How Hairstory Acquired and Managed +1000 Brand Ambassadors

Hairstory has reinvented how we think about haircare for women.  In a world where brands provide very homogeneous products, Hairstory believes that personalization and hair health are paramount to everything else.  They’ve built their entire product-base and business model around delivering long term hair health and beauty for their customers.

To create the best and most organic representation of their brand, Hairstory believes that their most passionate customers should be their primary sales team.  As such, they’ve prioritized building a brand ambassador program as a primary growth strategy.  The goal was to not only achieve strong customer acquisition metrics, but to also build strong retention metrics since ambassadors have smaller, more niche audiences and more open communities.

The challenges Hairstory faced are the same challenges any brand faces when they want to build an ambassador program.  How can we find thousands of potential ambassadors, and how can we manage them seamlessly?

Hairstory partnered with LoudCrowd to build and manage an ambassador program that was focused on:

1. Identifying high value potential ambassadors
2. Creating a personalized experience for those ambassadors
3. Incentivizing positive ambassador actions
4. Creating continuously engaging experiences to maximize the LTV

The goal was to grow this program to a meaningful scale (+1k members) while not adding management costs and building an incentive structure that lowered customer acquisition costs.

Program Structure: Exclusive Ambassador Program

Hairstory launched a fully automated, high scale ambassador program that would target high value creators to promote the brand.  The program began with free product and personalized instructions to leverage the product, and it allowed ambassadors to continuously earn rewards and commissions for creating content and generating sales.

Recruiting and Program Growth:

Hairstory launched a campaign to recruit ambassadors primarily over DMs and social posts. They built automated and manual DM workflows to attract ambassador talent, targeting hundreds of engagements per week.

In total, they were able to curate 1,000 members in the first 9 months, with the program reaching 1,150 members after the first year.

Incentives Structure:

Once the ambassadors signed up, they were eligible for a number of “content” rewards for creating on Instagram and TikTok, as well as commissions for any sales generated with their links or codes:

First Instagram Post or TikTok a month: 20% off
3 Instagram Posts or TikToks a month: 40% off
Bonus: 5 Instagram Stories a month: Surprise Gift

Personalized Experience for Ambassadors:

To create an ambassador experience that meets the brands standards of personalization and high quality, Hairstory designed exciting rewards for individuals in addition to the generic rewards.  Here’s an example of some of the unique outreach sequences and rewards Hairstory created:

Continuous Engagement Opportunities: 

And finally, to keep the program interesting and engaging for ambassadors, Hairstory created several workflows for ambassadors:

• Haristory sends out monthly reminder emails to encourage ambassadors to post
• Hairstory runs frequent challenges with ambassadors to give extra incentives to create content and more chances to earn prizes
• And finally, to keep the program interesting and engaging for ambassadors, Hairstory created several workflows for ambassadors

In the first year, the program has generated enormous social lift, resulting in 1.9k posts, 8.3M impressions, and over $250k in EMV.