How affiliates can use shareable referral coupon links to drive sales

Affiliate for WooCommerce helps add and manage affiliates and track performance from a single place – commissions, sales, payout, leaderboard, etc. Earn money without hard work. Increase your brand outreach, and get potential customers.

You can test the plugin on our live demo.

Your affiliates can promote your store using multiple methods: referral links, referral coupons, or affiliate landing pages.

When paired with Smart Coupons, they can do it even more effectively using referral coupon links and more.

In this doc, we will explain more about referral coupon links.

How referral coupon links work?

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When any coupon is assigned to an affiliate (learn more), it becomes a referral coupon.

The Smart Coupons plugin gives you the option to create a shareable link for each coupon on your store. Learn more here.

Affiliates can share the referral coupon’s links with their customer, which applies a discount and tracks referrals too.

Example: https://demo.storeapps.org/?coupon-code=SAVE20

Here, SAVE20 is the coupon code. The link does both – applies the discount and tracks the affiliate’s referral.

With this, customers don’t need to manually enter coupon codes.

This means:

Smoother checkout for customers
Higher conversion rates for affiliates
More sales for your store

How do affiliates get their coupon links?

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Affiliates can click to copy their ready-to-use links directly from their Dashboard under My Account > Affiliate > Profile and share with their customers.

👉 This is the simplest and most reliable way to access referral coupon links.

How referral links work with coupon + tracking parameters?

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Sometimes, affiliates may want to add coupon codes or tracking parameters to their referral link. This is ideal for affiliates who run ads or want to track specific campaigns.

For this, affiliates can generate links using the referral link generator from My Account > Affiliate > Profile.

Example – Affiliate link with coupon code + UTM:

https://demo.storeapps.org/ref/{affiliate_id}/?coupon-code=SAVE20&utm_campaign=summer-sale

They can just enter this part: ?coupon-code=SAVE20&utm_campaign=summer-sale in the referral link generator, it will create the above link for that specific affiliate.

Sharing coupon links via Campaigns

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Campaigns allow you (store admins) to send coupon links and promotional content to affiliates.

For example, you can create a campaign with the coupon link as the destination URL and a slug for tracking:

Coupon link: https://demo.storeapps.org/?coupon-code=SAVE20
Campaign slug: summer-campaign
- Resulting campaign link: https://demo.storeapps.org/ref/{affiliate_id}/?coupon-code=SAVE20&utm_campaign=summer-campaign

Affiliates can access campaigns under My Account > Affiliate > Campaigns.

You can also control and share campaigns with specific affiliates by following this doc.

Our recommendation

Use campaigns when you want to distribute a non-referral discount coupon with extra marketing material (banners, copy, etc.).

For referral coupon sharing, the affiliate’s profile is a cleaner and simpler option.

Additional benefits of Smart Coupons

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Along with referral coupon links, Smart Coupons also allows you to:

Bulk assign coupons to affiliates – saving time when distributing unique coupons across your affiliate network.
Create advanced discounts, store credits, and gift cards.
Run BOGO offers to boost conversions.

This makes Smart Coupons a powerful companion to Affiliate for WooCommerce.

Best practices for referral coupon promotions

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Use attractive, time-sensitive offers.
Combine referral coupons with seasonal campaigns (e.g., Black Friday, summer sales, product launches).
Provide affiliates with ready-to-use marketing assets (banners, product images, pre-written copy).
Always test links before sharing to ensure they apply correctly and track referrals.
Even shortened/branded links (Pretty Links, Bitly, etc.) will work (learn more).