Maintaining Ambassador Engagement with Milestone Rewards

One of the most common questions we get from our clients is, “How can we get our ambassadors to participate in every campaign?” A fun strategy we recommend experimenting with for your program is a milestone rewards system. Creating milestones that ambassadors can work towards as they participate in your advocacy program and campaigns will give them a sense of purpose and allow you to offer higher-valued incentives. For example, instead of offering a reward for every campaign they participate in, you can offer more exciting rewards they can earn after they participate in 3, 6, or 12 campaigns!

1) Promotes a less transactional do-this-for-that relationship with campaigns. Instead of offering a one time incentive for completing one campaign at a time, we have seen that giving ambassadors milestones to work towards can increase campaign participation throughout the year!

2) Frees up time to focus on engaging with ambassadors. It takes time to come up with creative, unique incentives each month, with a consequence being that ambassadors can get bored with the same incentive month-after-month. Creating milestones that ambassadors can work towards gives them a sense of purpose and allows brands to offer higher-valued incentives, which is also more motivating to the ambassadors!

3) Increases overall campaign participation and engagement. While drawings are a great strategy to use on occasion to mix things up, milestones give ambassadors assurance that their participation each month will guarantee them a set of rewards.This will increase your overall campaign participation each month and will make ambassadors feel like they’re getting more out of the program, generating more excitement!

4) Actual Attainable Rewards for Ambassadors. The milestones give ambassadors something to work towards and the gamification creates more excitement around the program.

Blendteclaunched their customer advocacy program at the beginning of 2020 and sent their ambassadors monthly social media campaigns, where they offered participants the chance to win a new blender or accessory item for completing them. Participation started out strong, but over time they saw a gradual decline in participation. They noticed that people stopped participating after their first 2 or 3 campaigns because they started to think they might never win. The excitement over the chance to win fizzled out. After all, it was completely possible that even if an ambassador participated in all 12 campaigns, they could still come away with nothing at the end of the year. On the other hand, Blendtec’s blenders usually range from $300-600 and they couldn’t just offer everyone a new blender for completing one campaign. So they revamped their strategy for 2021.

Benton, Blendtec’s Head of Marketing, says, “Our focus with our customer program is to garner UGC and our customer’s experience, so we wanted to make the ambassador experience mutually beneficial. We decided to give them the opportunity to upgrade their blender at the end of the year if they help us with our monthly initiatives. We hope this will make them feel valued and encourage them to stay engaged with us throughout the year.”

This year, Blendtec established rewards milestones that their ambassadors could work towards throughout the year. Participation has nearly doubled for their first campaign of 2021!

If you’re feeling inspired to set up rewards milestones for your ambassador program, we have provided a guide below. Keep reading or reach out to your CSM to assist!

1) Determine your milestones and rewards. We recommend setting up 3 or 4, and launching at least 1 campaign per month.

2) Set up a custom property in Wooly for tracking and fulfilling.

Go to Settings > Properties and click Add Property. Call the Property something like “Rewards Earned”. Create a Dropdown Field Type and list out the incentive levels. (You will use this when tracking and fulfilling the rewards.) Make sure to mark it as “searchable within your contacts” and to “show in contact profile” so it’s easy for you to find.

3) Launch a campaign clearly outlining the details on how to earn the incentives you’re offering. You can use this campaign as the first one they are to complete, so give them something easy to do such as posting on Instagram or IG Story. We also suggest adding the milestones to every campaign brief in the “Incentive” section to remind them what they’re working towards.

You will use the Campaign Participation Report to track and fulfill your ambassador’s incentives. Select the start date you launched the milestones incentives through today. You can sort by # of Campaigns Completed, (column). In the screenshot below, 4 people have “3 campaigns completed” so they will receive the first level rewards.

To fulfill your rewards, click into the 4 profiles and update the “rewards earned” property on the left hand side to whatever level you are fulfilling them. You will also find their address under Contact Information!

Once you launch more than 3 campaigns (or the first level reward number), plan on checking this report once a month to repeat this process and fulfill the new rewards at that time. No need to check on it every day.

Let us know if you have any questions!