Sullen Clothing's Ambassador program
Case StudiesMay 10, 20227 minsIndustry: Clothing & Apparel
Use Case: Ambassador Program / Leverage Customer Community
Integrations: Shopify Plus, Klaviyo
Influencerbit Generated 1300+ mentions in under 30 days from their Loyal Customers (The OG Influencers)
About Sullen Clothing
SullenClothing, founded in 2001 is one of Southern California’s top art-driven lifestyle apparel brands. With a strong focus on the ideals and practices of modern tattooers, Sullen evolved from a small group of art-driven tattooers and artists into a world-renowned “Art Collective”.
From successfully expanding their proven men’s designs into a line of women’s apparel to expanding their apparel collections with hats, and bags to running weekly artist t-shirt series to even recently starting Youth collections to gaining 1M+ followers on their Instagram page ; they have experienced exponential growth.
Problem
Cracking Customer Community Engagement is hard because it’s just too manual!
Team Sullen gave their customers the best product, the best service, and their customers loved them. With this growth in their customers, they wanted to harness this customer community and tap into the social audience of their customers (Word of Mouth).
By engagement, they didn’t mean running E-Mail / SMS campaigns with “Buy Now” CTAs. They wanted 2-way engagement with their customers. Making them take part in a specific trend and on its completion, reward them with some exclusive personalized gift. Thus gaining their loyalty and making them part of the Sullen Family.
For this to work, the process needed to be quick, simple, and seamless!
They came up with a Sullen Ambassador Program. For any Sullen Customer to become an Ambassador, they had to share a pic on their Instagram story wearing their Sullen purchase and tag @SullenClothing on Instagram.
All ambassadors get a 20% Exclusive Site-Wide discount code. Not only that, ”their exact Instagram username” is made into a discount code for 15% on Sullen’s website for their friends & family. (Valuing them & making them feel special!)
Sounds amazing, right? But, their biggest problem was Sullen’s scale (Tens of thousands of customers)
Verifying the user, tracking their Instagram on a google sheet, verifying the Instagram postings, acknowledging their content, saving this UGC, creating & sending exclusive discounts, and tracking ROI, Sales, and Social impressions is just not possible MANUALLY for thousands of Ambassadors!
In general, this manual juggling between multiple google sheets, Instagram, Shopify, and Email / SMS tool is what makes Community building a hard job!
Solution
Think of InfluencerBit as the brain connecting the Brand’s Shopify, Instagram, and their Communication tool (Klaviyo in this case) and automating all the flows between them.
Eg: Detect Customer’s mention on Instagram ➡️ Create Exclusive 20% Discount Code + make their instagram username as a Discount code on Shopify ➡️ Mailing them this exclusive reward via Klaviyo
Thus Accomplishing a fully automated strategy to utilize and build their Ambassador Program “exactly the way they want”. All on autopilot in under 30 minutes!
Initial 30 Days Stats (TL;DR)
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1500+ Customers added to their Influencer Program
(With every month adding 800+ more customers & building a strong knit community)
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Qualified: 98% (50+ Instagram Followers)
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Total Organic Mentions from Customers: 1300+
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Total Organic Impressions (Story+Post+Reels): 1.4M+
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Instagram usernames made into coupon codes: 490+
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Tracked Orders from these Codes: 200+
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Sales from Friends/Family using the coupon: 35%
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Of these friends / family, New Customers: 55% (Placing order for the First Time seeing the story of their friends)
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ROI on InfluencerBit (Only from Tracked Sales): 22X+
The whole process 👇
Entry point for becoming an Ambassador?
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For their existing Customer Community, we sent a mail (via Klaviyo) asking them to be Sullen’s Ambassador.
Got 55% Open rate & 4.8% Click rate
Campaign Stats from Klaviyo Mail sent to All Customers 
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For new customers purchasing from website, we embed a widget on the Thank You page to Join Ambassador Program once they have purchased their order.
About 10% of the customers purchasing give their Instagram username.
Asking them to Join Ambassador Program at Thank you screen after the order is placed
Who all are Eligible?
You can set multiple conditions based on follower count, engagement rate, influencer grade, Post count, etc in InfluencerBit Dashboard.
They were not looking for celebrities! They wanted to get every one of their customers to become Ambassadors!
Anyone with more than 50 followers and atleast 1 post was eligible
Incentive
Exclusive One-time use 20% discount code + Their Instagram username made into a 15% discount code for their friends
Communication
InfluencerBit Widget + Email
Anyone who gives their Instagram username is shown the offer then and there if they are eligible.
We have Klaviyo flows set up which send reminder mails to customers if they haven’t posted.
| Reminder mail if they haven't mentioned | Klaviyo Reminder flows |
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Anyone who mentions is sent an exclusive discount code via klaviyo with the gratitude text. Not only that, we also detect how many times they have mentioned. So if they've mentioned again, we send them a 2 time mention Thank you mail!
In short, we convert your Communication tool to an Ambassador Program Management tool!
What happens when they mention?
If they are eligible and they mention @sullenclothing, we detect this mention. We create an exclusive 20% discount code for them & their Instagram username is made into 15% discount code on Shopify, and send the “Mentioned You on Instagram” event to Klaviyo (or any other communication tool) to start this flow.
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Customer’s reaction?
What customers actually want is to feel empowered & heard. They want to be recognized and seen by the brands they love.
All these customers went crazy when they realized that the brand created “their instagram username” as a coupon code & sent them exclusive coupon. They loved that the brand took out time, checked their profile, and made their Instagram username into a coupon code! (Yes, It was us automating this all along 😉)
Customers's mentioning on Instagram, Sharing their love & becoming part of Sullen Ambassador!
How Profitable was this? ROI?
We got 190+ tracked orders from the Ambassador’s coupon codes! ~18% of the customers purchasing were “First Time” Customers! That is they trusted their friend’s Instagram story and used their code to purchase.
We got 1M+ organic social impressions on Instagram contributing to Brand awareness!
Just from the sales from the coupon codes, we gave them 25X+ ROI!
What does Social Standing of Top 30 customers bringing in maximum sales tell us?
83% of the top 30 Ambassadors generating sales had less than 2000 followers
PFA: Top 30 Ambassadors & their Follower Counts
This validates the hypothesis of we are “influenced” by our friends than big influencers on instagram!.
Future Plans?
Our mission is to leverage Customer Community! Increase CTLV, Re-Order Rates, get customers to do WOM.
In short making Sullen’s Customer “sticky”!
Just like this Ambassador angle, we are coming up with a Tattoo trivia on their website for their customer community. And anyone who participates gets rewards based on how they performed.
No more boring promotional emails with Buy Now CTAs. We are making customer engagement fun by taking out all the “manual” from it.
Like what you see? Wanna try this for your brand for free?
If you are a brand who wants to Leverage their Customer Communuity in engaging ways , we would be more than happy to onboard you. Hop onto our 14 days completely free trial, let us set up your flows and you just see the results on autopilot!