Klaviyo x Gatsby integration transforms Kulani Kinis’ fanbase into powerful brand ambassador programme

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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 programme 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 programme

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 and Gatsby, together, have allowed Kulani Kinis to completely automate the management of the Kulani Sun Chasers brand ambassador programme and turn social media influencers into brand advocates. How does it work?

Gatsby is a clever social plug-in that integrates with Klaviyo to enhance subscriber data with social media metrics and automatically reward them through Klaviyo Flows for tagging your brand on Instagram and TikTok. 

When customers sign up via Klaviyo’s built-in pop-up form, they provide their Instagram and TikTok handles. Gatsby 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. The Gatsby x Klaviyo integration 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.

Gatsby tracks when each Kulani Sun Chaser publishes content and triggers a Klaivyo flow to deliver their appropriate reward for that mention. 13% go on to publish UGC for Kulani Kinis through this automated workflow.

Brett Bernstein, CEO, Gatsby