Invite Reward is a new feature in ICS aimed at increasing both engagement and conversion rates for your campaigns. This feature allows you to offer a discount code to invitees visiting your site through an influencer's share link. The discount code is presented as a 'gift' from the influencer, making it unique to invitees and not available to other site visitors.

Including an Invite Reward is a straightforward, effective way to add value to most ICS campaigns. By offering an immediate benefit to invitees, you encourage more purchases, motivate your influencers, and gather useful data upfront for future marketing efforts.

Let's take a look to see how it would fit into your campaign:

If you're interested in setting up an invite reward for your campaign consult this guide: Setting Up Invite Rewards 

Along with this release, we've also included our regular set of improvements, updates and fixes.

We've been making a lot of strides to improve Ice Cream Social's functionality and reliability these last few months and are thrilled to share with everyone what we've been working on lately! 

A list of updates is included below, but here are some of the stand out additions:

Incentive Widget

We're excited to unveil a powerful feature for your referral marketing campaigns. The new Incentive Widget allows you to provide an enticing discount or promotional code to invitees arriving on your site through an influencer-shared link. It's simple to set up—just switch the widget type to 'incentive' instead of 'referral', create a promo code to use in your eCommerce platform, and fill out a few new campaign settings you'll find in the admin under the Share step.

As invitees sign up to claim their discount, you'll not only capture valuable customer data early in the flow, but also motivate them even more to make a purchase. It's a win-win-win: influencers will see more progress to their rewards to keep them engaged, you'll get increased ICS-influenced sales, and invitees receive a sweet deal.

While this functionality is live now, we'll be publishing a more detailed guide on how to set it up in the coming weeks as well as a few enhancements. 

Rewards Report

We've added a new report for campaigns that allows you to view and export a comprehensive list of rewards issued to influencers. This feature will help track the success of your campaigns, manage your reward budget, and assist with fair and timely compensation to eligible influencers. Plus, with the added ability to export this data, you can extract is for use with reports on other platforms or for further analysis. 

Customize Widget Launcher Button

New trigger customization options let you personalize aspects of the widget's launcher (i.e. the round button that floats in the corner.) Apply a custom color and choose from our curated icons to better represent your campaign, capture your audience's attention and ensure it aligns perfectly with your brand's aesthetics. You'll find these settings on the Integrations page under the section labeled Trigger.

Single Page App Support

Our SDK just got a significant upgrade to streamline your integration process. With the newly introduced ics.serve() function, you can dynamically adjust the widget without the need for complete reinitialization. This enhancement shines especially in Single Page Applications, minimizing conflicts and providing a smoother experience from multiple SDK initializations.

Exciting news! We are thrilled to announce the official release of our latest widget, which builds upon the success of our previous one and includes several improvements (highlighted below.)  Our developers' efforts and the invaluable feedback from beta testers played a crucial role in the success of this release, we appreciate everyone who helped build this thing and those who participated in the beta. 

This new widget and its accompanying SDK offer numerous general enhancements as well as setting the foundation for future improvements and innovations. This release marks the beginning of a new chapter for our product, and we are committed to providing even more value to our customers through referral campaigns and beyond.

Feature highlights

Let's take a quick look at what the latest widget has to offer:

• New UI for improved usability
• Link-based tracking for improved reliability and to remove dependence on third-party cookies
• Shortened personal link generation for influencers (e.g. ice.social/2RGEP7D)
• UTM parameter support to use with external analytics services (GTM, GA4, etc), read more on this here
• Consent collection and data handling improvements in compliance with data privacy practices
• Improved influencer sharing using WebShare API
• New integration script including behavior, appearance and trigger customizations
• Support for all legacy widget localizations, plus some new languages (Current list available here)
• Fully compatible with legacy version to allow for simple and immediate upgrade

Installation script available on new Integrations page

In addition the the widget itself, our newest release includes an overhaul to the admin Integrations page which includes customization options for the new widget, providing a simple way to configure the integration script without the need to adjust the code snippet manually.  

You can find this in the ICS admin from the Integrations tab of any of your campaigns. From here, the Script Configuration sidebar provides options that will let you adjust many aspects of the new widget, including behavior, appearance and trigger customizations.  

Installing or upgrading? 

If you're upgrading from the legacy widget, it's as simple as replacing the older integration script with the new one, which you can find on the Integrations page mentioned above. 

If you're a TicketSocket Premiere customer, this widget is available from inside the Premiere admin, making upgrading a very simple process. We'll soon have a similar internal integration built into TicketSocket Enterprise in the coming months as well. 

For more integration help or advanced setups, visit our support page or contact your ICS rep to guide you through the change.

Beta Widget Updates

• Embeddable display now available (instructions here if you want to try it out)
• New integration setting to set an optional delay before the widget pops-up
• Share links, regardless of when they were generated, will now always use the current Redirect URL
• Groundwork completed for localizing content and applying translations
• More documentation available for beta participants, and more to come

New Influencer Management Tools

We've added a new way to view and manage influencer details, which includes many new capabilities:

• Overview screen that provides quick details about an influencer at a glance, including conversion information and personal link
• Ability to respond to end user data requests, including:
  • Editing influencer information
  • Anonymizing an influencer to remove personal information 
  • Managing an influencer's consent options
  • More details
• Improvements to reward issuing flow
• Conversion management including the ability to Cancel conversions
• Ability to to link to influencer's detail page to share directly with other admins and team members

Unsubscribe Improvements

While auditing our data and privacy practices, we identified some optimizations to be made to our Unsubscribe functionality to make it more reliable and ensure user consent preferences are always respected. This resulted in creating new API resources for managing these preferences, as well as a revamped UI for the communication preference portal.

Policy & Terms Bulk Updating

A few updates back we mentioned that recent changes to Ice Cream Social policies now require our clients to provide their influencers with their own merchant policies instead of ours. To make the update process easier for everyone, we've implemented a feature on the Terms & Policy settings section of the Business Settings that will also apply those changes to each of your existing campaigns so they match.

Road to the Beta Widget

We've been working on a new widget experience to replace our previous offering with something more versatile, reliable and conscious about privacy and data practices. We're getting into the final stretch and with an official release just on the horizon we've deployed some important changes to prepare for it.

Legacy Link Compatibility

It's important that the transition from our legacy widget to the new, beta widget will be a seamless experience. To support this, we've created a link adapter service that assesses links generated from the legacy widget and makes sure they're picked up by the new beta widget to avoid any lapses in tracking, essentially giving us backwards compatibility. With this is you'll be able to switch over to new widget when the time comes without having to worry about creating new campaigns.

Influencer Marketing Consent

A key difference between the legacy widget and the beta widget is that the latter will offer support for GDPR, CPPA and other relevant privacy and data regulations. A major piece to satisfy our commitment to customer choice and privacy was to implement the ability to record and honor influencer marketing consent choices. To this end, we've introduced settings to control whether influencers are explicitly asked upfront if they want to submit their data to opt in to receiving ICS marketing communications. This consent collection also provides another opportunity for us to make your Privacy and Cookie Policies visible and accessible to the customer so they can learn exactly how you plan on using their data after collection. While we recommend always turning this setting on, the choice is yours to make and will ultimately depend your organization's privacy and data policies.

You'll find this setting under Campaigns > Settings > Data & Policy in the admin.

Early Adopter Integration Guides

We've been working closely with clients showing an interest in the new widget and prepared some initial documentation to get their integrations kick-started. It's a mutually beneficial way to get you access to these features faster, while we gather your ever valuable feedback to continually improve it. Since we're getting very close to the launch and are confident in both performance and reliability, we figured why not just post those guides here for the intrepid among you interested in giving it a try before the official launch. Go nuts:

• Direct JavaScript Integration V2 Widget
• Shopify Setup Guide for V2 Widget

Comments? Questions? Feedback? Hit us up via old fashioned email at ics-beta@icecreamsocial.io

What's next?

Next is the official release of the new widget! For this, you can expect:

• New widget code to be made available in the admin
• Revised, official documentation and installation guides included on our support site
• Ability to respond to end user data requests (e.g., updating/deleting influencer data, changing consent options, etc.)

And, of course, our most requested feature: 

• 💬 SMS notifications!

And that's the scoop for now, until next time! 

- Ice Cream Social Team

Stripe is now available for use as a reward processor in Ice Cream Social! If you currently use Stripe to process payments on your site, you can now take advantage of our Stripe integration and reward influencers with refunds on their original orders. To set this up, visit your Reward Processor settings in the ICS admin and follow the instructions to connect your Stripe account!

Greetings, Ice Cream Socialites! This is looking to be an exciting year, even in these short few months ICS has generated clients half a million in revenue and made over 100,000 impressions on customers - and we're just getting started! We're ecstatic about what's roadmapped for 2022, but since you're long overdue for an update, let's get into things: 

V2 Beta Widget

Over the last few months our team has released many iterations of our new widget and have been continually tweaking and refining to make sure it'll provide a great new user experience and encourage more sharing and engagement from your influencers.

As we get closer to an official release, all that remains is your much-valued feedback! If you're interested in joining the handful of clients using the V2 Beta Widget already, reach out to ics-beta@icecreamsocial.io and our team will provide you with info to get up and running.

Square Updates

Recent changes introduced some issues with our Square Online integration and we've worked with Square's team directly to resolve them. Additionally, we've made some updates to the Square OAuth process in our admin to adhere to their new requirements and make use of Square's latest APIs.

Meld Integration

We've partnered with Meld to streamline reward issuing and payment processor integrations. This integration greatly improves this functionality and will be invaluable in supporting new reward methods and payment processors in the future. Next up, we'll be adding support for Stripe rewards utilizing Meld's technology (which you can expect to see in the next few releases.)

GDPR Compliance (Phase 1 of 2)

Our dev team has been working closely with our attorneys and data protection officers to provide thorough compliance with GDPR and UK data protection laws. ICS takes privacy very seriously and these changes will better serve the data and privacy interests of our customers as well as "unlocking" ICS for use in international markets. We continue to release updates behind the scenes as we work towards the goal of reaching full compliance.

NOTICE: Related to these changes, you soon may be prompted to update your Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy URLs in your Data & Policy settings to use your own instead of Ice Cream Social's. This update will eventually be mandatory, but we'll provide ample notice and resources explaining how ICS, as a data processor, uses your customers' data.

Outside of these updates, we've released dozens of improvements and changes throughout the product over the last several weeks, some of which you'll find on the abridged list below:

Hey friends, we've been spending time under the hood preparing for our upcoming widget we mentioned in the last update, but we didn't want to leave you empty handed and squeezed in some other updates we hope you'll find useful!

Conversions Report

For better visibility into all the conversions influencers are earning you, we've added a new report to provide useful details like the order ID and which influencer it was attributed to. You'll find it right under Reports in the campaign details pages.

Spanish Localizations

We're now offering Spanish language localizations on our widget and emails. If you were on the edge of your seat waiting to serve Ice Cream to your Spanish speaking customer base, stop by your campaign settings!

What's coming up?

New Widget

Fresh versions of our widget and integrations scripts are underway and include wide reaching improvements to provide an even more delightful experience for both you and your influencers. These upcoming changes will provide benefits like:

• More intuitive integration process and options for eComm platforms
• Improved UI
• Shortened personal links allowing for improved tracking and support external analytic services (Google Tag Manager, etc.)
  
• Removing reliance on third-party cookies (Heavyweight browsers like Chrome, Safari, and Firefox will all have removed support for this type of tracking by next year)
  
• Easier influencer sharing to a wider variety of social media platforms by using the WebShare API
• Establishing groundwork for client customization and branding for the widget
• A lot more!

Interested in trying it?

We're very excited about these updates and are almost ready to release them into the wild with an opportunity for select clients to participate in the beta. If you're interested in a test drive and open to giving us feedback along the way, drop our team a line!

Also coming soon:

Repeatable rewards, new reward processing options & cashback rewards

Until next time,

- The Ice Cream Social Team

We've been at work serving you up some new Ice Cream Social features, here are the highlights: 

Authorize.Net Integration

To expand our Reward Processing options, we've integrated with Authorize.Net to allow automatic processing of order refunds for influencer rewards. To set it up, go to the Reward Processing section of your Business Settings in ICS, add your Authorize.Net API login ID and transaction key, make sure you're using the most up to date script from your campaign's Integration tab and then we'll capture the transactions to let you issue refunds through ICS.

Authorize.Net is supported on Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce and a handful of other platforms.

API Documentation & Webhooks

ICS is built on a robust REST API which we ultimately hope can be leveraged by clients and partners to build custom integrations to extend, automate and expand on the platform’s offerings to fit specialized marketing and reporting needs. As a step towards this goal, we've published v2 of our API alongside closed beta API and technical reference documentation. This documentation also includes access to our new webhook functionality which further increase the platform’s flexibility for custom integrations. 

While this documentation is not yet publicly available and accessible to all of our clients, if you're interested, reach out to our team so we can evaluate your use case and see if you're a good fit for early access.

Support Email Field

To help establish a communication channel between your team and your influencers, a new setting in the Business Settings will allow you to add a point of contact if your influencers have questions, concerns or inquiries into their reward status. Set an email address here and it'll be included on our outgoing emails.

In Other News

Ice Cream Social is now available in the Square App Marketplace

We've mentioned previously that we were working on features to allow full integration on Square's ecommerce platform. We're happy to announce we've wrapped these up and are now officially live on Square's app store: 
https://squareup.com/us/en/app...

 Ice Cream Social Blog

We've published a blog where you can expect posts including handy information on how to improve your referral marketing strategies and other related topics. Check out our first post on Getting the Timing Right: How and When to Ask Your Customers for Referrals.

What you can expect from ICS next:

• New Integration and scripts for an improved, more versatile integration experience
• A refined, more customizable ICS widget
• Improvements to influencer fraud prevention
• Personal link URL shortening and improved metrics

Until next time,

- The Ice Cream Social Team

Since our last update, we've put out a couple of releases focused on refining Admin Beta and working towards our goal of a full release. 

Many background tasks and optimizations have been accomplished to increase the performance of the app and enhance the user experience in key areas. In addition, disruptive bugs affecting flows like Campaign Setup and Business Setup have been resolved.

Included below are the highlights.