How to run referral programs in Braze?

If you already run lifecycle and promos in Braze, your referral program should live there too. You don’t need another “referral dashboard” that tries to do messaging, journeys, and analytics on its own. What you need is a clean split of responsibilities:

• Braze: orchestration, targeting, messaging, reporting.
• Voucherify: referral rules, code management, validation, rewards.

Braze is really good at reacting to events and attributes; Voucherify is really good at deciding whether a referral is valid and what the reward should be. Stitch those together properly and you get a referral stack that is flexible, debuggable, and doesn’t collapse the first time product or marketing change the rules.

Below is how I’d design a Braze-centric referral program when Voucherify is in the mix.

Responsibilities: Braze versus Voucherify

When you’re integrating two systems, the first useful thing you can do is decide who owns what, and never blur that line unless you have to.

Voucherify owns:

• Definition of the referral campaign: one-sided or two-sided, tiers, caps, eligibility rules.
• Code lifecycle: generation, assignment, validation, expiration.
• Reward logic: what to issue, when, and to whom (advocate, friend, both).
• Safeguards: fraud prevention rules, min order value, new-customer checks, etc.

Braze owns:

• User profile and segmentation: who is eligible to be invited, who is an active advocate, who has gone dormant.
• Journey logic: Canvas flows for invite, reminder, reward notification, and win-back.
• Channels: email, push, in-app, SMS, WhatsApp, webhooks.
• Engagement analytics: opens, clicks, conversions at the message and Canvas level.

Integration paths for referrals in Braze

There are five ways to connect Braze and Voucherify: Connected Content, Custom Attributes, Promotion Codes Lists, Custom API integration, and Event Sharing.

In the context of referrals, you can keep it simple.

• Connected Content is for on-the-fly lookups from Voucherify when rendering a message (e.g., publish a referral code if none exists, fetch current rewards). Use it when you need real-time data and are okay with the message waiting on an API call.
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• Custom Attributes are for everything you need on every channel without latency: the code, link, counts, tiers. Use Voucherify distributions to write these into Braze, then treat them like any other Liquid variable in templates.
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• Event Sharing / webhooks is how you get referral_code_published, referral_conversion, and referral_reward_issued into Braze as first-class events. Use them as triggers for Canvases and goals.
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• Promotion Codes Lists are fine if you have a small, static batch of referral codes tied to a specific campaign, but for ongoing always-on referral programs, dynamic publishing via API is more robust.
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• Custom API integration is for teams that want a thin middleware layer in front of Voucherify: for example, to normalize payloads, enrich them, or centralize logging and idempotency. It’s not required, but it’s often a good idea once volume grows.

Connected Content for sharing referrals

The Connected Content method is fully API-based, which means that you can use Braze channels to distribute any data that can be acquired via API. In the Voucherify & Braze integration, Voucherify API shares the information with Braze, and with a simple code snippet, Braze can send a message containing any information pulled from Voucherify’s API. 

What kind of information Braze can pull from Voucherify API?

• Unique referral code
• Number of referred customers
• The tier achieved by a referrer
• Available rewards
• The expiration date of the referral code
• And much more

To use Connected Content, you need to edit the body of your Braze message by adding the following piece of code:

{% connected_content

{{URL address of the selected API endpoint}}

:method get

        :headers {

        “X-App-Id”: “{{API key}}”,

         “X-App-Token”: “{{Secret key}}"

        }

         :content_type application/json

         :save {{variable}} 

%}

These four bolded fragments are variables you need to replace with valid information in order to get your integration up and running. You can find the complete list of API calls in the Voucherify documentation.

Here is a comprehensive GitHub library with useful Liquid and Connected Code snippets for managing promotions and loyalty programs using Voucherify and Braze.

Custom Attributes for storing referral data

One of the best practices in using Braze and Voucherify integration is to use the Custom Attribute method, which allows you to store important information about your customers in Braze. To do so, add Braze as a distribution channel in the 6th step of creating your referral campaign and include a referral code there:

With Custom Attributes you will be able to share important properties between Braze and Voucherify, such as:

• Code of a published voucher
• Publication date
• Value of a published voucher
• Customer cockpit URL

Of course, that’s not the end of the list – all the possibilities can be accessed via Voucherify API. All the fields you fill in the “fields mapping” section will then be passed to Braze, allowing you to use the information in Braze messaging by placing the attributes as liquid tags.

To learn more about data synchronization and to get more detailed information about other tools that might help you in creating a perfect referral program, head on to Mike’s article: How to Fast-track a Referral Program with Voucherify, Segment, Braze, and Branch? 

Custom API integration for powerful referral programs

The third integration method – a Custom API integration – is the best way to select the most crucial elements of both platforms and tailor them to the needs of your referral programs. It is possible thanks to well-documented, rich REST API provided by both Voucherify and Braze. Note, though, that such an approach requires a solid team of developers to work on the integration. Voucherify offers 10 SDKs for such occasions.

Referral codes list

The fourth method enables sharing Voucherify referral codes in Braze using the Promo Codes snippet, in addition to Connected Content and Custom Attributes. To do this, first, export the codes from Voucherify, then import them into Braze. Finally, add an email code snippet in Braze to pull the codes from the promotion list. Learn more in our documentation >

Event sharing

Lastly, with Braze's Inbound Integration, you can send custom events from the Voucherify API directly to Braze. This capability allows you to trigger messages through Action-Based Delivery. Additionally, you can sync Braze audience IDs with customer metadata. This feature enables you to create referral programs targeted at specific customer groups that have been segmented in Braze. Learn more in our documentation >

Summary

All five methods of integration have their advantages, but they share the same purpose: a possibility to create and launch an omnichannel referral program in a matter of hours. With the powers of Voucherify and Braze combined, you can have full control over your referral programs while being sure that all the referal notifications you’re eager to send out are going to reach their addressees the way you want them to – at a right time, with the right information.