Influencer

Overview

The goal of an Influencer program is to recognize your brand’s most influential advocates and treat them differently by giving them an appropriate reward and personal dashboard to view their referral stats and share their offer with friends, family, and followers. The Influencer program requires no additional technical lift other than what is likely already in place for your Refer A Friend program.

Recognizing influencers and incentivizing them to share is done in a number of ways:

• Influencers are promoted to with the Influencer Welcome email that emphasizes the exclusivity of the program.
• Influencers' share links and codes are personalized, which makes them feel special and important.
• Influencers are incentivized to share with their networks en-masse without having to jump through hoops (i.e. the share experience). For example, an influencer receives the welcome email with their personalized share link and immediately posts it in their Instagram bio. This is quicker and easier than having to generate a link from a share experience on your company's website.
• Influencers are rewarded differently (and more) than advocates in a typical Refer A Friend program. For example, influencers are rewarded with 20% off coupons, whereas advocates in the evergreen Refer A Friend program are rewarded with 15% off coupons. Once an influencer generates $250 worth of revenue in friend purchases, they receive a bonus reward.

Marketing

Email Promotion
Promoting your Influencer program can be achieved in a variety of ways depending on your company's goals, customer base, and desired flow. You can choose to promote to internally-identified influencers and partners using the Influencer Welcome email, or use Extole Audiences to identify any super advocates from your Refer A Friend program that you'd like to invite.

Promotion to Apply
If you're interested in promoting the Influencer program more widely, you can leverage the optional Application Experience built into the Influencer Portal. In this case, your promotional strategy may look similar to that of your Refer A Friend program, except instead of your customers simply signing up, they'll fill out an application to become an Influencer that you can review and approve.

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Best Practices

• Define criteria for what makes a successful influencer
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  • Keep this top segment incentivized with rich offers they can share and redeem.
  • Send regular nurture emails to keep influencers engaged.
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Design the invite email so that it is clean and concise to avoid any confusion on how to participate.

Influencer Journey

The influencer journey revolves around the Influencer Portal. The portal is the hub where influencers can engage with your program, starting with the Application Experience if you choose to use one. An influencer, once you've invited them directly or verified and approved their application, can log into the portal to view their dashboard and to share links and codes with their networks.

Influencers to whom you've directly promoted receive the Influencer Welcome email containing their personal share link or code as well as a link to their dashboard. They can choose to simply copy and paste the share link or code, or they can log into their dashboard to share on web or natively via mobile across a variety of social channels, SMS, or email. Each friend or follower who uses the influencer's personal link or code will earn the influencer a reward, which appears in the stats section of their dashboard.

Friend and Follower Journey

Friends may receive share messages directly from your influencers via social channels, SMS, or email, encouraging them to sign up, create an account, or make a purchase. Followers, on the other hand, may find and use your influencers' personal share links or codes posted on social media.

Once a friend or follower taps on an influencer's link, they'll be taken to the Friend Landing Experience. This page features the influencer's name and profile image, delivers any reward earned, and encourages the visitor to shop or sign up, and so on.

Rules and Rewarding

Each time a friend or follower uses an influencer's link or code to complete a purchase, the influencer will earn a reward. These rewards are typically more generous than those offered in a typical Refer A Friend program to both encourage your influencers to continuing share with their networks and emphasize the more prestigious nature of being an influencer. Influencers can see how many rewards they've earned, as well as their total reward value, in their dashboard.

Performance and Data

Examples

The Influencer program isn't one-size-fits-all and doesn't need to involve high-caliber personas on Instagram or TikTok to succeed.

Your "influencers" may in fact be:

• Super Advocates
• Ambassadors


• VIP Customers
• Affiliates
• Partners


• Sales Agents

Athleta
Athleta promoted their Influencer program to fitness instructors. The program streamlined communication with instructors to allowed them to more directly share with their network. Using Extole's performance tracking and custom rewarding made the program efficient and easy to optimize. As a result, the Influencer program became a primary revenue driver for Athleta.

Quim

Quim designed their Influencer program to promote to both sexual wellness doctors and top advocates identified through Extole's platform. The program allowed Quim to track doctors who referred their patients and streamlined communication with doctors. Not having to jump through the hoops of an onsite share experience allowed doctor's to more efficiently share Quim with their networks.