You want to grow beyond influencer marketing and scale your efforts.

You’re even ready to provide true cheerleaders of your brand a raise in compensation to get a deeper commitment for your company in return.

And since over 90% of marketers told us their brand ambassador programs are ROI-positive, you know it’s the perfect next step.

Before you create a brand ambassador program of your own, get inspired by these 10 companies that are running ROI-positive programs in 2025. We’ll explore:

👉 How each brand ambassador program works

👉 What you can learn from the top ambassador programs

👉 Best practices for building your own program

Let’s get into it…

1. Boohoo

💵 Ambassador compensation: Gift vouchers

🔗 Program link: Boohoo Collective

Boohoo – a DTC fashion brand selling affordable clothing – makes it easy for customers and fashion creators to sign up for their brand ambassador program with their email, Instagram, and TikTok.

It’s fully self-serve to get started, enabling would-be ambassadors to sign up and start earning commissions by adding their favorite Boohoo products to a dedicated storefront.

Boohoo has various program rules, such as requiring ambassadors to visibly display Boohoo products and tag @boohoo in every post.

Here’s an example of ambassador content: beauty influencer Lux Island has specific Instagram Highlights for BooHoo hauls, linking to dresses on her Stories. 

What you can learn from Boohoo

It’s feasible to create a fully standardized program, especially for well-established brands that have a big customer base. The requirements, and the rewards, are the same for everybody who applies. 

Sure, you won’t attract bigger influencers – but you can create a separate program for them. This method lets you maximize any potential inbound interest even if you have a small team.

For less established brands, here’s what you can take away from Boohoo: the requirements for their program are based on content output, not sales results. 

That might make sense for you if:

👉 Your goal is a high volume of user-generated content/creative

👉 Your product has a longer consideration cycle (you’re not expecting immediate sales)

👉 You’re struggling with tracking or sales attribution, but you believe the more content, the better

2. Deeper Sonars

💵 Ambassador compensation: Exclusive discounts, free products, and community 

🔗 Program link: Deeper Heroes

Deeper Sonars sells a unique castable sonar for anglers, plus other fishing accessories. They run various ambassador programs:

👉 Deeper Heroes: Professional anglers who use Deeper sonars

👉 Other paid partnerships: Bigger influencers with separately negotiated long-term deals

🎤 Note: We have an in-depth podcast interview with Deeper’s marketing team. Watch it here: How Deeper Sonars Manage 7K+ Brand Ambassadors With 5 Marketers.

Deeper Heroes are YouTube vloggers, content creators, pro anglers, and angling entrepreneurs. They share tips and tricks about using the sonars, create how-to videos, answer product questions, and more. They also give feedback on upcoming features and suggest new products. Valeriia Chemerys, Head of Media Partnerships at Deeper, says:

Valeriia Chemerys

Head of Media Partnerships, Deeper

When we develop a new product, our ambassadors participate in testing it out and giving us valuable feedback.

Heroes get members-only deals on the Deeper product line. They also get to engage with other avid anglers, both locally and globally, as part of an exclusive community. Deeper even flew out some ambassadors to join a real-life fishing tournament!

Gabrielius Ser, one of their ambassadors, shares informational content on his YouTube videos and shorts, putting Deeper products in front of 3,420 subscribers.

What you can learn from Deeper Sonars

Sometimes marketers don’t realize you can run more than one brand ambassador program simultaneously.

Deeper caters to three very different types of creators, each of which has specific requirements and rewards.

Here are two more aspects of Deeper’s brand ambassador strategy you can replicate:

👉 They leverage their ambassadors to get detailed product feedback.

👉 They are intentional about their influencer content. Deeper isn’t looking for selfies showing off a sonar – rather, they prefer educational content showing how ambassadors use their products.

🤓 Read more: How Deeper Sonars Recruit Brand Ambassadors.

3. Wild

💵 Ambassador compensation: Free products, discounts, and commissions on sales

🔗 Program link: Wild’s Brand Ambassador Program

Wild is a sustainable, refillable, and natural personal care brand (think deodorant, body wash, lip balm, etc.). They recruit brand ambassadors into a performance-based program with commission based on sales.

Extra perks include free products, exclusive offers/limited editions, and content support from the team.

They cast a wide net, onboarding any relevant creators with 1K+ followers (which makes sense for performance-based compensation).

Here’s an example of ambassador content: Andrea Leach shares her love of Wild’s chemical-free and sustainable missions with her followers.

What you can learn from Wild

First – simplicity can work, even at scale. Wild’s influencer marketing team is over 20 people, so it’s safe to say they’re executing on a lot of creator partnerships. Their program page is short and sweet, yet it tells you everything you need to know to sign up.

Second – despite having relatively wide criteria for ambassador recruitment, Wild still does a great job of choosing ambassadors that are aligned with their message around sustainability and natural living.

The program isn’t entirely self-serve, either; they have to approve each applicant. That might make sense for you too if you’re trying to keep ambassadors on-brand and relevant, at the cost of (potentially) having fewer total ambassadors.

4. Gymshark

💵 Ambassador compensation: Free products and access to Gymshark gyms 

🔗 Program link: Gymshark Athlete

Founded in 2012, Gymshark owes its huge success almost entirely to partnerships with fitness influencers on TikTok and Instagram.

At first, the brand prioritized one-off collaborations with influencers, but it soon began focusing on developing long-term relationships through its brand ambassador program, even offering some influencers their own Gymshark lines.

Founder Ben Francis has credited his brand’s success to long-term relationships with ambassadors. He has also mentioned that Gymshark Athlete feedback helped tailor the brand’s clothing quality.

How does Gymshark attract such high-impact partners? They look for people who genuinely love the brand and embody its values, and who also enjoy creating unique content. Once they become a Gymshark Athlete, they’ll wear and promote the brand at pop-up events, and post regularly on social media.

According to the Gymshark ambassador program page, “The best advice we can offer is to keep focusing on your own path and identify what makes you unique.” They want their ambassadors to “inspire others to become greater versions of themselves.”

Gymshark Athletes get new products before they officially launch, invitations to exclusive events, and personalized discount codes to share with followers. David Laid is a long-term brand ambassador of Gymshark and has recently launched his own line with the brand. Here’s the announcement:

What you can learn from Gymshark

Most Gymshark Athletes started out as fans and customers, which means they’re perfect to represent the brand. They have genuine enthusiasm about the products and mission.

If you’re trying to recruit brand ambassadors, start with your customers and fans.

Modash lets you check if you have any “influential fans” (i.e., Instagram followers with 1K+ followers of their own). It looks like this:

And you can do the same with an email list! Import your list of customer emails, and Modash will match them to social media accounts. Identify any influential customers and start your recruitment efforts there.

👉 Give it a try (free, no credit card needed.

5. Red Bull 

💵 Ambassador compensation: Per hour wage

🔗 Program link: Red Bull Student Marketeer 

Red Bull is known for its long-running brand ambassador program. With over 4K ambassadors, known as Student Marketeers, “generating awareness and excitement for the product and brand,” Red Bull has one of the most successful brand ambassador programs in the beverage industry.

Red Bull ambassadors initiate product trials, help establish the energy drink’s consumption at university events, and ensure a great brand experience for consumers at Red Bull events.

Red Bull recruits student ambassadors on an hourly wage. Here’s an example: Gabija Mačiūnaitė shares her experience with the brand as a Student Marketeer.

Student Marketeers build distribution channels and drive sales through increased visibility.

What you can learn from Red Bull

Since most energy drink consumers are aged 18 to 34, Red Bull mobilizes its target audience of college students to persuade their peers to try the product.

If your customers are in a similar age range to Red Bull’s, you could consider focusing on recruiting students like they do.

Whatever your target market, tailor your brand ambassador program accordingly.

6. Harley-Davidson 

💵 Ambassador compensation: Exclusive merch, discounts, and community

🔗 Program link: Harley Owners Group

Harley-Davidson’s brand image is of leather-clad men and women on huge black motorcycles, and the company has marketed this image to perfection by creating a sense of exclusivity and class behind the bikes.

The program is called Harley Owners Group (HOG), which embodies the traits of freedom, fun, and belonging.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of HOG members attend exclusive rallies, participate in group rides, and receive special perks such as insurance discounts and access to limited-edition products. They have the opportunity to connect with other Harley-Davidson enthusiasts, sharing their memories and giving advice on maintaining their bikes.

Members also get an exclusive quarterly magazine and a touring handbook.

What you can learn from Harley-Davidson

Harley-Davidson’s ambassador program is unique in that it is focused on building a community of brand enthusiasts who already own their products.

By creating a sense of exclusivity and offering unique benefits to its ambassadors, Harley-Davidson is able to foster loyalty and strengthen the bond between the brand and its customers.

AlexTheTraveler is a YouTube influencer who shares bike content, especially about Harley-Davidson rallies.  

7. Sephora 

💵 Ambassador compensation: Free products, exclusive events, and resources to grow personal brands

🔗 Program link: Sephora Squad 

Sephora launched its brand ambassador program in 2019, and in just a few years, it has become one of the most coveted ambassador programs out there. Why?

👉 Sephora ambassadors get beauty products and limited-edition Sephora Squad gear throughout the year. 

👉 They also get access to exclusive events as well as personalized training and development.

👉 Ambassadors can use professional equipment at Creator Lounge, Sephora’s studio in Los Angeles. 

👉 They also get to grow their network by connecting with mentors, other team members, and even celebrity brand founders.

👉 Even after the year-long partnership is up, ambassadors still have access to training materials, products, brand events, local meet-ups, and potential campaign opportunities.

Sephora organized a brand trip for its #SephoraSquad2023, which was a networking opportunity for all its ambassadors and a chance to learn more about the brand. TikToker and Sephora Squad alum @_skincarewithroyce posted about his experience: 

What you can learn from Sephora

Although I’m sure Sephora compensates ambassadors very well, it also does a great job of building in non-monetary benefits.

Exclusive events, networking, access to the Creator Lounge, and mentorship are all examples of value you can add to your ambassador program without directly paying more to creators.

In-person events (and the sheer amount of creator content they generate) are particularly valuable – and they’re sure to create some FOMO among other potential ambassadors!

If you want to create a similarly in-demand and exclusive ambassador program, you’ll likely need a big budget up front. Be picky, recruit the best of the best in your space, and make it desirable for everyone else.

8. Astrid & Miyu

💵 Ambassador compensation: Free products and sales commission 

🔗 Program link: A&M Ambassadors 

Jewelry brand Astrid & Miyu predominantly works with ambassadors on Instagram and TikTok in the UK, EU, and US, rewarding them with:

👉 Free products

👉 Sales commission

👉 Sneak peeks at new products

👉 Access to a dedicated ambassador community

The brand is big on handing over creative control to their ambassador partners: they provide a brief containing their campaign messaging and then leave individual creators to share content that feels natural to them and their audience.

What you can learn from Astrid & Miyu

Astrid & Miyu uses a dedicated hashtag, #MusesofAM, to make tracking ambassador content easy.

At the time of writing, the hashtag has close to 200 posts on TikTok and 2K+ on Instagram, including this one from Mia Luckie:

‍

Using a dedicated hashtag is an easy hack, saving influencer marketers a ton of time on rounding up ambassador content. Although, as we’ll explain later in this article, you can save even more time through automated influencer content tracking.

9. Charlotte Tilbury

💵 Ambassador compensation: Sales commission, free gifts, and discount codes

🔗 Program link: Charlotte’s Magic Beauty Stars

Skincare brand Charlotte Tilbury runs a regular affiliate program for bloggers and website owners, plus Charlotte’s Magic Beauty Stars program for ambassadors – namely gamers, pro makeup artists, and social media influencers with 1K+ followers on Instagram or TikTok.

Charlotte Tilbury ambassadors get their own affiliate code granting a 15% discount to their followers and clients, plus attractive perks like:

👉 Free product samples

👉 Invites to exclusive events and masterclasses

👉 Early access to new Charlotte Tilbury products

What you can learn from Charlotte Tilbury

On the dedicated landing page for Charlotte’s Magic Beauty Stars, the brand highlights some of its existing ambassadors, like @beautiful_glowy_skin:

This makes it easy for would-be ambassadors to check out what other creators are promoting and learn about the benefits they’ll get by joining the program – like how @beautiful_glowy_skin discusses product ingredients and why they matter in this post:

With fewer than 6,500 followers on Instagram, it’s fair to assume that @beautiful_glowy_skin is far from the biggest ambassador on Charlotte Tilbury’s books. 

If the ambassador program featured only Kardashian-sized accounts, most influencers would assume they had no chance of being accepted.

This positions the ambassador program as relatable and within reach, encouraging other creators with smaller followings to apply.

10. YesStyle

💵 Ambassador compensation: Sales commission, discounted purchases when shopping with commission, free sponsored products, and up to $100 in second-tier sales from referred influencers

🔗 Program link: YesStyle Influencer Program

Korean beauty brand YesStyle runs a tiered ambassador program for influencers on X/Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube.

It’s a simple premise – the more sales you refer in a 12-month period, the higher your rewards, including:

👉 Higher baseline commission rates

👉 More attractive discount codes for followers

👉 The chance to get featured by YesStyle

👉 Birthday gifts and welcome offers

👉 Free sponsored products

Higher-tier ambassadors also get entered into the Influencers Referring Influencers program, which allows them to earn a cut of any sales generated by ambassadors they refer. That’s a smart play, helping YesStyle recruit new ambassadors with almost zero effort on their part.

Plus, there’s a good chance that ambassadors referred by existing top performers will go on to drive lots of sales themselves.

What you can learn from YesStyle

YesStyle has created a dedicated Instagram profile for its ambassador program, named YesStyle Influencers.

They use this space to share some of their favorite influencer-generated content, like this post from ambassador @bea.biancaa_:

The account also hosts regular giveaways for influencers, shares details about new campaigns, and highlights trending beauty products.

It’s an effective, low-effort way to keep ambassadors dialed in with YesStyle’s latest campaigns. And with 321K+ followers, it’s safe to assume the account has become a useful promotional tool in its own right.

6 pro tips for running a high-performing ambassador program

Nurturing your brand ambassadors boils down to three things:

👉 Keeping them engaged and active so they become partners for the long haul

👉 Getting the best out of your partners to optimize the ROI of your brand ambassador program

👉 Improving your team’s efficiency so you can scale and collaborate with more brand ambassadors – without burning out or compromising quality

Now, you’re probably thinking: That’s all well and good, but how exactly do I execute on that advice?

Let’s explore what you can do specifically for your brand ambassador program.

1: Add a flat fee on top of commissions

Commission-only payments might not be enough to lure top ambassadors and keep them engaged with your program. Adding a flat fee reduces this risk and incentivizes brand ambassadors to earn “extra” money through commissions.

No wonder over half of influencer marketers in our survey use a mixture of flat fees and performance-based commissions.

If paying a flat fee for every type of collaboration isn’t feasible for you, pay an activation fee to kick off the partnership. From there, pay only performance-based fees.

Tanja Milicevic, Affiliate Manager at Donnerberg, paid YouTubers a flat rate for a single video and offered performance-based commissions on top. The result? She onboarded the creator of the Fisiolution channel, which has over one million subscribers.

For best results, Anna Klappenbach suggests paying ambassadors a performance-related bonus on top of their flat fee once they’ve hit an agreed sales target.

Anna-Maria Klappenbach

Senior Influencer Marketing Manager, Modash

We establish a threshold. If an influencer’s rate was $300 per deliverable, we’d implement a performance bonus per sale after they generated $300 in sales. It’s an appealing incentive for the influencer and helps us recoup our costs too.

‍💰 Pro tip: When you’re managing hundreds of ambassadors, it can become overwhelming for your finance team to handle the high volume of invoices. You run the risk of having to pay late fees, not to mention irritating your creators. You can avoid all of that with an influencer payments platform – it makes sure creators are paid on time and in their preferred currency.

2: Provide non-cash incentives to your ambassadors

As we saw above with Sephora, running a successful brand ambassador program isn’t all about rewarding your partners with cold, hard cash. There are plenty of non-monetary ways to incentivize performance – and as an added bonus, they help you build a closer connection with your ambassador partners.

Popular non-cash incentives include:

👉 Free products

👉 Event invites

👉 Early access to new products

👉 Exposure via your brand’s social media channels and/or newsletter

While regularly sharing free products is often the simplest non-cash incentive, there’s a lot to like about inviting ambassadors to company events. Not only are they rewarded, but they’ll likely post about it on their social channels too, thereby increasing buzz around your brand. 

Influencer marketer Cheyanne Pettyjohn highlights another big benefit of sharing event invites: your ambassadors can inform product development and marketing.

Cheyanne Pettyjohn

Director of Influencer Marketing, Rookie Wellness

We would love to leverage more events so influencers can give real testimonials during sampling and so we can build brand awareness in person.

Using events to gather in-person product feedback from your ambassadors is smart, just like Swedish beauty brand Löwengrip ran a “product development breakfast” for its ambassador partners:

⚡Pro tip: Remind brand ambassadors of these non-cash benefits in your regular communication with them because it’s easy to forget to redeem a discount code or RSVP to an exclusive event.

3: Create an ambassador community

Create a dedicated group channel to communicate with your ambassadors – like a Slack group, an email newsletter, an Instagram group chat, anything. The critical part is having a way to stay in touch with all your brand ambassadors at once.

Regularly communicating will ensure brand ambassadors stay engaged and excited to promote. You also want to invite them to brainstorm ideas and ask questions.

For example, jewelry brand Regalrose runs a private Instagram account for sharing creative inspiration and examples of top-performing content with its community of ambassadors.

You can also use your private ambassador group to send out:

👉 Announcements like new product launches and promotions

👉 Invitations to exclusive ambassador events

👉 Tips and resources to help ambassadors drive sales

4: Create ambassador challenges or multiple tiers of commission

“Gamifying” your ambassador program helps you to:

👉 Recognize and appreciate your top performers

👉 Incentivize low-performing brand ambassadors to improve

Take Deeper Sonars, which has several tiers to its program. Each ambassador starts as a “newcomer” with limited benefits and scales up to “expert” level. As they advance through the tiers, the discount voucher percentage increases:

Deeper Sonars isn’t alone: in our survey, 52% of marketers have multiple commission tiers for rewarding top performers. 

But it’s not just about giving top ambassadors a more generous cut of any sales they generate – you should also consider the following motivational tactics:

🏆 Add a “sales leaderboard” to your ambassador newsletter or dashboard so ambassadors can see who’s performing the best.

🔦 Spotlight ambassadors on social media or in your brand ambassador community when they perform exceptionally well.

🎯 Set personalized sales goals for each ambassador via your dashboard, such as: “Sell five products in your first week and get XYZ reward.”

🥇 Run seasonal sales contests around key events, like Cyber Weekend or Valentine’s Day, with exclusive offers for ambassadors who bring in the most revenue.

🤓 Pro tip: Retain high-performing ambassadors with incentives that are redeemable in the long run. For example: “After one year of being our ambassador, you get a bonus of $500 and XYZ products.”

5: Create helpful ambassador briefs

Producing effective briefs is a real balancing act.

On the one hand, you don’t want to stifle your ambassadors’ creativity by sharing overly prescriptive briefs. But on the other hand, you want to ensure they hit all the right talking points.

(For an in-depth look at striking the right balance in your briefs, check out our guide to influencer briefing.)

As a general rule, you should share tips and resources to help your ambassadors create optimal content, such as: 

👉 What they should write in the caption

👉 How they should display the paid partnership label

👉 Creative assets and brand guidelines (save time on future campaigns by templatizing this information)

👉 Potential creative angles/hooks

Skincare giant NIVEA gets it right in this example for a sponsored YouTube spot (which we translated from Dutch):

This brief offers creative ideas and clear do’s and don’ts while encouraging creators to come up with unique hooks and speak in their own voices.

Also, consider making an FAQ page or doc that helps reduce back-and-forth emails. 

AdoreMe’s ambassador landing page is an A+ example. Not only does it have an FAQ list, but it’s also sorted into various categories, like Compensations and Connecting your Instagram account.

🤓 Pro tip: The FAQ list isn’t a one-and-done deal. It needs to be updated as you scale and evolve your ambassador program. Your commission payouts or payment methods might change, and your FAQ section should reflect that to avoid confusion. And as you field new (but similar) questions, add them to your FAQ list.

6: Automate content tracking

Valeriia Chemerys, Head of Media Partnerships at Deeper Sonars, manages 200+ paid ambassador partnerships with a small team.

What task eats up the biggest slice of her team’s time? Monitoring ambassador content and providing feedback. 

And it’s no surprise: keeping track of ambassadors’ posts is easy when you have a handful of ambassadors posting a few times every week. But as you grow, manually tracking content becomes exponentially harder.

As you scale, you’ll need software to increase your efficiency.

That’s what Deeper Sonars did when they started using Modash which has an influencer monitoring platform for tracking all your influencer posts automatically – doesn’t matter if you have 10 ambassadors or 100.

As well as tracking via hashtags, keywords, and mentions, Modash also has a tool called Event Mode which automatically captures every piece of content a creator posts during a set period – even Stories.

With Event Mode, you never have to worry about your ambassador partners forgetting to tag you or using the wrong hashtags.

Best of all, your partners don’t need to sign up for anything to make our tracking tools work.

When all your ambassadors’ posts are collated in one dashboard, it’s easy to:

✅ Report on ambassador performance

✅ Grab ambassador posts for repurposing

✅ Identify your top-performing ambassadors

✅ Ensure all ambassadors are duly highlighting ad disclosure

Automating content tracking is one of the quickest and easiest ways to reduce the size of your to-do list. Try Modash for free and see for yourself!

Ready to start your brand ambassador program?

Businesses like Deeper Sonars and Astrid & Miyu prove that you don’t need to be a household name to run a successful brand ambassador program.

What you really need is a compelling reason for would-be ambassadors to sign up. That could be a competitive commission structure, or the chance to earn attractive non-cash incentives (like free products and event invites).

Before choosing your remuneration structure, take a look at your competitors. If they’re paying flat fees and generous commissions, you’ll have to do better than rewarding ambassadors with the occasional product sample.

👉 For more tips and best practices, check out: How To Recruit Brand Ambassadors (+5 Ways To Make Your Program Irresistible)