How Dolce Vita Got 11x More UGC Content from Gen Z
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 to 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
Dolce Vita launched a campaign to recruit customers and student ambassadors via email, social announcements, and word of mouth. Potential ambassadors could apply, and after undergoing a qualitative review would be admitted to the program.
In total, they were able to curate 1,000 members in the first 3 months, and over 2,000 members by the end of the first year.
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 members on what they want to see more of, exclusive invitations to events, general program reminders, and more.
Results
In the first year, the program generated enormous social lift, resulting in over 2k posts, 11M impressions, and over $350k in EMV. On average, ambassadors generated 11x more content after joining the program.
Efficiency
The costs to generate those posts were far lower than their influencer cohorts. Using the all-in costs of rewards and the LoudCrowd platform, program members generated content at a CPM of $3.79 — roughly a 13x improvement on influencer efficiency, where the average CPM is $50.
Based on money invested in both LoudCrowd and the rewards, the program generated an ROI of 6.5x. And all of these milestones were achieved with minimal management — a team of 2 overseeing the program and managing all 3,000+ members.