Buttondown Documentation
This functionality and documentation is a work in progress.
Okay, so, subscriber referrals. You might be familiar with the whole "MorningBrew viral loop" thing, and are interested in building that; you may just be curious about who your most vocal subscribers are and you want to reward them at an ad-hoc basis. Buttondown's main goal with this functionality is to provide you with the primitives to build a referral system without being too opinionated about what that referral system is.
What this means is, at a high level:
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.First things first: before you generate a referral link you need to make sure this feature is enabled on your newsletter. To do this, go to Settings → Basics, and toggle on "Referrals".
Now the important part: "How do I give people the link they care about"?
This markdown snippet sums it up:
Or, if you're using a custom domain:
That snippet represents a long-lasting, unique referral link for each subscriber you have. This means that you can put language in your email (or footer, or header) along the lines of:
In a bit more depth: every subscriber has a referral_code
that is retrievable using Buttondown's template language. When this is passed to the above URL, your main subscribe page is displayed but with a notice that mentions that the given subscriber is referring them. If someone signs up to your newsletter from that link, it'll be marked that they were referred!
Not seeing a referral code populate? Make sure this is enabled in Settings → Basics
You can view the referrals for your newsletter in three places:
This is a great question and the boring answer is that I want to be careful about rolling out this functionality. In due time, this will be how it works.
Not at the moment, though this too is planned functionality.
The long-term vision for this feature is to also allow subscribers to have a lightweight interface for tracking their own referrals.
Please let us know on the tracking ticket for the feature!