Context

Founded in 2001, over the last two decades Dolce Vita has become a household name in women’s fashion. Their confident, fashion-forward designs have inspired millions of customers and attracted a loyal, dedicated following.

Always evolving, Dolce Vita wanted to adapt with how modern consumers buy products and engage with the brand through social channels. It was critically important for them to appeal to both their core customers and new Gen Z creators and shoppers in an increasingly competitive market.

Solution

To acquire more Gen Z customers with increasingly efficient customer acquisition costs, Dolce Vita decided to roll out an ambassador program that would focus on their existing customer base, while also tapping into the college ambassador space, to incentivize more Instagram and TikTok content. 

The goal was to grow this program to a meaningful scale (+3k members) while not adding management costs and building an incentive structure that lowered customer acquisition costs.

Execution

Program Structure: Exclusive Ambassador Program

Dolce Vita launched a fully automated, high scale ambassador program that would admit thousands of customers and create incentives for Instagram and TikTok content.  They kept the rewards and incentives interesting by periodically focusing ambassadors with challenges, and only allowing ambassadors to earn benefits if they created content.

Program Growth

Engagement Strategies

Members received emails every time they earned a reward, encouraging them to continue posting to reach the next tier. Dolce Vita also ran multiple challenges that incentivized higher quality content and helped re-engage ambassadors in the program.

Dolce Vita added all 3k+ Social Club members to their Close Friends on Instagram, where they announced exclusive perks for their program members, including Close Friends-only giveaways, crowd sourcing their members on what they want to see more of in the program and at Dolce Vita, exclusive invitations to events, general program reminders, and more.