What is the Invite-a-Friend System?

The Invite-a-Friend System is part of the Beta Management feature set which only becomes enabled if your project is a Pre-launch Campaign type. To learn more on this please refer to: Creating A New Project  > 2. Campaign Type

The Invite-a-Friend System allows your users to invite their friends to your beta. Enabling this feature will help spread the word about your beta and attract more users. 

In this system, you give users a fixed number of invites which they can send to their friends. For example, every already invited user can invite 5 of their friends. The invited friend gets immediate access to your beta, as if they had applied for access and you automatically accepted (invited) them.

This is similar to how Gmail launched way back in the day. 

How it works

The user (inviter) must have a status of either Invited or Active to be able to invite new users. This means that they would have had access to your beta already for them to be able to use the Invite-a-Friend form similar to the one below. 

The invitee will then receive an invitation email with their assigned unique invitation code. 

If you look up this newly invited user in the Users list, you'll find that they are automatically in the Invited, not Applied state. They will be moved to the Active state once they have accepted the invite and used their code. 

How it differs from the Referral System

With the Viral Referral System, each applied user receives a unique referral link which they can share with friends over email and on social networks. When a friend of theirs clicks on this referral link we record the click. If the friend who clicked later signs up, then we record this conversion as a referral. This is more like a referral because the friend does not get access to your beta -- just referred to your beta. They still have to apply for access (fill out and submit the signup form) and you still have to approve their application (i.e. invite them).

With the Invite-a-Friend System, the user must already be in the Invited or Active state to be able to invite others. This allows you to make access to the invite form exclusive only to those kind of users. With the invite form, the user can submit their friend's email address which automatically grants their friend the Invited status as well. You can limit how many invites a user is allowed to make. 

While each system has its specific use, you can use both of them together in your campaign. 

How to set it up

1

From your project dashboard, navigate to Settings > Project Settings from the top-right corner. 

2

In the Project Settings sidebar menu, select the Beta Management tab then toggle ON the Invite-a-Friend System feature. 

Set the value for Invitations per user to limit how many people a user is allowed to invite. Hit Save when done. 

3

Embed the Invite-a-Friend form or display it in a popup on your website or app. 

Alternatively, you can use the friend_invitations#create API call if you'd rather build your own invitation form or integrate the functionality directly into your app. 

4

You'll also want to make sure that you have an Active Friend Invitation email sent to every invited user. You project will automatically have this default email message when you enabled Invite-a-Friend System. 

You can create/edit this through Email > Messages. 

For this email to work, under the  Settings tab the email Trigger must be set to send when a user is invited by a friend. 

In the Content tab, make sure you've inserted the {{recipient_email}} and {{invitation_code}} variables which with every email sent will automatically be replaced by the necessary information each invitee needs and have to use to join your beta. 

Manually change how many invitations a user has

Perhaps one of your users asked if it's possible for them to directly invite more friends. If you need to modify the number of invitations a user has, or perhaps for a specific group of users, you can manually change them through the Users page. 

Here's how you can do it for one or more users: 

1

From the Users page, find and select the users you'd like to change the number of invites for, then click on the Action menu and choose Edit Profile from the dropdown. 

Tip: You can use the search filter to bulk edit profiles of multiple users matching your filter criteria (e.g. users with the same country, users who applied on a specific date range, etc.) so you don't have to individually select each particular user.

2

In the modal that pops up, set the value for Invite-a-Friend Invitations as shown below then Save.

Alternatively, if you're viewing an individual user's profile, you have the option to edit it and adjust their Friend Invitation count as needed. 

That's it! If you check the profiles of each of those users or if you customize the users table to show  Friend Invitations you'll find that their Friend Invitations count has changed as you've set.