by 
Occasionally, your program members’ participation and engagement may wane over time. Luckily, there are several actions you can take to reinvigorate your brand ambassadors so that they continue posting and tagging your brand.
Get Creative with Social Rewards
Change up your rewards and implement a monthly grand prize.
Your most active brand ambassadors have likely earned all of the rewards available to them and may feel oversaturated. Declining participation, especially amongst your fiercest advocates, is a telltale sign that a reward revamp may be necessary. Below are some creative ways to spruce up your rewards.
Include a surprise gift where qualified members can choose from a selection of gifts. Shopify makes this possible and easy to implement via hidden collections.
Change up existing reward tiers, or add additional reward tiers. Swap out discounts for credits, gamify based on content type, etc. Check out this article about the importance of social reward programs for brands.
Implement a monthly challenge or grand prize. Something like “our favorite in-feed post each month will get a $100 Amazon gift card” goes far, especially amongst those who have already earned every other reward possible.
Level up your program by incorporating other perks like access to a private Discord, content creator training, etc.
Take Every Opportunity to Engage Your Brand Ambassadors
Level up your communication flows with surprise gifts!
Your ambassadors may feel fatigued from your existing communication cadence. Changing up your messaging and cadence is a great way to catch your ambassadors off guard and get them intrigued again. In particular, weaving in special or surprise gifts, especially into your welcome flows and other flows, may incite product purchases and thus more content.
Include a gift in your welcome flow to ensure recruits have a (new) product to post about.
Include surprise discounts/gifts into your monthly briefs/comms. Again, this will ensure that your members have the latest product to brag about on social media.
Leveraging SMS for Engagement and Social Rewards
Implement SMS for program communication and reward delivery
Email is not the most effective, modern-day method to communicate with your biggest advocates. SMS reaches ambassadors where they shop and post, on their smartphones. Data suggests that SMS open and click-through rates are magnitudes larger than that of email. By simply implementing SMS comms, you can expect more engaged and knowledgeable ambassadors. On top of that, the ease of creating an SMS message allows you to get more creative/thorough with your comms. Check out this article to learn more about implementing SMS and this article for the importance of SMS for program communications.
The Best Ways to Repurpose UGC
Engage with and feature your ambassador content on your website and across social.
One goal of many ambassador / social reward programs is to make your community feel valued and special. The easiest way to do that is to show your advocates that you appreciate them by engaging with and reposting their content. Getting both your engaged and unengaged ambassadors excited about the potential to work closely with a brand is sure to drive participation, especially amongst wannabe influencers/creators.
Never miss an opportunity to say thank you with Auto Story Replies. LoudCrowd’s Auto Story Replies functionality allows you to send automated messages to your ambassadors (or anyone) that tags you in an Instagram Story. You can customize/segment these messages based on a variety of profile features. More on Story replies here.
Featuring your ambassadors on Instagram Story + Feed, and on TikTok communicates that you genuinely love their content and therefore makes it more likely they’ll post about you again. Wannabe influencers are especially inspired by branded boosts through features. To turn this into a routine, consider processes along the lines of Ambassador Friday Features, or Ambassador of the Month.
Comment warm prior posts from your ambassadors. Show your members that you care about them and that you are impressed by the content they produce.
Dedicate a portion of your website to featuring your Ambassadors. This will surely ignite excitement amongst those who have and have not been thoroughly engaged.
Add Creator Commerce to your Brand Ambassador Program
Offer your brand ambassadors commission for social sales
There’s no question that effective brand ambassadors are going to feel most incentivized by cash payouts. LoudCrowd makes it easy to turn any brand ambassador or influencer program into a creator-oriented affiliate program. Brand ambassador programs see a 10x boost in content after the addition of an affiliate marketing component to an existing program.
LoudCrowd makes it easy to enable revenue driving tools and commissions on any program.
Give all of your brand ambassadors their own Influencer Storefront
Influencer Storefronts represent the new and exciting tool in the brand ambassador space – much like the adoption of Linktr.ee and other platforms. Your brand ambassadors will have real estate on your site to curate their favorite products and showcase powerful UGC. Your brand ambassadors will feel so much closer to your brand and hence increase the amount of content they’re posting and are much more likely to be retained.
LoudCrowd’s Influencer Storefronts are completely automated – meaning they can be added to any existing Social Club or Ambassador Program without any additional lift from your marketing or eCommerce teams.
Give your brand ambassadors a personal affiliate code
A/B tests from several LoudCrowd ambassador programs found that affiliate referral codes drove the following:
- 40% increase in UGC from program members
- 10x increase in conversion rates from social selling
- 2x more attributable sales than ambassador programs without codes
On average, brands can expect significantly more UGC from their ambassador programs after implementing codes because they provide the creator with a strong CTA. It’s the same reason why top affiliate and ambassador programs like Walmart Creator, Amazon Influencer, and Target Affiliate do this.
