Unleashing the potential in ambassador programs : identifying concrete measures to improve the efficiency of ambassador programs

Abstract

This thesis aims to analyze how SafetyWing can improve the efficiency of its ambassadors and what the implications are for ambassador programs in general. Ambassador programs are an expanding part of digital marketing for businesses. Briefly, ambassador programs are when a business awards another business a commission for sending traffic their way. SafetyWing, a Norwegian startup operating on a global basis within the insurance industry, is a company that relies on ambassadors for digital marketing. We collected user data from SafetyWing, as well as traffic data describing traffic entering the SafetyWing webpage. In addition, we collected both traffic data and textual data from the web pages of SafetyWing’s ambassadors. We have used various methods such as textual analysis, topic modeling, correspondence analysis, regression, and visualizations to analyze the data. In addition, we created two new variables, namely category (1-4) and topic (1-6). To analyze profitability, we divided total sales per blog post by total traffic to the blog. The results showed that blogposts that focus extensively on SafetyWing, category 4, are much more efficient than those focused elsewhere, because of the focus. Moreover, blog posts about digital nomads, the target group of SafetyWing, are relatively unprofitable in category 4. Lastly, we found that blog posts that focus somewhat or extensively on SafetyWing, benefit from also including one or a few competitors. Our conclusion is shaped as a recommendation to SafetyWing. Namely, we recommend SafetyWing advise ambassadors to write a category 4 blogpost and use this actively as a referral source from other blog posts. Additionally, the post should include one or a few of the competitors of SafetyWing.