Over the last couple of years, Slack has emerged from a business communication tool, to a legitimate community platform (The Full List of 1000 Slack Communities). For those of us that use Slack on a daily basis, this came as no surprise. Communication and collaboration are the core of a community, and Slack nails this functionality. When you give your audience powerful and focused tools to engage directly with you, and each other, amazing things can happen.

One place that Slack shines is in premium, or paid communities. Being able to access experts and content creators (podcasters, coaches, YouTubers, etc) directly for a subscription fee is a rapidly growing trend. The ability for communities to fund themselves in this way is a game changer.

With LaunchPass, creating a subscription based community on Slack is easier than ever. It takes less than 5 minutes to start accepting payment for access to Slack teams, and channels.

Launching is one thing, but how do you go about growing a premium community into a successful subscription business?

We’ve seen numerous approaches to marketing and growing premium communities on Slack. From content marketing, to SEO, social media, paid search, and PR. But for growing a premium community, one method stands above the rest. Referrals and word of mouth.

In every community there are a group of highly engaged contributors who often help moderate, welcome newcomers and share the benefits of being a member. Commissions are a powerful way of rewarding these members, which can result in substantial growth.

The remainder of this article will show you how to create a referral marketing system with Refersion to supercharge growth, helping create a profitable subscription business in record time.

Launching your affiliate program

If you haven’t created a premium Slack community with LaunchPass, we recommend starting with this article: How to create a membership community on Slack in 3 minutes. It only takes a few minutes, so once you’ve done that come back for the rest!

The steps below include:

• Connect LaunchPass with Stripe

• Connect Refersion with Stripe

• Install Refersion’s Tracking and Conversion Scripts

• Publish and promote your affiliate program

Step 1: Connect LaunchPass with Stripe

Once you’ve created your invite page (and started your 14-day free trial), you’ll be able to connect your Stripe account with LaunchPass. Just head over to settings in the LaunchPass admin and click “Connect with Stripe”.

Step 2: Connect Refersion with Stripe

After signing up for Refersion, you’ll also need to connect it to your Stripe account. Choose Stripe from the Start Guide, or if you’ve already signed up, go to Account > Settings > Tracking and click on Add Tracking.

Step 3: Install Refersion’s Tracking Scripts

Head over to LaunchPass, and click “edit” on the invite page where you’d like affiliates to earn commissions.

Step 4: Add Refersion’s tracking script

Within the “Analytics & Tracking” field paste the following code. You’ll need to replace both SUBDOMAIN and PUB_KEY below with the Refersion Subdomain and Public Key from the Tracking Page (be sure you are signed in to Refersion to have the relevant info populated!). You can find your SUBDOMAIN and PUB_KEY in Refersion’s snippet here: [Refersion — Refersion Tracking for Custom Sites]

<!‐‐ REFERSION TRACKING: BEGIN ‐‐>
<script src="//SUBDOMAIN.refersion.com/tracker/v3/PUB_KEY.js"></script>
<script>_refersion();</script>
<!‐‐ REFERSION TRACKING: END ‐‐>

Note: If you are using the LaunchPass widget you can embed the “Tracking Visits” code directly on your website which can be found here: Refersion — Refersion Tracking for Custom Sites

Step 5: Add Refersion’s conversion script

Within the “Conversion Tracking” field paste the following code.

_refersion(function(){ _rfsn._setSource("STRIPE"); _rfsn._addCart(data.stripeCustomerId); });

Step 6: Email Refersion your LaunchPass invite page link

Email the URL of your invite page (i.e https://launchpass.com/group/channel) to “[email protected]” with subject “LaunchPass Domain Configuration” to complete domain set up with Refersion.

Step 7: Publish your page and start working with affiliates!

Once you’ve completed these steps Refersion, LaunchPass and Stripe are all integrated, and you are ready to start promoting your affiliate program!

You can manually add affiliates, share an affiliate signup page with your members, or even get added to Refersion’s own marketplace where potential affiliates can discover and promote your community.

Each affiliate will get a unique link to your invite page, and when a new member signs up they will be rewarded in whatever way you decide!

I’d like to give a special thanks to AJ and the Traffic Think Tank for helping hash out some of the details in this article. Traffic Think Tank is a paid Slack community where you get access to some serious SEO experts. ?

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out the friendly folks at Refersion or email us at [email protected] ?