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Overview
If your team already uses ActiveCampaign, Referral Factory can add a referral program around your existing contacts and deals. Referral Factory manages the referral experience and attribution, while ActiveCampaign remains the place your team works with contacts and deals.
Why use Referral Factory if I already use ActiveCampaign?
You can keep ActiveCampaign as your marketing and sales workspace and add Referral Factory for the parts ActiveCampaign is not designed to manage: recruiting referrers, giving them a referral link and sharing experience, tracking who referred each lead, qualifying the referral and applying campaign reward rules.
What can I automate between Referral Factory and ActiveCampaign?
You can turn existing ActiveCampaign contacts into referrers, write their referral links back to ActiveCampaign, send new referrers and leads to ActiveCampaign as contacts or deals, and use deal progress to qualify referrals. The contact-versus-deal choice for leads is the key decision in this integration.
How do existing ActiveCampaign contacts become referrers?
You sync all contacts, or only the contacts in a list or with a tag, into your campaign as referrers. Each one gets a Referral Factory link and sharing option, and Referral Factory can write the link to a contact field in ActiveCampaign. With an ongoing sync, new contacts that match are added every 2 hours.
What happens when someone makes a referral?
The referrer shares through Referral Factory. When the new lead joins the campaign, Referral Factory sends them to ActiveCampaign as the record selected for the campaign: a contact, or a contact with a deal in the pipeline and stage you chose. Your team then follows its normal ActiveCampaign process.
Why does the contact-versus-deal choice matter?
Automatic qualification uses deals. If Referral Factory creates a deal for each lead, the referral can qualify when the deal reaches a stage you select or is marked as won. If Referral Factory creates only a contact, the lead is sent to ActiveCampaign but cannot be qualified automatically, so you would qualify those referrals in another way.
What happens after Referral Factory qualifies the referral?
Referral Factory updates the referral status and applies the campaign rules. If your campaign rewards qualified referrals, the reward process can then begin. For commission rewards, Referral Factory can use the value of the ActiveCampaign deal.
What would the full automated journey look like with ActiveCampaign?
An existing ActiveCampaign contact becomes a referrer and receives a Referral Factory link, which is also written back to their contact. They share it, and Referral Factory sends the new lead to ActiveCampaign as a contact with a deal. Your team works the deal in ActiveCampaign, and when the deal reaches the selected stage or is marked as won, Referral Factory usually qualifies the referral within 15 minutes and the campaign reward process can begin.
What stays in ActiveCampaign and what stays in Referral Factory?
ActiveCampaign remains the place for contacts, lists, tags, deals and pipelines. Referral Factory remains the place for the campaign, referrer experience, attribution, qualification rule and rewards.
Which setup guides should I read next?
See the ActiveCampaign referral-link sync guide, the ActiveCampaign lead-sync guide, the ActiveCampaign referrer-sync guide and the ActiveCampaign automatic-qualification guide. Use the ActiveCampaign troubleshooting guide if something does not work as expected.