How Hairstory Acquired and Managed +1000 Brand Ambassadors

Context

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?

Solution

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

• Identifying high-value potential ambassadors
• Creating a personalized experience for those ambassadors
• Incentivizing positive ambassador actions
• Creating continuously engaging experiences to maximize 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.

Execution

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.

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.

Incentive 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

Continuous engagement

To keep the program interesting and engaging for ambassadors, Hairstory created several recurring workflows:

• Monthly reminder emails to encourage ambassadors to post
• Frequent challenges that give extra incentives to create content and more chances to earn prizes
• Personalized outreach sequences and unique rewards for individual ambassadors

Results

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

The costs to generate those posts were far lower than their influencers. Using the all-in costs of rewards and the LoudCrowd platform, program members generated content at a CPM of $4.53 — roughly an 11x 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 6.3x. The ambassadors were also highly energized: on average, they created 2x more content for the brand after signing up.

And all of these milestones were achieved with little management — a team of 2 overseeing and managing all +1,000 members of the program.