CASE STUDY
Stio x Clique + Impact
successful affiliate program migration
Stio Enjoys a 25% Hike in Sales
An affiliate program with growing needs
Stio offers beautiful, functional products for those steeped in mountain life. The outdoor apparel aficionados partnered with Clique Affiliate in 2015 to optimize its underperforming affiliate program.
The brand’s unique direct-to-consumer business model gave them a competitive edge and increased publishers’ interest in their affiliate program. The previous affiliate network did not have the tools to match the program’s popularity. The team contended with high costs, complex program management, and limited partnership control.
The search for a new management solution required the agency to identify the challenges preventing growth in the previous affiliate network.
Pain Points
Limited reporting capabilities prevented a deeper insight into the customer’s purchase journey, contribution to non-attributed sales, and channel incrementality. Furthermore, data manipulation was time-consuming, and creating customized reports was a tedious task.
Imprecise attribution meant the team could not accurately identify each partner’s or channel’s contribution to conversions.
Restrictive commission terms hindered the opportunity to optimize the rewards strategy for top-performing partners.
Unrestricted coupon codes promoted the spread and use of other digital channel codes not intended for affiliate promotion—resulting in manually reversing these sales monthly.
Outdated recruitment tools made the process of discovering new partners manual and labor-intensive.
The impact.com platform provided the tools, services, and features to meet Stio’s growing needs
Stio is an outdoor apparel and mountain lifestyle brand based in Wyoming. The company inspires a connection with the outdoors through beautiful, functional products infused with mountain soul. Its product range—characterized by performance, quality, and versatility— equips customers for epic alpine pursuits and the quieter moments of mountain life.
Clique Affiliate is an affiliate marketing agency working exclusively with passion and lifestyle brands. Founded in 2012, the agency creates highly profitable and tightly optimized affiliate programs for notable clients. Clique Affiliate’s success is testimony to its team’s commitment to delivering the highest quality of service backed by tried-and-true strategies and forward-thinking innovation.
A management platform to drive program growth
Completed top-tier partner migration in 4 days and data integration within hours with Shopify
The agency team used impact.com’s Shopify plugin for tracking and data integration. The impact.com app is a no-code plugin, meaning the team could integrate and end-to-end test without needing web development expertise. The process, which previously took several weeks on the previous network, was completed within a few hours.
Before migration day, the impact.com support team assisted Stio’s top revenue-generating publishers with a seamless platform transition. Additionally, the team leveraged the following resources and services to facilitate an efficient, painless migration to impact.com:
A dedicated Onboard Success Manager
PXA training sessions
24/5 in-app chat support
Gained insights into partner incrementality with the powerful Optimize reporting suite
The team accessed impact.com’s robust Optimize reporting suite to address the lack of visibility that previously hampered them. Key reports included:
The Contribution report gave insights into each partner’s contribution as an Introducer (first-touch), Closer (last-touch), or Influencer (other points in the conversion path).
The Leapfrogging Summary report offered a look into the final partner interactions in a conversion path within a specified time window.
The Crediting Concerns Report provided information on shopping behavior and attribution. The team optimized contracts/IOs to align with program KPIs with this data.
Recruited top-tier partners, such as Outside, using automated Discovery tools
Stio leveraged impact.com’s Discovery tool to automate a once-manually-run partner recruitment strategy. Features, such as the Extended Search, introduced large media partners and publishers, including Outside, Gear Junkie, and Active Junky.
Additionally, the team tapped into impact.com’s curated Recommendations to target recruitment efforts around holidays and special events, like Father’s Day and Memorial Day—maximizing audience reach.
Regulated the spread and use of coupon codes with innovative technology
The Match Expression Tool Regex ensured media partners received credit for all referrals using their codes. At the same time, the Promo Codes Exception list combated the spreading of exclusive coupon codes on other websites. Additionally, the team used Paid Search Monitoring to police trademarked keywords and Stio coupon violations.
Optimized the compensation strategy with tailor-made commission terms
Innovative and flexible commission options by impact.com allowed the team to optimize the partner rewards strategy.
The Switch Contract functionality rewarded publishers providing featured coverage with limited-time commission increases.
The Referral SharedID tool saved money on unwarranted commission payouts. The team could set rules preventing commission when a specific coupon site within the sub-affiliate network refers an order.
The Group-Based Commission model helped create IOs based on the publisher’s business model. The team could apply program terms of service, restricted product SKUs, and restricted coupon codes to IOs.
In Their Words
“impact.com has leveled up our affiliate program in a few areas. We’ve reduced costs, streamlined program management, and improved partnership control. The platform’s everyday usability is a timesaver by simplifying data manipulation, enabling faster data pulls, and providing intuitive reporting templates for one-off needs.”
Cole Soldwisch
Performance Marketing Channel Manager
Stio
"Our complex strategy for the Stio affiliate program required a technology platform that could deliver granular reporting, actionable attribution, new partnership discovery, customizable commissioning, and tracking we could trust. impact.com not only delivered but exceeded our expectations. The impact.com team has supported us from the beginning, providing agency support, training, certification courses, and help docs to help deliver our vision for the Stio program. We’re thrilled with the results and partnership!"
Brian Boyd
Owner
Clique Affiliate