How to Create a Brand Ambassador Program

By: Mahnoor Awan

Who is a Brand Ambassador?

Brand Ambassadors can be celebrities, social media influencers, or brand enthusiasts, who are hired to represent a brand in a positive light in public.

However, quite often, brand ambassadors are customers from your target demographic, who voluntarily promote your brand by publicly speaking, blogging, tweeting, and/or instagramming about how much they love your product or service. These customers are an expression of the character of your brand, as they embody the same beliefs and values as your brand. Their job is to stay in regular contact with your customers, promoting the brand to them, and providing you with invaluable feedback on what your customers think about your brand.

If you’ve been thinking about starting up a brand ambassador program for your company, here are some tips that might help you.

Define your goals

Before choosing a brand ambassador, it is important to define the goals of your brand ambassador program.

• What is it that you are looking forward to achieve with this program?
• How could a brand ambassador affect not only your brand, but also be a positive influence for/on your customers?
• Are these goals in terms of increase in awareness of your brand and/or an increase in an overall revenue for your company?
• How much are you willing to spend on this program in terms of marketing it and/or giving out rewards, which is discussed later in this article.

Outlining some of these goals and others will often help you determine the strategies for your program.

When defining your goals, have reasonable expectations. Your revenue or engagement on social media platforms will not go up overnight.

Build a Lifestyle around your brand

When creating a brand ambassador program, it is important to realize that your brand is not just a product or service. Most programs seek to associate a lifestyle around it. An image that a fan-base or a social audience would latch onto and in turn incorporate the brand into their lives because it projects a lifestyle they seek. Your fans want to feel they are a part of the brand’s mission, the bigger picture that your company offers about how your brand impacts your customers’ lives in a positive way.

For example, Lululemon is not just a company that sells yoga mats and athletic wear. It promotes a healthy, energetic, and fit lifestyle. Its brand ambassadors are yoga teachers who teach free yoga classes in local Lululemon stores. In return, they receive free merchandise, acknowledgement and free promotion in the form of a big picture in the local Lululemon stores, and employees referring the customers to the ambassador’s free classes.





Choose and Invite

Since brand ambassadors are a company’s loyal customers, it is important to make sure that whoever you choose as a brand ambassador, is a customer who is already a fan of the business. You can choose from customers who have already said a good thing or two about the brand themselves, without expecting any reward in return, only because they really like or appreciate your brand. These are the customers who will be willing to promote your brand.

Preferably, these customers should be of the same demographic as your target market because it is easier for other customers to relate to their content. Try choosing someone who is socially active and embodies the same values and visions as your brand.

Once you’ve chosen who you want as your brand’s ambassador, it is now time to reach out to them. When reaching out, it is important to be really clear and specific about what the customer’s participation as a brand ambassador would entail and what benefits are they likely to receive.

Here’s an example from GramforaCause. They have clearly outlined what the brand ambassadors are responsible for, and what they will get in return.





Give Brand Ambassadors the Spotlight

Once you’ve selected a brand ambassador, you can start out by giving them ideas and information on how to feature your brand. But eventually, you’ll just have to release the reins and let the magic happen. If your brand ambassador is already popular on social media, then it is likely, they know what they are doing. So, don’t hover over their every move and let them do their thing.

However, based on your goals, make sure you determine the right frequency of your brand promotion through your ambassadors, in order to avoid brand fatigue.

Provide Rewards

Since brand ambassadors work voluntarily, it is a good idea to offer them rewards for all their hard work. This reward can be in terms of your free products or service use. It can also be compensation for for your products or services or something exclusive that gives them a VIP feel.

For example Microsoft’s MVP - Most Valuable Professionals. These are customers who share their expertise with other Microsoft customers, especially in terms of helping with technical issues. The MVP’s are rewarded by a weeklong trip to Microsoft headquarters that involves networking, celebration, recognizing their efforts and much more.





When delivering the rewards, try to make it as personal as possible, with a genuine thank you note for helping to promote your brand.

Evaluating Your Program

Did your brand ambassador program help you achieve your goals? There are a few ways you can measure if your program positively affected your company:

• Increase in revenue
• Increase in likes on your social media platforms
• Increase in followers on your social media platforms
• Increase in traffic to your website
• Increase in engagements on your social media platforms
• Trending on social media platforms

A brand ambassador program is a great marketing and promotion strategy for a brand. It gets the mission and the value of your brand across through people who are genuine users of your brand. This adds to the authenticity of what your brand has to offer. Following these simple, basic steps might help you jumpstart a great brand ambassador program.

If you are looking for more marketing tips, click here to read our weekly blogs.

How to Create a Customer Loyalty Program

By: Irangi Gamage

How important are your customers? Well, without any, you wouldn’t be in business. But specifically, if your business involves repeat customers then we ask a different question:“how important are loyal customers to a business?” Bob Konsewisz, a strategist consultant for Maritz Loyalty, states that loyal customers are worth five or six times more than regular customers. Therefore retaining customers is crucial for a business. A customer loyalty program can be designed to say thank you, and to encourage future business from your customers as well as referrals.

A customer loyalty program is an incentive program that lets your frequent customers get discounts, VIP sales coupons, advanced purchase access to upcoming products, or gain points which can later be redeemed for prizes. If you don’t have one in place, here is how you can get started on a customer loyalty program.

Creating a Customer Loyalty Program

When designing a customer loyalty program, start by asking these two questions:

1. What are the incentives that customers will receive?
What type of a loyalty program do you want to create? You will need to decide if you want to provide your customers a discount with purchases, a points program that can later be redeemed for free products and prizes, free shipping, or products and services that are exclusive for them. Loyalty programs are not limited to these, once you know what type of a program you want, you can get creative. It is typically a good idea to look at your competitors for loyalty program ideas. You can make one that is similar to theirs, or make one that is unique to further differentiate yourself from competitors.
2. What is the process for customers to achieve their incentives?
How will customers progress to the goal of getting rewarded? Will they have to make more purchases, visit the store more often, refer friends, and/or partake in social media contests? You don’t have to pick only one of these actions. Your loyalty program can consist of multiple actions that may allow them to receive awards.

Tips for Creating a Customer Loyalty Program

1. For a successful customer loyalty program, it is important to have a moderate level of difficulty, that also provides value for your business.


2. Research done by professors Nunes and Dreze on loyalty programs showed that providing customers with early advancements as a bonus increases the effectiveness of a customer loyalty program.
   
   
   An example: A coffee shop provides customers with two different point cards. The first one has 8 slots to fill before getting a free drink (buy 8 drinks to get one free). The second card has 10 slots to fill with two already stamped (buy 8 more drinks to get one free). At the end of the day, both these cards are the same. Customers with either card will have to buy 8 drinks to receive a free one. However, customers with the second card tend to finish their card and get their free drink more often than the customers with the first card. This is because they feel as though they got a head start to the game. The two filled slots help the customers visualize the end of the game, which will encourage them to visit the store more often to get their card stamped.


3. The loyalty program should be sufficiently promoted by your employees to the customers. This is an efficient way for your customers to get to know about the programs your business has to offer. Therefore, it is important to train your employees, teach them about your loyalty programs, and encourage them to communicate this to your customers. Social media, newsletters, and flyers can also be used to convey these information to customers, which will further promote and maintain your loyalty program.


4. Be creative and keep the program fresh by changing it up every once in awhile. For example, you can give extra points for referrals in one month and extra points for social media tags in the next month, or give a free product on birthdays.

Some examples of customer loyalty incentive techniques:

• Loyalty Cards & Coupon discounts like those from grocery & retail stores
• Additional or one-time credits by signing up to receive eblasts, or social media actions
• Additional points earned for each month of a paid monthly subscription
• Additional points earned for each referring someone who becomes a customer
• Tiered savings and rewards redemption rates (incentive to build up points as they are worth more at different levels)

Having a customer loyalty program can be beneficial for your business because it adds value to it by increasing the retention rate of your loyal customers, and encouraging new customers to do business with you. Applying the tips mentioned above could help you when creating your own customer loyalty program. Contact us if you get stuck and visit our blog for similar articles.

Five Ways to Ask for Referrals and Reviews

    By: Irangi Gamage  

Reviews are important for your business because, quite often, potential customers rely on them when making a purchase or using a service. One less 'star' compared to your competitor on a review site, or one horrible review left by a customer, is sometimes enough for a potential customer to consider not using your service.

What about those companies without any reviews? Are they reliable? Many customers could be as suspect of businesses with no reviews as they are with all positive ones.
Similarly, referrals are as important to any business. When a customer refers to one of their friends, it adds to the credibility and trustworthiness of your business.

Having online reviews about your company or asking your customers for referrals are two of the important components of online marketing today. You should not be afraid to ask your customers for reviews and referrals for your business. After all, customers are the ones who know you the best. They will be able to provide honest reviews and refer your company to the best people.
If you don’t know where to get started with asking for reviews and referrals, here are 5 ways you can ask your customers.

Be Direct

The first step you can take is to be direct and ask your customers for a review/referral. This could either be done in person/in-office or by sending an e-mail, or even prompting from your website and social media. Either way you communicate, be specific about what you want and make sure your tone is polite and not demanding.

An in-person example:  

I’m really glad you are satisfied with our work. It would be great if you could refer us to one or two people that would need our services/if you could leave a review for us. Would you like some business cards?

An e-mail example:


Mr. John,

Our business is always looking for referrals and this upcoming year, with our expansions, I wanted to ask if you knew anyone that would need our services, to please forward them this email or a link to our website.
Thank you for your time.
A similar template can be used for reviews. After this has been communicated to your client, make sure to follow up after you receive a response from them. It is important not to make the requests sound demanding, while keeping it short and precise.



Make the Process Easy

People are busy with their lives and are not be pleased if they have to do a long and complicated task for free. Since reviews or referrals are favors that you are asking of them, ensure to make this process is as easy as possible.
It is better to ask the customers for a review when they are at the peak of their satisfaction with your business. This could be during the final stages of a project, once they have received their services, or after they have bought products. This will help not to frustrate your customers and encourages more positive reviews.

Send customers the links to your review sites to make this process easier for them. If you are doing referrals, you can send them a prepared template that they can use to forward to their referrals. You can also simply ask them what you can do to help them and make this process easy and fast.

Create Incentives

Create incentives to encourage your customers to post reviews and send referrals but don’t pay them. Paying them may not look good for your business and your customers may not take to it well. However, you can set different smaller incentives. For example, a draw for movie tickets, or if you have a customer loyalty program, you can give extra points for referrals or reviews.

Give Out Business Cards



If you want reviews, your first step should be setting up accounts on relevant review websites, but most importantly ensure that your business is listed and verified on Google. These review sites can be advertised on your social media, so customers know where they can go to leave a review. It is also a good practice to give your business cards to customers after they are finished doing business with you. Your business cards can include your review sites as well, which can further encourage customers to write reviews for your business.

Thank Your Customers

After receiving referral contacts or reviews from your customers, you should always thank them immediately. The more personal your thank you is, the better it is. It should be something thoughtful and not expensive (as giving an expensive gift is equivalent to paying them) such as a thank you email, a call, or a handwritten thank you note.

Using these tips you can improve your business by getting more customers through referrals and good reviews. If you receive negative reviews, UpOnline’s 5 Ways to Publicly Respond to a Bad Review blog can help you respond to them in the best way possible.

Snapchat for Your Business

By: Irangi Gamage

Snapchat. If you are not familiar with this word, then you are missing out on one of the greatest ways to promote your business. Snapchat is a social media application that allows you to send live pictures and videos that last up to 10 seconds and disappear from the viewer’s account after. Unless, of course you do ‘stories’. Stories in Snapchat allow you to send live videos or pictures through the app, which are visible to everyone in your contact list for 24 hours. All the features, including capturing videos and pictures, and the use of filters are available within the app and anything from external sources can’t be uploaded.

As mentioned on the Snapchat website, “Over 100 million people use Snapchat every day to Snap with family, watch Stories from friends, see events from around the world, and explore expertly-curated content from top publishers. Snapchatters watch over 10 billion videos per day, which is more than a 350% increase in the last year alone. In short, Snapchat is about great storytelling - our stories, and yours.”

Why Use Snapchat?

In a recent Edison Research paper, Snapchat has grown more in 1 year than Twitter has in 4 years. Snapchat has a higher usage than Twitter and LinkedIn. While Twitter and LinkedIn have been around for awhile now, these statistics say a lot about the success of Snapchat.

Familiarizing yourself with Snapchat, one of the most used social media platforms today, could give you an upperhand in the modernized marketing world. Snapchat works well for businesses that want to launch new products, are holding live events, or have constant promotions.

Here are some tips that will help you get started with Snapchat.

Storytelling

Storytelling is a creative way you can grab and hold someone’s attention. Like other social media, many Snapchat users tend to check their Snapchat at the most random times. This could be while they are waiting for a bus, while having their lunch, or maybe even while sitting through a boring lecture.

The restrain of 10 seconds per video on snapchat makes it challenging to organize your content wisely. Fortunately, you can string together a few videos and Snapchat will play them one after another as a story. Customers can skip through your videos or stop your story at any time if they are not interested. So the key is to make your material as creative and interesting as possible.



Production and Creativity

You only have a couple of seconds to grab your customer’s attention. Even if you have a number of snap videos tied together, your customers will not go through all your content if your story doesn’t appeal to them within the first few seconds. Therefore, it is extremely important to consider the production and quality of your video, and the creativity of your content. Titles, colours, filters, and transitions can all help your video. Since Snapchat is more of a casual social media platform, remember to keep the content light and easy going to tap into the age range of Snapchat users between 12 and 34 (Entrepreneur).

Snippets

If you have upcoming events or product launches, Snapchat can be an additional promotional tool. Teasing your customers until the official launch of your product will keep the customers on edge, wanting to hear more. The small snippets will create a buzz amongst customers, which will increase the interest for your product or event.

Incentives



According to Business Insider, about 58% of college students have stated they were more likely to buy from a company if they received coupons through snapchat.

Using incentives such as coupons and hosting contests on Snapchat is a great way to encourage your customers to buy from you. It is not only a great opportunity for you to retain your customers, it also creates an outlet to gain new customers.

Behind the Scenes

Customers are not usually aware of the actions that are ongoing behind the scenes. Capturing some of these moments to show your customers, gives your business a chance to show off its personality. Especially if these behind the scenes show your business’s work ethic and a fun and responsible work culture. This helps in building a stronger brand image in your customers minds. It also allows your customers to get a VIP feel, if such content is only available through Snapchat to the customers that follow you, it could make it feel more exclusive and increase customer loyalty.

Additional Benefits

Through this real-time marketing, Snapchat helps you improve and strengthen your business’s brand image. The features and benefits of Snapchat are not limited to the ones mentioned above.

Snapchat allows you to do Snap ads, for a fee, create your own Snapchat sponsored lenses (filters), and Snapchat geofilters. So, if your business is targeted towards the age of Snapchat users, this small investment could bring you greater benefits.

Given that Snapchat is one of the most popular social media apps at the moment, taking advantage of it could benefit your business. When Snapping, make sure to have fun while maintaining the professionalism of your business. Always think from a customer’s perspective to see if you would enjoy the content you are showing them.

UpOnline’s blog focuses on the latest industry and insights on how to maximize your marketing efforts. Articles we post on our blog cover social media tools and news, many that relate to Snapchat. Give us a follow on Twitter for bi-weekly Snapchat tips.

5 Tips to Help You Write a Great Subject Line

By: Irangi Gamage

How often have you received emails that you immediately deleted? The subject line is your reader’s first impression and has the ability to persuade them to open the email. Consider the following tips to help you write a great subject line.

When deciding on a subject line, it is important to know your audience and the tone you want to convey. This will aid you in coming up with a great subject line that is as specific as possible, which in turn will increase both open and click through rates.

Having a great title for your content is crucial. However, when the content is being sent via email, a great subject line might be even more important than the title.

1. Personalization

A more personalized subject line could encourage the reader to open the email since they are being addressed directly. Including the addressee's name on the subject line for certain types of communications can work well as part of your strategy. Even having a simple “you” will make the email more personal.

Some examples:

• John, look what we found for you!
• Your personal promotion code ends this Saturday!

2. Short and Simple

It’s usually a good idea to keep your subject line as concise as possible.

Let the reader know what the article or communication is about. Create some curiosity, while keeping it brief. A subject line should typically be no more than 50 characters. These 50 characters should be simple, descriptive, and straightforward. This will avoid the frustration faced by readers who come across emails with long non-descriptive subject lines (Wordstream).

Short and simple subject lines:

• (Company name): Our next steps
• Monthly News and Events
• Your order has been received (which sounds a lot better than: 'order number 5379580138470238 has been received and is being processed’)

3. Clever and Clear

Sometimes when trying to be clever, the message loses clarity. A case study by AWeber Communications in 2011 found that a clear subject line gets 541% more clicks than a clever one. This is because not all clever lines are relevant to everyone, and the meaning is lost on some readers.

Clever subject lines:

• Don’t open this email
• It’s finally here!

A great subject line needs to be something that would give the reader a clear understanding of the contents of the email. At times, being as simple as possible will lead to positive results (Aabaco Small Business).

Clear subject lines:

• Please review us on Google
• 3 new products we are giving away!
• Grow your client list faster

4. Timing and Urgency

If your timing is right, then you have done half of your marketing right. Readers usually only read about things they are in need of at that moment.

Perfectly timed subject lines:

• Uh oh! Your subscription just ended
• Where to drink beer right now (sent at 6:30 pm on a Friday evening)

Creating a sense of urgency is extremely important, as this will encourage readers to read the contents when they receive the email. If there’s an offer time period or a limited supply, this will create a sense of urgency with customers (Hubspot).

Creating a sense of urgency:

• Save 50% if you purchase by tonight
• Buy one and get one free: limited supply

5. Words to Omit

There are certain words that should be avoided when writing a subject line, as certain words might place your email directly in the spam folder.

Omit words similar to these:

- Reminder	- Help	- Earn $	- Buy	- Cash	- Urgent	- Free
- Claim	- Clearance	- Prescriptions	- Biz	- Income	- Millions	- Collect

UpOnline Examples

Here are some great subject lines we have used in our UpOnline newsletters in the past:

• Are your patients satisfied?
• What are your business goals for 2016?
• Looking to increase practice reviews and referrals?
• We want to hear from you!

Take these into consideration when writing a subject line for your emails to increase the appeal of your emails to your clients. It is also extremely important that the content within the email is relevant and is consistent with the subject line. Finally, having a call to action in the email is equally important as this will encourage customers to take action right away!

For example: You can subscribe to our newsletter to stay up-to-date with everything you need to know about improving your business’s marketing.