Avelon wins Best Value, Best Functionality & Features, Best Ease of Use and Best Customer Support on Capterra. How Torq used athletes & customers to drive 25% of their total eCommerce revenue
You know the orange labelled gels and nutrition products in your local bike shop? Well, that’s Torq Fitness, and Avelon are incredibly proud to showcase the immense growth Torq have achieved by utilising ambassadors, affiliates and publishers over the past 6-months. You can check out their website here.
Torq came to Avelon with two questions: “how do we grow our eCommerce revenue without spending big on advertising?” and “how do we incentivise our ambassadors and consumers to promote our products?”.
The initial problems
Some top level facts from Torq were quite alarming; there were no goals or requirements for teams and ambassadors, nor were there programs put in place to measure return on investment. It was a bit of a free for all.
The team had also used an affiliate platform before with high upfront costs, questionable and unreliable partnerships and virtually no return on investment. It needed a total overhaul. At the very least, Avelon wanted to track the return on their current partnerships, so they could optimise and then grow them over the next 12-months.
Where did Avelon come in?
“From understanding the nutrition and sports market, we knew Torq were a well established brand in the space and every user raved about their all-natural products. They’ve always focused on retail and eCommerce took a backseat, especially as more nutrition brands were coming into the market and creating some serious competition. They truly relied on repeat business and were very risk averse.” – Andrew, Founder.
Avelon built the ambassador strategy alongside Torq and agreed tiered commissions across their entire ambassador network right from the get go, allowing affiliates to earn up to 24% commission for first time buyers and thus, pushing affiliates to fill the funnel with new customers.
Once the commission rates and attribution windows were agreed, Torq integrated Avelon with their website through the native plug-in available on the WooCommerce plug-in store. As the majority of Avelon is automated, Torq just let their ambassadors know they had to sign up to their affiliate program through Avelon if they wanted to join.
We also utilised Torq’s current consumers, turning them into advocates for the brand. They did this through creating a standalone ‘sponsorship’ page that was linked to their affiliate program, filtering all sponsorship requests through Avelon. If an athlete wasn’t of a high enough profile for immediate sponsorship, they would trial them on Avelon to track their return and then move them into their sponsorship program (if they produced a high enough ROI).
What were the results?
Over the course of 2023, Torq decided to stick to simply using affiliate links which would bundle discounts together at the checkout phase and not use any discount codes. Whilst this is a great idea in practice, it’s hard to communicate this to affiliates and even more difficult for affiliates to communicate this to potential customers – proven in the low volume of sales and low average order value in 2023.
So, we drilled down into the numbers and decided to test a ‘total commission package’ starting in Jan 2024. The total commission package allowed Torq to maintain a stable profit margin and still offer affiliates a high commission rate – it just gave affiliates the option to:
a) use affiliate links only with no discount code or discount attached to it and retain 24% total commission, or:
b) provide consumers a 10% discount code for 10 points less commission, i.e instead of 24%, they were offered 14% commission
Whilst option a meant affiliates would earn more commission, it also meant the overall volume of sales would be far lower. Every affiliate chose option b and soon after, the sales came flooding in.
Split percentage of purchase types and order percentage by month go hand-in-hand, as Torq decided to move their CPC marketing into affiliates, i.e the money they were spending on Google Ads were redirected to discount codes and commission payments.
What level of affiliate were making the most sales? Well, this is the most interesting question we’ve been asked. Publishers actually made 0% of the total sales for Torq Fitness and social affiliates with over 5000 followers only made 12.1% of the total sales in their Torq affiliate program.
We further surveyed these under 5000 social follower affiliates and came to the conclusion on all of their profiles: almost all of these affiliates were either competing in their sport or were part of a riding/running club and were figureheads in their local community.
We spoke to 5 of these affiliates and asked them what methods they used to drive sales through their discount codes and links. The result? Every single one told their friends about their discount code and added the tracking link to their clubs website, which was visited every Friday by members of the club to check the times of the event on the weekend – and subsequently, saw an increase in purchases of 500% every weekend, compared to weekdays.
Summary
- In 2024, Torq exceeded their entire previous year of affiliate sales by 50% and by the end of February 2024, Torq had increased its overall affiliate eCommerce sales by 545% from the previous year…in just two-months
- Over 25% of Torq’s entire eCommerce revenue comes from new customers acquired through affiliate marketing, whilst their affiliate conversion rate has skyrocketed from 9% to 32%
- Retailers have seen an 18% uplift in online and in-store sales since this partnership launch
- In-person affiliate sources drove 87.9% of all affiliate sales
- Saturday accounted for 30% of all sales and Sunday accounted for 40%
If you’d like to learn more about how Avelon can help you automate your consumer and affiliate programmes, or if you’re interested in exploring our platform further, please sign up through the link below or get in touch with our team.