Moana Bikini Achieves Hot Results By Automating Their Influencer Marketing With Gatsby

Moana Bikini is an Aussie owned and based swimwear store known for their vibrant prints and cheeky cuts in reversible styles. Moana was established in 2011 in partnership with a Hawaiian-owned brand, and has since continued to grow. Skip forward to today, and Moana has built a community of loyal customers who inspire and support each other. Moana is a force for female empowerment and body confidence, reflected in their sizing from an Australian 6 up to a 20.

Moana Bikini is arguably one of the most Instagrammable swimwear brands out there. Moana has a strong online presence including 579k Instagram followers who share Moana’s love of sun, sand, and bikinis. With regular product drops backed by the powerhouse that is body-positive owner, Karina Irby, it’s not hard to see why. 

Moana has grown a loyal following of customers who support and empower one another — known as the Moana Army. As of September 2022, there’s close to 30,000 posts on Instagram hashtagged with #moanabikini, and a constant stream of stories and grid posts tagging the swimwear label.  

With such a huge following of tech-savvy customers, we identified an opportunity to automate Moana’s influencer marketing using Gatsby, Klaviyo and Justuno. We saw a number of benefits for Moana, including:

• Rewarding a loyal customer base for submitting UGC (and encouraging them to continue doing so)
• Increasing customer lifetime value by encouraging repeat purchase through rewards
• Spreading brand awareness (without the pricetag that comes with doing paid collaborations with micro-influencers)
• Freeing up more of Moana’s marketing hours by automating the process

Gatsby is a fully-automated CRM tool that helps businesses using Shopify make the most out of their influential and loyal customers. Gatsby syncs all data with Klaviyo, making it clear to see the exact dollar amount a Gatsby strategy has generated.

Gatsby also has the ability to organize registered Instagram users based on the number of followers they have — a great feature for businesses (like Moana) to utilize to allocate set reward values, rather than issue blanket rewards. This feature also allows businesses to set up internal notifications when an influencer with a certain number of followers registers their handle. For example, a business may decide that influencers with over 25k followers meet their threshold for paid collaborations. 

To implement a successful automated influencer marketing strategy for Moana Bikini using Gatsby, we looked at three areas:

1. Data Capture
2. Email Campaigns
3. Email Automations 

We split Moana’s customers up into four groups based on their number of followers, from under 1,000 to over 25,000, and allocated accompanying rewards. 

 

Data Capture

To get started, we first needed to ask Moana’s customers to register their Instagram handles. This was done via a series of optimisations to their Data Capture forms (built in Justuno). We designed an additional screen to go into all popups targeted at new customers, as well as introduced an additional popup for existing customers. The latter popup simply asked customers to register their Instagram handle and advised they’d get rewarded when they tagged Moana in their photos. 

Email Campaigns

The next step was to launch the incentive via a series of email campaigns to Moana’s newsletter list. When customers clicked on the email campaign, they were taken to a page on Moana’s website which fires the aforementioned Data Capture form. 

 

Email Automations (tactic 1)

We implemented four separate email automations for Moana using Gatsby, including an Influencer Nurture series, and a dedicated Post Purchase series for Gatsby subscribers. In the Post Purchase series, customers are given an affiliate code to share with their followers. A recent survey by Forrester Research showed that 70% of people value their peers’ opinions when it comes to the trustworthiness of a brand. This tactic we used for Moana spreads brand awareness, and encourages new customers to make their first purchase by establishing trust. 

 

Email Automations (tactic 2)

Next, we added a block into key emails within Moana’s existing automations. This block encourages customers to register their Instagram handle, and shows the benefits of doing so. This ensures customers are given the opportunity to register their Instagram account at different stages in their customer journey (if they haven’t already done so). 

Here’s a look at some key results we achieved for Moana compared to the Klaviyo benchmarks for the apparel and accessories industries.

Data Capture: 

• 68.9% engagement rate with Gatsby on Moana’s main Data Capture form (i.e. 68.9% of the people who signed up for Moana’s newsletter via their main Data Capture form also entered their Instagram handle). 

Launch Campaign:

• Click rate: 30.8% above the Klaviyo benchmark
• Conversion rate: 2,400% above the Klaviyo benchmark 

Email Automation (Gatsby Nurture Series email 1):

• Open rate = 76% above the Klaviyo benchmark 
• Click rate = 520% above the Klaviyo benchmark
• Placed order rate: 764.8% above the Klaviyo benchmark