Sales and UGC Content Soar After Melinda Maria Formalizes Creator Program

Koala Eco is on a mission to create safe, powerful, plant-based products using natural, sustainable ingredients. They’ve built their objectives around aiding people’s wellbeing by connecting them to nature. As a result, their purpose led brand drives their eagerness to engage and grow a passionate community.

To create the best and most organic community, Koala Eco believes that their most passionate audiences deserve rewards. As such, they pursued building a social rewards program that inspires their community to share Koala Eco on Instagram and TikTok. As a byproduct of their efforts, they aimed to grow their existing social community 10x.

Fostering the best brand communities in the world is not an easy endeavor. Koala Eco sought out a way to facilitate an organic-feeling community, but with limited time resources. How do we maintain and grow a community of thousands of brand advocates? Does fostering a community lead to more brand loyalty, and increased customer LTV?

Koala Eco partnered with LoudCrowd to build and manage a Social Club of hundreds of members that was focused on:

• Incentivizing members to post on Instagram and TikTok by offering free product
• Growing their social community through their existing brand champions
• Cultivating a community member lifecycle journey that results in higher CLTV

The goal was to accomplish all focuses with Social Club automations that still felt organic and personal from the brand.

Program Structure: All Customer Social Rewards Club

Koala Eco launched an all customer, Social Rewards Club, which targets their existing brand advocates and any new customers in the US and Australia. The program offered a clear call to action for community members: share Koala Eco with your friends and audiences on social media. The Social Rewards Club offers participants discounts, site credits, and even surprise free new products, that are automatically delivered upon completion of the social posts.

Recruiting and Program Growth

Koala Eco promotes their Social Rewards Club with every new or existing customer touchpoint. For example, on the website, customers can find the Social Rewards sign-up page in the navigation bar. And, on marketing email blasts, consumers can find the Social Rewards Club on every email footer.

Koala Eco also saw a huge opportunity amongst Airbnb hosts for their Social Club. Koala Eco leveraged LoudCrowd’s discovery capabilities to identify potential Airbnb hosts to invite to the program via a DM engagement strategy.

In total, they were able to reach ~950 community members after the first year.

Special Activations to Increase LTV

Koala Eco also leverages their community for special brand campaigns. For example, after Koala Eco joined 2022’s #NaturePact campaign, they encouraged and rewarded their community members for doing the same.

To gather more needed video content, they encouraged their Social Club members to post Reels during the month of October and saw an immediate 15% increase in video content.

Koala Eco Received More Content Without the Cost of Influencers

In the first year, the program generated enormous social life, resulting in 2.9k posts, 6.73M impressions, and over $202k in Earned Media Value. That’s a 9x increase and 11x increase in posts and EMV respectively compared to the program start.

On top of that, the costs to generate those posts were far lower than influencers costs. All-in costs of rewards AND the LoudCrowd platform, community member content was generated at a CPM of $5.64. That’s roughly a 10x improvement on influencer efficiency, where the average CPM is around $50.

Social Club Members Became Their Most Valuable Customers (LTV)
Program members redeemed their Social Club rewards at a rate of ~30% which is double the national average for coupon redemptions. This also translated to Social Club members spending dramatically more with the brand.

After joining the Koala Eco Social Club, members on average, gained 385 AUD (Australian Dollars) to their CLTV (customer lifetime value). Similarly, compared to non-program members, members are 578 AUD more valuable in CLTV. Clearly, best in-class communities result in greater brand loyalty and lifetime value.

With all of these milestones achieved, Koala Eco rounded out the year with a 7.5x return on their Social Club. Investing in community for your brand champions pays off rapidly.