The goal with ambassador marketing is to ultimately create a new stream of revenue for your brand and increase brand awareness. But in order to do so, you have to allow your brand ambassadors to become sales champions. Plus, you have to reward them for it.
Launching a brand ambassador program with engaging activities and rewards can be a real trial and error process at the start - especially when first learning what rewards serve as the best incentives.
We know how tricky it gets to strike that fine balance between an actionable and effective ambassador task or Mission and a worthy reward. So, after learning about some of the most effective rewards via our ambassador marketing platform, we’ve rounded up a list of insightful tips on how to use rewards as a way to generate sales and maximise your marketing efforts.
6 Ambassador Marketing Rewards that Work
By following the 6 tips listed here, you’ll learn how you can reward your brand ambassadors and sales champions as they promote your brand in a way that will bring value to your ambassadors, while also contributing to your total brand revenue.
1. Generating Sales with Commission
This reward entails offering your ambassadors a percentage of cash in return for any sales they generate while completing a particular ambassador task - like with affiliate marketing. This task could include anything from simply making an Instagram Story about your brand or posting a picture on their social feeds featuring one of your products.
By giving your ambassadors a unique discount code or tracking link to share with their followers, you’ll be able to track how many sales they’ve made on your eCommerce store through the use of that unique discount code and tracking link. This will help you determine how much commission they’ve earned.
2. Gift Cards
Gift cards serve as a great incentive for ambassadors to participate in the marketing tasks or Missions you create as it gives them the freedom to choose which products or services from your brand they’d like to redeem. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be tied to sales. You could offer a gift card reward to your ambassadors for simply completing tasks via your ambassador marketing tool that are intended to build brand awareness, for example, and not generate sales.
Some ambassador marketing platforms like ours, offer a point system so that brands are able to reward their ambassadors according to the number of points they attain by achieving and ticking off varying Missions and tasks. You can use this point system to determine different gift card amounts, so that ambassadors with a higher amount of points may receive a higher-priced gift card.
In case you were wondering, Missions are mini-marketing tasks that you can prompt your brand ambassadors to complete on our app in return for a reward in the form of gift cards, points, cash or freebies.
3. Free Products
Freebies are a great way to not only reward your sales champions but also to get your ambassadors to rep your brand's merch. This is a reward we’d recommend you include at the start of your ambassador marketing program as it’s a great way to get the ball rolling and entice potential brand ambassadors to join your program.
You could send your new ambassadors a fun package with a couple of freebies and request that they create and share social media content that features some or all of the freebies. In this way, they'll have earned their reward even before they’ve completed the ambassador task.
Later, you can introduce freebies as a reward again. At that stage, it should ideally be given as an add-on to another reward your ambassadors will receive after completing a task or earning a certain amount of points. Freebies are also great rewards to use as part of content Missions. They're a great way to get new content from your ambassador community when you launch new products.
If you’d like to connect Freebie rewards to sales Missions, you could announce the Mission in the following way: “Redeem a gift card of $50 plus a free pair of sunglasses once your unique discount code is used on our website at least 200 times.” This will encourage your ambassadors to share their unique discount code with their followers - your target audience, so that they may generate as many sales as possible to claim that freebie.
4. Website or Social Media Features
If you’re running an ambassador program, we’d recommend you have a space on your website or social media where you give your participating ambassadors a special shoutout. This serves as a huge morale boost, but it also gives you the opportunity to create a valuable reward.
A feature like this can act as a great prize that incentivises your ambassadors to create content around your brand in the hopes of attaining such a cool shoutout. And you could make it a recurring thing so that every second day or every week you reward a new ambassador with the same prize.
By implementing a website or social media feature as a reward, you’ll boost awareness around your ambassadors and strengthen your relationship with them. Receiving praise from the brand directly is also a great move in terms of brand ambassador retention, so definitely keep this one on your radar if you haven’t thought about it yet!
UGC images, first: @tamara_photography._ for Popsockets, second: @anacbpereira for Burga, cover: @mariskanooijens for Desenio
5. Discounts
Similar to the gift card reward, offering your ambassadors discounts on certain products or across your entire eCommerce store is a solid way to motivate them to complete any ambassador assignments you’ve created.
If you’re looking to clear out certain stock from your inventory, you could even offer a discount on those products alone. In this way, you’ll be able to clear out old stock and reward your ambassadors at the same time. The Code Drop feature on our platform is tailor-made to support brands who want to achieve this outcome.
6. First Access to New Products Launches
Launching a new product or service? Turn it into an opportunity for your ambassadors to earn a new and exclusive reward! By explaining how they’ll be able to earn exclusive first access to a new product, you’ll stir enough excitement to get most of your ambassadors to participate in the marketing campaigns and drum up some excitement via word of mouth.
Once the new product is redeemed, your ambassadors will be able to help spread the word about the launch of the product by featuring it across their social media content.
This reward serves as a double win because it:
- Scales engagement from your ambassador community
- Becomes a way to promote new products without setting up a second ambassador task
