to make getting your sweepstakes published a simple, streamlined process.

Get your sweepstakes up and running in minutes. They offer built-in tools to make the sweepstakes creation process as easy on you as possible.

Custom Actions

Custom actions can be set up so you decide how you want customers to participate, like sharing the giveaway, watching a video, or making a comment.

Pre-optimized campaigns are available, along with automated emails for customer follow-up, unlockable milestones for customer engagement, and real-time fraud detection.

Rewards

UpViral allows you to create rewards programs to incentivize your customers to take specific actions, such as referring friends, making purchases, or sharing your content on social media. 

You can set up a reward system, offering a host of different valuable rewards to your customers to keep them incentivized, like:

• Ebooks
• Downloads
• Coupon codes.

Built-in milestones allow customers to work toward measurable benchmarks so they can continue to unlock more and more rewards, based on the number of referrals they make.

For example, at 3 referrals, a customer could get a 15{d0d8c9a3780aae347a3c0ec9b539f6350131b27bfcedb699d8911923448b0bae} off coupon, then for 5 referrals, they get a download, and at 10 referrals, they’ll earn a free ebook!

Rewards are unlimited, so you can offer as many as you wish. Once you set up this system with UpViral, it can be totally hands-off. UpViral will work in the background automatically, tracking subscribers and sending emails on autopilot.

Waiting Lists

UpViral lets you create waiting lists to generate buzz and excitement around your product or service. This is perfect for product launches or store openings.

You can build anticipation and excitement around the introduction of a new product, service, or launch. Customers get a chance to be among the first consumers to gain access to your newly released product or service!

It’s as simple as setting up a landing page for your waiting list and collecting email addresses from interested customers who get put on the waiting list. 

UpViral also provides a built-in referral system encouraging participants to share the waiting list with their friends and family.

Reporting and Analytics

Gain access to valuable insights, analytics, and reporting so you can track your marketing campaigns with UpViral. Check-in on customer engagement; you can also do AB testing and review the data to tweak marketing campaigns as needed.

Other Features

What else do you get with UpViral?

• HTMP integration
• 50+ API integrations
• Zapier integration
• Segmented leads
• Advanced CRM integration
• Coupon system
• A/B testing.

Create your viral campaign with ease using UpViral.

Here’s how the pricing works…

UpViral Review: Pricing

When it comes to pricing, UpViral offers a variety of pricing plans to fit your needs.

You can choose between monthly and annual billing, with a 20{d0d8c9a3780aae347a3c0ec9b539f6350131b27bfcedb699d8911923448b0bae} discount for annual billing.

All plans include a 14-day trial for $1 to test out UpViral.

Starter ($119/month)

Some of the features included in Starter are:

• Unlimited campaigns
• Up to 10,000 leads
• 1 referral AI credit per month
• 1 brand
• 50+ integrations
• Chat and email support.

Business ($199/month)

The Business plan includes everything in Starter, plus features like:

• Up to 25,000 leads
• 3 referral AI credits per month
• 2 brands
• 500+ integrations
• Remote UpViral branding
• API and webhook.

Premium ($499/month)

The Premium plan gets you everything in Business, plus features like:

• Up to 100,000 leads
• 10 referral AI credits per month
• 5 brands.

Overall, UpViral’s pricing is expensive compared to other referral marketing companies. This was one of the biggest gripes from users. The cost is steep, especially looking at the competition.

With each plan, although you’ll get a ton of features to help you grow your business and take advantage of a viral referral marketing strategy for your organization, the cost is up to double the price of competing referral marketing tools. 

Who Is UpViral For?

UpViral is designed for marketers and businesses that are trying to improve their lead-generation efforts. 

Businesses of all sizes can benefit from using UpViral for their referral marketing needs, whether they’re looking to run a viral contest or giveaway or create a custom waiting list for an upcoming launch.

It’s great for marketers and businesses who want to take an automated approach to referral marketing, too. You can set up your systems and let them run on autopilot in the background, checking in when you want to so you can review analytics and review performance.  

UpViral has everything you need to run successful viral campaigns to grow your business.

Use Cases

Creating viral marketing campaigns with a tool like UpViral can be perfect for many industries, from e-commerce to health and fitness, travel, hospitality, financial services, and more.

Here are some examples:

Banks use referral marketing to get new customers for their financial products. Bank account reward programs are pretty popular, offering up to hundreds of dollars to customers who refer others to open a checking or savings account, for example.

This can include cash bonuses, account credits, or other rewards like gift cards.

For example, Chase offers a $500 cash bonus if you refer a friend.

Travel and hospitality companies like hotels or airlines use referral marketing to attract new customers. 

This can include discounts on hotel/airfare bookings, earning loyalty points, or other services when you refer others to the travel company. They may offer discounts on bookings, loyalty points, or complimentary services to customers who refer friends or family to book through their platforms.

For example, when you refer a friend to Choice Hotels, you’re awarded 500 Choice Privileges Points, and your friend will get 500 points when they complete their first stay.

If you’re looking for alternatives to UpViral, there are several referral marketing platforms available.

Here are three options to consider:

UpViral Alternatives

Three alternatives worth mentioning to measure up against UpViral are ReferralCandy, Referral Factory, and Keap. Let’s take a look.

ReferralCandy

ReferralCandy is a referral marketing platform for e-commerce companies. They help online retailers create referral campaigns to drive leads and sales.

ReferralCandy is one of the best referral software companies to grow your business.

With ReferralCandy, you can create custom referral programs that integrate with your online store on platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, and BigCommerce.

Set up custom rewards to incentivize customers to share the business with their network. Store discounts, cash rewards, and custom rewards are available. 

You can integrate your marketing apps, such as Mailchimp, Google Analytics, and other tools, to gain insights about customers and sales. 

ReferralCandy pricing starts at $59 per month for the Premium plan, and a 14-day free trial is available.

Check out our full ReferralCandy review.

Referral Factory

Referral Factory is a referral marketing software that helps you create referral campaigns for your business. This no-code tool can get you up and running fast with a self-built referral program you create that can be shared with customers to drive traffic to your business.  

The platform offers a variety of features, including integrations with Zapier, Monday, Salesforce, and other tools. You get built-in referral tracking including the ability to issue over 200 rewards in over 50 countries.

Referral Factory pricing starts at $95 per month for the starter plan, with a 15-day free trial available.

Keap

Keap is a sales and marketing automation platform that includes a bunch of features, including referral marketing. With Keap, you can create referral campaigns fueled by your happy customers, including campaign tracking and the ability to request recommendations.

Keap pricing starts at $199 per month for Pro and includes a 14-day free trial. It includes all their features, not just the referral marketing tools.

So for the price, you get features like:

• Lead capture and automated follow-up
• Invoices
• Text marketing
• Dedicated phone line
• Appointments

UpViral Review: Bottom Line

UpViral is one of the top referral marketing companies in the industry. Use their tools and options to grow your business using viral referral marketing. Increase leads, improve your conversion rates, and drum up a viral buzz surrounding an upcoming release or promotion. 

The three main features, sweepstakes, rewards, and waiting lists can help you drive growth to your business, and with automated systems behind UpViral, you can’t miss.

Users rated UpViral very high. They got a 4.7/5 rating on GetApp and 4.9/5 rating on Capterra, from over 100 different reviewers. Users liked how user-frendly UpViral was. They also reported having a positive experience with customer support. The most critical feedback was about difficulty during the setup process and limited customization options.

From the viral giveaway campaign options to built-in AI features, access to tons of templates to make the process easy, and automated management, UpViral is a top choice for setting up your referral campaigns.

If you’re looking for a marketing tool to help you grow your business using the power of referral marketing, UpViral is worth considering.