In order for any ambassador program to be successful, it must first have happy participants.
Happy brand ambassadors talk about your brand more, promote it in a positive light and are able to ultimately bring in more potential customers. With happy and authentic ambassadors, potential customers are provided with the authentic recommendation they need to make a purchase. Its proven, 71% of people are more likely to make a purchase online if the product or service comes recommended by others.
Check out our ambassador program examples playbook to learn how brands are scaling their ambassador programs to thousands of participants, hundreds of thousands of pieces of UGC across Facebook, Instagram & Twitter & millions in measurable referral revenue.
How do we possibly keep ambassadors happy? It’s easy! Give them awesome rewards.
A reward can be anything. Start off by giving them the same things a new employee would get on the first day like a pen, notebook, t-shirt, or of course an official business card. Up the ante as an ambassador puts in more time with the brand. Free product and product discounts usually work the best to help keep ambassadors engaged along the ride. Exclusive rights to purchase a new product before it’s released isn’t a bad idea either.
You want ambassadors to feel like they are getting a great deal in return for their participation. When rewards are not in line with the value of the ambassador’s effort than the probability of losing brand loyalty increases. Several social media posts across the course of a month should be rewarded with something more than a simple sticker. Be sure the reward’s value is similar to a fair hourly wage.
Here are 8 types of rewards that every ambassador program can offer.
Product Discounts
Offering discounts on your products is a great win-win for both the ambassador and the brand. With product discounts, ambassadors have the opportunity to purchase more of your products and the company benefits from the increase in frequent purchases. Chubbies Shorts, for example, issues discount codes that the ambassadors can use for on site purchases.
Entertainment tickets
What’s better than 2 free tickets to an entertainment event? People love great deals and sending your ambassador to a concert or sporting event allows them to grow awesome lasting memories of what the brand has done for them. For Salesforce events, ambassadors have the opportunity to claim front row seats and free tickets.
Promotional Items
Every company has a box of promotional items somewhere around the office. Give ambassadors some promotional items when they first join. A great way to immediately welcome someone to the team and it gives ambassadors something to promote. Water bottles, stickers, t-shirts, and a notebook all do the trick. Makers Mark and Salesforce both provide their ambassadors with business cards from the get go.
New/Exclusive Products
Engage your ambassadors before new products come out. Seek out their opinions and feedback and give them the opportunity to own the product before everyone else. The feeling of exclusivity helps ambassadors achieve a sense of belonging and gives them something to keep up to date with. Adidas created Tango Squads to help provide their ambassador community with access to new products and company news before being released for public consumption.
Recognition
Recognize your ambassador community’s work. Use the content that has received the most hits on the brand’s social media platforms and find a place to feature the ambassadors that are contributing the best work. Lululemon invites 100 of their ambassadors to an ambassador summit every year to show their thanks, introduce ambassadors to the company headquarters and treat them to a 4 day getaway.
Invite to the Company
Be sure to invite ambassadors to the company headquarters, parties and events. All ambassadors need to be treated like family and what better way than to bring them into the company, seek out their opinions and give them a free meal. Dell became a leader in this category when they created a Consumer Advisory Panel. After flying out their ambassadors to the Dell Headquarters, ambassadors then had a chance to share their perspectives on the brand and engage directly with company executives.
Cash
Of course! What better than cash? Make sure your ambassadors have the opportunity to earn some money. One strategy would be to create personalized referral links for your ambassadors so that can earn a commission on the purchases people make using the ambassador’s link.
Gift Cards
The next best thing after cash. A gift card helps to increase frequent purchases from ambassadors and allows ambassadors to collect store credit that they can use on future purchases as well.
Conclusion
Does your ambassador community have the opportunity to earn at least one of the rewards mentioned above? If not, try some out! I’m not saying you need to offer all of the rewards listed but try and incorporate at least a few into your program going forward.
Rewards should get people motivated and excited to be active and complete promotional activities for your brand. If engagement is low form your community, look at the rewards you offer. Again incorporate rewards that are worth your ambassadors time, the value of a reward should be fair with respect to the time an ambassador spends creating content.
Learn more about how to start a brand ambassador program and scale with BrandChamp’s brand ambassador software platform.
Looking to find a better way to give your ambassadors some rewards? Check out BrandChamp’s ambassador platform and see how we help you build a rewards catalog by requesting a demo here.
