Stio increases sales by 25% with impact.com

Discover how Stio migrated top-performing partners to impact.com in 4 days and implemented a highly effective strategy that facilitated affiliate program growth.

Case study

Stio enjoys a 25% hike in sales with Clique Affiliate and impact.com

Situation 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. Stio and Clique needed a network with innovative 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 Stio's program. ● Imprecise attribution meant the team could not accurately identify each partner’s or channel’s contribution to conversions. ● Limited reporting capabilities prevented a deeper insight into the customer’s purchase journey, contribution to non-attributed sales, and channel incrementality. ● Restrictive commission terms hindered the opportunity to optimize the rewards strategy for top-performing partners.

Situation

Solution

Outcome

Situation (cont.) An affiliate program with growing needs

● 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 ● Outdated recruitment tools made the process of discovering new partners manual and labor-intensive.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.

Situation

Solution

Outcome

About

Stio

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

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.

Situation

Solution

Outcome

Solution A management solution driving program growth

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.

Completed top-performing 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—a challenge in the past—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

Cole Soldwisch Performance Marketing Channel Manager, Stio

Solution

Situation

Outcome

Solution (cont.) A management solution driving program growth

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.

Solution

Situation

Outcome

Solution (cont.) A management solution driving program growth

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 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 reduced publisher expenses by blacklisting exclusive and non-affiliate codes. Additionally, the team used Paid Search Monitoring to police trademarked keywords and Stio coupon violations.

Solution

Situation

Outcome

Solution (cont.) A management solution driving program growth

Optimized the compensation strategy with tailor-made commission terms 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 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 and restricted coupon codes to IOs.

Solution

Situation

Outcome

“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

Outcome A platform that cut costs and facilitated steady growth

25%

increase in sale

After migrating to impact.com, Stio implemented a highly effective, cost-saving strategy that facilitates affiliate program growth. The team accessed the right tools to streamline program management and the control to automate the partnership life cycle stages. The outdoor apparel brand saw significant improvements across key metrics:

drop in commission expenses

25% increase in sales year-over-year (YoY)

●

7.5% decrease in total expenses

●

7.5%

8% reduction in commission expense

●

decrease in total expenses

1.4% drop in average cost percent of revenue

●

10% lower action cost reduced

●

$2 rise in ROAS

●

Outcome

Want to have results like Stio? | Contact grow@impact.com

Situation

Solution

Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10