Whether consumers are searching for a new moisturizer or a hotel room for their next vacation, they have more ways than ever to research their next purchase.
Between social media, LLMs, search engines, and CTV ads (to name a few), there have never been more ways to discover, evaluate, and buy from brands.
But often, the most persuasive source is a recommendation from someone you know. 84% of people trust their friends and family to share accurate information about a brand—notably more than those who trust customer reviews, brand employees, and journalists, according to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer.
Against this backdrop, 73% of B2C marketers say CACs are rising, according to Klaviyo’s 2025 State of B2C Marketing Report, and leaders are split on whether they should prioritize new customer acquisition or retention to meet internal ROI goals.
That’s the beauty of referral marketing: it serves both needs, by helping you reach new customers cost effectively and recognize your biggest advocates for their support.
For B2C brands, referral programs drive revenue by bringing in new customers and rewarding existing loyal advocates. But designing and scaling these programs can get complicated without the right tools in place.
To create a referral experience that lowers customer acquisition costs (CACs) and grows customer lifetime value (LTV), B2C marketers need integrated referral marketing software.
What is referral marketing software?
Referral marketing software automates and customizes all aspects of your brand’s referral program, including omnichannel customer communications, link management, and referrer incentives. Different platforms support different types of referral programs, such as:
- Friend-to-friend referrals: Referral marketing software makes it easy to equip your happy customers with referral codes and links they can pass on to their inner circle. In many cases, these platforms accommodate two-way rewards, where both the current and new customer receive incentives after the new customer makes a purchase.
- Influencer marketing: Nearly 60% of consumers have made purchases because of an influencer recommendation, according to Better Business Bureau research, making these professional creators another valuable referral source for B2C brands. Some referral marketing software helps manage influencer or creator collaborations specifically, tracking revenue driven by influencer campaigns and automating partner payments.
- Affiliate programs: Affiliates can be bloggers or websites that recommend your products to their audience in exchange for a commission on each sale they drive to your brand. Certain referral platforms automate affiliate onboarding, payments, and reward redemption.
No matter which type of referral program you have, integrating your B2C CRM with your referral marketing software makes it easier to increase conversions, track revenue impact, and create long-term customer loyalty.
11 of the best referral marketing software options for B2C teams
B2C referral programs boost your bottom line by accelerating both customer acquisition and retention. Here are 11 referral marketing software options that turn your happy customers into brand champions:
Friendbuy
Friendbuy is a referral marketing software that offers flexible, customizable referral programs for retail and ecommerce brands to:
- Design referral program web experiences and other assets that match your brand’s visual identity.
- Offer customized rewards for referral participants, from coupons and credits to points and third-party gift cards.
- Track the analytics that make most sense for your brand and A/B test program variables to optimize referral performance over time.
With Klaviyo’s Friendbuy integration, you can sync customer referral data into your CRM, and:
- Automatically welcome new advocates and friends in cross-channel flows.
- Add personalized referral links to messages, like emails, text messages, and push notifications.
- Share individual coupon codes with each customer to encourage them to refer your brand to their network.
- Trigger emails and text messages based on loyalty and referral data, like opt-in status, purchases, and rewards earned.
“We’re really leveraging Friendbuy and Klaviyo together to drive a couple of different business outcomes, the first one being retention, because we want to incentivize our past customers to continue enjoying our brand,” says Erin Walters, email marketing associate at Natural Dog Company. “And then also on the customer acquisition side, to drive those strong purchases through a personal referral.”
Influence.io
Influence.io makes it easy for ecommerce brands to offer rewards in exchange for customer referrals. It lets you offer two-sided incentives, so both the referrer and new customer earn benefits after the new customer makes a purchase.
You can use Klaviyo’s Influence.io integration to:
- Add information like loyalty program point balance, referral codes, and referral URLs to your customer profiles in Klaviyo.
- Trigger flows based on specific referral events, such as when a new customer redeems a referral code.
LoyaltyLion
LoyaltyLion is a customer loyalty platform that helps Shopify merchants automate their referral programs and reward advocates for bringing in new customers. It offers omnichannel loyalty and rewards program management, referral program management, AI-powered loyalty features, and loyalty analytics, empowering you to:
- Trigger referral requests after specific moments, like after a purchase or when a customer posts a positive review.
- Nurture top referrers with points, rewards, and personalized thank-you communications.
- Customize the types of rewards available to referrers and access performance data to refine your incentives.
With Klaviyo’s LoyaltyLion integration, you can quickly identify, engage, and reward your top referrers. Referral events sync directly to Klaviyo so that you can send relevant, cross-channel communications (like congratulating a loyal customer when someone redeems their referral).
Use LoyaltyLion with Klaviyo to manage and grow your referral program by:
- Sending contextually relevant messages based on loyalty tiers and cart data
- Segmenting consumers using LoyaltyLion’s advanced loyalty data and messaging them accordingly, like inviting high-value customers to a secret sale
- Automatically rewarding customers based on real-time behaviors, like hitting a referral milestone or reaching a new loyalty tier
- Using pre-built flow templates to welcome new loyalty members, celebrate birthdays, and remind customers of their rewards
Mention Me
Mention Me is a referral and influencer marketing platform that offers referral program management, micro-influencer partnerships, and creative analytics. It surfaces which customers are driving the most referrals, helps you support customers in creating content about your brand, and optimizes ads by targeting customers who are likely to convert.
With Klaviyo’s Mention Me integration, you can:
- Improve referral performance through personalized, automated communications to both customers and people they’ve referred.
- Grow your database of marketable contacts with opt-in prompts for referred shoppers.
- Use referral data to build more targeted lookalike audiences for your paid ads.
Premium pizza oven brand Gozney knew their customers frequently discovered them through friends and family. They identified customer champions using Advanced Klaviyo Data Platform (Advanced KDP) and incentivized them to refer friends. Gozney then pulled extended customer revenue data from Klaviyo’s Mention Me integration to enhance segmentation and engagement.
This data-driven approach, along with advancements in post-purchase flows and SMS marketing, helped contribute to a 24% YoY increase in retention.
ReferralCandy
ReferralCandy helps ecommerce brands launch referral and affiliate programs that boost revenue without additional ad spend. It connects with most ecommerce platforms, letting you choose referral reward options and create tiers to offer different incentives when customers hit new milestones.
On the affiliate side, ReferralCandy empowers you to set specific commission rules, automatically track links, and manage global payouts.
With Klaviyo’s ReferralCandy integration, you can:
- Automatically send referral activity and data to Klaviyo profiles.
- Trigger a Klaviyo flow when a customer joins your referral program and use custom properties to personalize enrollment messages.
- Sync ReferralCandy segments to Klaviyo to offer tailored referral rewards and messaging by customer group.
Rivo
With Rivo, a loyalty and referrals platform for Shopify merchants, you can launch a white-labeled referral marketing program that’s fully customized to your brand’s visual identity and website.
Klaviyo’s Rivo integration lets you:
- Create custom audiences segments based on any Rivo attribute, including a customer’s VIP tier and referral status.
- Trigger flows when a customer signs up for your referral program, sends a referral link to a friend, or earns a reward once someone they referred makes a purchase.
Hybrid cookware brand HexClad launched a tiered referral program through Rivo to boost customer loyalty and minimize cost per acquisition. From the start, HexClad relied on Klaviyo’s Rivo integration. In 90 days, the brand drove $450,000 in new referral revenue and a 17% lift in average order value from referred customers.
Appstle
Appstle offers Shopify retailers apps to manage their subscription, membership, and loyalty efforts. It lets you design bespoke referral programs and create rules-based rewards that gamify the customer experience.
With Klaviyo’s Appstle integration, you can create your own referral program based on what’s important to your audience, and gain new customers by:
- Setting rules based on shopper activities, like having referring new customers unlock a loyalty tier or rewards points
- Personalizing customer communications, like sending an email when a customer earns a certain number of points in exchange for referrals they’ve made
- Connecting your referral program with your loyalty program, marketing communications, and reviews
impact.com
impact.com is a partnership management platform that lets you manage influencer, affiliate, and referral programs all in one place, simplifying internal processes and integrating affiliate and referral efforts so you can drive more conversions. Use the platform to:
- Configure your referral program to reward events beyond just purchases, like email sign-ups.
- Offer bonus incentives for multiple referrals made in a specific timeframe.
- Give customer advocates access to referral activity, status, and history tracking with referral dashboards.
With Klaviyo’s impact.com integration, you can automatically segment advocates who have been active or inactive within the past 30 days, then send them personalized referral reminders. You can also easily embed referral program CTAs across your customer communications.
JeriCommerce
The percentage of consumers who use mobile wallets jumped from 31% in 2025, up from 14% the year before, according to a PYMNTS study. JeriCommerce is banking on this trend, offering loyalty cards for Apple Wallet and Google Wallet that unify the online and in-person shopping experience.
Here’s how it works for referrals:
- Customers invite friends directly through their mobile wallet, no separate app or form needed.
- The referrer and the referred each earn points or discount rewards which get tracked through the wallet.
- Every customer can access their own referral dashboard from their wallet to see the referrals they’ve made, points they’ve earned, and their progress toward their next reward.
With Klaviyo’s JeriCommerce integration, you can incorporate wallet-based referral programs into your marketing efforts. Use Klaviyo with JeriCommerce to:
- Send mobile push notifications about referrals and rewards through the wallet pass, along with emails and text messages.
- Launch wallet campaigns based on Klaviyo events, like abandoned cart notifications, rewards tier upgrades, or birthdays.
- Promote your referral program directly within the wallet pass.
- Include wallet download links and referral information in Klaviyo flows, like your welcome flow, post-purchase flows, and VIP onboarding flows.
Social Snowball
Social Snowball is a word-of-mouth marketing platform for ecommerce brands. Direct-to-consumer companies use the platform to manage their customer referral and influencer partnership management in one place.
Whenever a new customer makes a purchase, Social Snowball automatically creates an affiliate account and unique code or link so they can start referring their friends right away. Select from over 700 rewards options for referrers to choose from when redeeming their earnings.
Social Snowball also offers more than 10 targeting rules for segmenting your advocates. For example, create a VIP program for high frequency referrers that unlocks unique rewards like cash or gift cards.
With Klaviyo’s Social Snowball integration, you can personalize customer emails and text messages based on 8 trigger events (e.g., when someone first joins the program or makes their first referral sale) and 10 custom properties (including commission value and reward redemption status). For example:
- Send a welcome flow to new affiliates when they join the program.
- Reward customers when they drive a successful referral.
- Share affiliate tracking links or discount codes with reminders to distribute to their network.
Upzelo
Upzelo is a centralized platform for boosting revenue through loyalty, referrals, and memberships. It uses mobile wallet passes to engage customers both online and in store. Here’s how it works:
- Automatically generate referral links for each customer to share with their friends.
- Motivate customers to refer their friends with custom reminders at high-intent times, like right after they've made a purchase.
- Give customers the option of redeeming referral rewards online or in store using the Shopify POS integration.
With Klaviyo’s Upzelo integration, you can simplify referral management and grow your reach by:
- Thanking customers with personalized rewards and points after making a purchase
- Automatically reminding customers to refer their friends at key times, like right after they check out or when their product arrives
- Creating segments of your top customers and sending out special privileges like early access to sales
Drive more revenue from your referral marketing program with Klaviyo
When it comes to spending money, people trust the people they already know. That means you already have a dedicated customer base ready to co-sign your brand and bring in more sales.
By integrating referral marketing software with your B2C CRM, you can improve personalized outreach, increase the volume and value of customer referrals, and reduce CACs.
Klaviyo integrates with top referral marketing software like Friendbuy, LoyaltyLion, Mention Me and more, so you can:
- Centralize referral data to identify patterns and reward your best customers.
- Improve your referral program performance with smarter targeting.
- Convert new customers and increase their LTV.
Related content
