Turn your Fans into your Affiliate Sales Engine

Beloved indie clothing brand Ivory Sheep has more than 14K Followers on Instagram. When they launched their own clothing line, they came to Everpilot for a thoughtful, customized approach to starting their affiliate program. We came up with a plan that would leverage their loyal follower base and the unique strengths of the Everpilot platform (custom support, deep analysis) to help them build their program from their existing superfans.

With thousands of Instagram followers for their apparel brand, Ivory Sheep is in the position of having a great product and a market for it. Like many apparel brands, the founders knew that a good chunk of their followers understood the affiliate space - and many had fantastic, visually beautiful feeds that would be a great fit for Ivory Sheep's product.

The challenge was to find interested fans without spending hours poring over posts or sliding into Instagram DM's.

We created a custom influencer intake form with Ivory Sheep's distinctive visual branding. The form invited fans to submit their info to be considered for the affiliate program. The form organized interested influencers' info in one handy place.

The Ivory Sheep team posted the form in an IG story on their main handle.

Within days, hundreds of fans had applied - way too many to manually review. We hooked the form up to Everpilot's deep analysis feature - within minutes of an application being submitted, Everpilot's AI prepared an "executive summary" for the influencer, including their engagement rate, follower count, post history, handles and contact info. All the executive summaries went into one dashboard.

Seeing all the influencers in one place made it easy to understand and compare influencers at a glance. The brand team could filter applicants by engagement rate, follower count and location. Finally, they could Shortlist the applicants they wanted to engage with first.

Shortlisting applicants helped narrow down the list from hundreds to dozens, but the brand still wanted to understand some of their Shortlisted influencers more deeply in order to make sure they were choosing the right people to build years-long relationships with.

They used Everpilot's "detailed profile" feature to pull up deep reports on each of these influencers. In order to generate a detailed profile, Everpilot's AI processes months of an influencers' posts - often hundreds of posts - and preparies summaries and examples of that influencer's posting history, prior brand sponsorships, content themes, sensitive content and audience demographics. Detailed reports are a perfect way to truly vet an influencer for a paid or long-term relationship, ensuring that their online pressence is fresh, relevant and brand safe.

With this additional information in hand, the Ivory Sheep team was able to confidently decide on the first fans they wanted to recruit as brand ambassadors.

Thanks to our easy intake form, well-organized dashboards, and rapid deep analysis, the Ivory Sheep team were able to identify influencers they wanted to work with for years, building customer loyalty and their affiliate program at the same time. They also saved the thousands of dollars they might have spent recruiting through an affilate network.

If you're an independent consumer brand interested in starting your affiliate program - or expanding it - using this strategy, reach out to us now at help@everpilot.com or book a consultation. Our approach is faster, cheaper and more effective than paying an affiliate network thousands of dollars to generate lists of people who may never even have heard of your products. And our AI tools save your team hours of painstaking vetting, form construction, and more. We're happy to design a package that makes sense for your brand's needs.