Viral Loops + Ghost

How to use Ghost and Viral Loops together

Launch a referral program for your newsletter to turn your readers into ambassadors and get more email subscribers

Viral Loops allows you to build a newsletter referral campaign that can be connected directly to your Ghost newsletter.

With this integration, all you need to do is embed referral widgets in your emails. Viral Loops automatically generates unique referral links, tracks referred subscribers, and sends them directly into Ghost as members.

Here’s how to get started:

Create a Newsletter Referral Campaign in Viral Loops

Sign up for a Viral Loops account and create your first campaign using The Newsletter Referral template, selecting Ghost as your platform.

viral loops campaign setup

Once your campaign is created, give it a name and spend some time setting up your rewards and milestones, and customizing your referral widgets and invitee page. For more advice about using Viral Loops, check out their help guides.

viral loops milestones setup

Connect your Ghost site with a custom integration

Now that your campaign has been created, the next step is to connect it to Ghost so you can run your campaign and keep everything in sync.

In Ghost Admin, head to SettingsIntegrations and add a new custom integration for Viral Loops:

custom integrations in Ghost

Name the custom integration Viral Loops and add an icon if you wish. Hit save, and keep this page open.

viral loops custom integration

Finally, paste the Admin API and Admin URL from your custom integration in Ghost into your Viral Loops campaign, ensuring you have Automatically add new Ghost Members to Viral Loops checked to keep everything in sync.

viral loops custom integration

If you’d like to add a label to members in Ghost who have signed up from your referral program, you can also add that here. This allows you to filter your member list in Ghost to see who has been recommended by other readers.

Use the referral widget in your newsletters

Now that your integration is done, you can get started with your referral campaigns. Viral Loops allows you to create custom embeddable sharing widgets, here’s an example:

viral loops widget example

Add your widget anywhere in your newsletters by pasting the embed code from Viral Loops into a HTML card in the Ghost editor.

add HTML card to post

Pro tip: Save your Viral Loops widget embed as a Snippet, so you can easily insert it again in the future.