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Klaviyo Social Marketing transforms Kulani Kinis’ fanbase into powerful brand ambassador program

Klaviyo Social Marketing transforms Kulani Kinis’ fanbase into powerful brand ambassador program

64%

of revenue is attributed to Klaviyo

$425k

revenue generated from Kulani Sun Chasers in 6 months

22k

customers signed up to Kulani Sun Chasers

Kulani Kinis started out as a side hustle for Sydney-based couple Dani Aktins and Alex Babich after Dani spotted a gap in the market for stylish, affordable, well-made bikinis. Sun lovers quickly took notice, and word-of-mouth helped the Australian label grow into a much- loved, global bikini brand with over 585,000 Instagram followers. The recently established Kulani Sun Chasers ambassador program has 22,000 members who love to share content with the brand via Instagram and TikTok.

Learn how Kulani Kinis automates micro influencer management for their Sun Chasers program

Challenge

Dani learnt early on that beautiful photography of real customers wearing bikinis was an effective sales tool. She ran campaigns with Instagram influencers and arranged photo shoots with local beach goers to create cute, authentic content to share on social media. The strategy rapidly gained Kulani Kinis a large following, not just in Australia but in Europe and the U.S. too. To manage brand advocacy at scale, the business needed either ten of Dani, or a clever tech solution.

Solution

Klaviyo Social Marketing (previously called Gatsby) allowed Kulani Kinis to completely automate the management of the Kulani Sun Chasers brand ambassador program and turn social media influencers into brand advocates. How does it work?

Klaviyo Social Marketing syncs Klaviyo with organic social media, enhancing subscriber data with social media activity, so brands can automatically reward them for tags on Instagram and TikTok through Klaviyo Flows.

When customers sign up via Klaviyo’s built-in pop-up form, they provide their Instagram and TikTok handles. Klaviyo Social Marketing then gathers social media profile metrics on each user, including how many followers and posts they have, and feeds the data back into Klaviyo. It also tracks social media mentions to measure the programme’s impact and make it easier for Kulani Kinis to acknowledge customers’ posts using automated emails.

We were searching for a way to acknowledge micro-influencers who were providing us with valuable UGC, but who we no longer had the capacity to interact with individually. Klaviyo Social Marketing provides us with a scalable solution to automate this process whilst also retaining a personalised connection with these brand ambassadors.
Kirsten Laurendet
Knowledge, consulting & digital marketing, Kulani Kinis

Strategy

Kulani Kinis uses this rich Customer-First Data™ in Klaviyo to segment its subscribers according to their number of followers, and develop hyper-personalised email and SMS campaigns to encourage and reward brand advocacy. Every influencer who signs up receives an automated welcome email with a voucher and discount code to share. The value of the voucher varies depends on their number of Instagram followers.

To keep ambassadors engaged, the brand runs regular and exclusive content creation competitions on Instagram and TikTok and has set up rewards to incentivise continual mentioning of our brand. The benefit of this is twofold; we create a community at scale for customers and influencers who want to grow their following and engage with our brand, beyond just purchasing our products, and in return we receive rich UGC to reshare on socials and develop invaluable advocates for our brand.
Kirsten Laurendet
Knowledge, consulting & digital marketing, Kulani Kinis

The brand’s key demographic is young women in their 20s and 30s who are far more likely to be on their phones than at a PC, so Kulani Kinis also uses Klaviyo SMS to send friendly reminders by text. Incentives and rewards are used to encourage customers to keep posting and sharing content, to amplify the brand’s message. These classic gamification tactics are highly effective.

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