Spreading the word about your online business on the modern internet means you need to go where the action is. Link-based tracking is still a great foundation for building an affiliate or customer referral program, but with more and more people getting their information about what and where to buy from video, podcasts, and social media, the need to track referrals from online influencers using shareable coupon codes is only going to grow.

In this article, we'll explain how you can use Stripe promotion codes to allow your affiliates to drive more customers to your business.

When you connect your Stripe account to Rewardful, the system receives and responds to notifications about key events occurring in your business, like when customer records are created or updated or when a coupon discount is applied.

Rewardful lets you assign promotion codes to your affiliates in the same way that affiliate link tokens are assigned. When customers check out using an affiliate's promotion code, Rewardful is able to track it and attribute the customer to the appropriate affiliate. Your customer gets a discount on their purchase, and your affiliate is credited with the customer and receives commission according to your campaign's rules.

Rewardful's promotion code tracking feature was designed to get you from zero to functioning affiliate program as quickly as possible, and because customers are matched to affiliates on the basis of promotion code redemption, it's all possible to do without ever installing the Rewardful tracking script on your website - or for that matter, without having a website at all!

During our onboarding and setup process and once you've connected your Stripe account and configured your account settings and initial campaign, you'll be presented with a number of options for adding Rewardful to your website.

For merchants solely interested in using coupon codes to track affiliate referrals, Rewardful offers a Stripe Promo Codes integration option. This feature caters specifically to those who can't or won't use affiliate links, and selecting it will allow you to bypass the instructions for installing the tracking script and simply get on with setting up your program and recruiting affiliates.

Keep in mind, link-based tracking will not function without the tracking script. By choosing the Stripe Promo Codes integration, you are opting for a straightforward and efficient method of referral tracking that leverages only promo codes. If you plan to allow your affiliates to use a mix of links and coupon codes, you should choose another integration option and install the tracking script. Don't worry, you'll still be able to set up promotion codes even if you're also using links.

Rewardful's campaigns already let you group affiliates together according to the type, duration, and amount or percentage of their commissions. Now, you'll also be able to define the settings for the discounts they'll be offering their referred customers too. From your Edit campaign form, find the Campaign coupon option from the Advanced settings section.

Clicking the Create a coupon button will open a popup form where you can specify the discount settings for your campaign just as you would in Stripe - discount type, percentage, amount, and duration. We'll use your inputs to create a coupon in Stripe tied directly to your campaign.

Once you've configured the coupon rules, enable the promo codes for your campaign by toggling on the option, then click "Create Coupon" to save your settings.

Note: Once you enable promo codes and save your settings, they cannot be disabled. To turn off a promo code, you will need to remove the coupon code from the campaign. The action will deactivate current promo codes and prevent the generation of new ones. Please note that removing the campaign coupon code will also disable any double-sided incentives if they are enabled.

As affiliates are added to your campaign, Rewardful will generate unique promotion codes based on the coupon you just created. Affiliates can choose to use the codes issued to them by the system or generate their own custom codes. Either way, though, they'll be able to start sharing them with their audiences right away with no work for you.

Check out this video to see how the feature works on a live system.

A few things to keep in mind as you're setting up your campaigns to use promo codes for attribution.

Percentage-based affiliate commissions in Rewardful are always computed based on the net sale amount which excludes taxes, refunds, and yes, discounts, so you should take this into consideration when configuring your campaigns.

For example, let's say you have a product that sells for $100 per month, but you're offering a 20% discount to customers who redeem a promo code. Your affiliate's commission on a sale will be calculated based on the $80 that was charged to the customer and not the $100 list price.

Merchants using Rewardful have historically used our double-sided incentives feature to provide affiliates with a way of offering referred customers a discount while they themselves receive a commission. While this has worked just fine for many of our customers, coupon-based attribution allows you to do the same with no changes to most standard Stripe checkout workflows.

We expect that most of our merchants will likely opt for the new feature instead of double-sided incentives for new campaigns and that many will migrate their existing double-sided campaigns to promo codes, but Rewardful will continue to support both options going forward. Campaigns, though, should be configured to use one or the other but not both of these since Stripe only allows a single coupon to be applied per customer.

In most cases, customer attribution in Rewardful works on a first-come, first-served basis meaning that the first affiliate to whom a Stripe customer is assigned will receive commissions for any subsequent purchases. This seems like common sense, but in practical terms, it can lead to occasional unexpected results.

Suppose, for example, that a customer visits your website via a link from affiliate A and is attributed to that affiliate upon creation. The customer later returns and uses a promo code from affiliate B for a subsequent purchase. In this case, the customer would receive the discount, since Stripe is responsible for calculating the billing details, but the commission for the sale would be received by affiliate A because the customer is associated with their account.

A similar rule applies to customers using multiple promotion codes over a series of purchases: the first affiliate will retain attribution for the customer.

Merchants can avoid repeated use of discount codes by disabling their use for existing Stripe customers.

Using coupon codes has a number of important advantages over our more traditional affiliate links.