How Tri-Fit Athletic produces organic sales growth with triathlon specific publishers

Tri Fit have come onto the triathlon scene in the past three years, putting their stake in the ground as the award-winning, triathlon specific apparel brand for athletes looking for unrivalled performance. In comparison to other clothing brands in the space, Tri Fit have a refined amount of products, focusing on quality over quantity, and it shows – with the small brand being dubbed best in test across multiple titles for the past three years.

Whilst this overview of Tri Fit and how they took advantage of our deep relationships with sports publishers is a great read – it’s a brilliant overview of exactly why you need to analyse your data, adjust your target and double down on what’s working. And boy, did it work for Tri Fit.

Why did we start working with Tri Fit?

The relationship with Tri Fit started back in the early days of Avelon. They had a change in business ownership and were looking to capitalise on their recent award wins, but didn’t want to venture into the realm of discount code sites, gifting products to ambassadors with no return or provide huge discount codes to ambassadors. Their products are premium with high-end pricing, and for good reason: they’re the best on the market.

Luckily for Dan (owner of Tri-Fit), our business model is built on brands retaining as much margin as possible. We work with one or two discount code sites (bear in mind 98.2% of the entire affiliate industry sales are voucher code websites), but we’re incredibly specific about who we work with. Big shout out to Endurance Zone (fitness to rewards platform) and Tenere Team (they plant trees for every commission payment that they earn).

Dan also wanted to get more top-end athletes in his kit without splashing huge sums of money as he’d been burnt before, but he also didn’t want to gift every single person some kit to get them posting – because he was just getting the business going again.

So, to recap. Dan wanted to:

Find high-end athletes without spending huge sums of money
Provide athletes with a reward for driving sales on his site
Capitalise on his recent award wins with publishers across our publisher network
Automate all of the publisher affiliate process

How did Tri Fit find and incentivise them new athletes?

Dan’s one of those guys who’s just a pleasure to speak to and you really buy into the entire ideology of Tri Fit: lower quantity, higher quality products for people wanting to push themselves in triathlon. After an initial few chats with Dan, we stumbled across some pretty interesting data: his return on Google Shopping, Adwords and META ads were diminishing – but he kept seeing loads of direct to website sales without any attribution.

We scrambled around trying to find the reasoning for it, until he got an email from one of his customers at a triathlon club who loved the kit so much, he recommend other people in the club to buy from him as well. A bunch of sales came through that evening within the radius of the person – and a lightbulb moment arose: his customers were his best affiliates.

Now, how do you find the most influential people in a club and incentivise them to promote your brand without just gifting them kit? A tiered ambassador program whereby athletes could move up the rankings with the more commissions they earn.

A three-tiered ambassador program

The Tri-Fit ambassador program was separated into three tiers, with the ability to move through the tiers depending on how well you perform and what your level of social engagement is. If you’d like to download the Ambassador Pack, just drop an email to andrew@avelonetwork.com.

STRENGTH – TIER ONE

STRENGTH is their entry tier for ambassadors. It provides 15% discount off RRP for your Tri-Fit purchase, 10% commissions on every sale generated on the site with a discount code and 15% commission on every sale at full RRP – PLUS ambassadors can get their initial kit cost reimbursed when they trigger £1000.00 of kit sales on the Tri-Fit website. There’s really no downside.

ENDURANCE – TIER TWO

ENDURANCE is their second level for ambassadors and gives the ambassador one free Tri-Fit suit plus a 25% off discount on any other Tri-Fit kit, plus a 50% discount on a custom Tri-Fit tri-suit. They earn 10-15% commission on every product sale on the site plus get exclusive access to new products and colour ways of existing products. They can also earn an annual bonus if they become the best performing athlete/affiliate in this tier.

Athletes only enter this tier once they exceed/hit the credentials/requirements for STRENGTH and ENDURANCE moves them into a few other requirements:

£1500.00 of kit sales per year
1 x tagged social post and 1 x tagged story post per week
1 x sharing of a Tri Fit social post per month for 6-months
Tri Fit to be listed in social bios
Race in Tri Fit kit at least 4 times during the season
1 x blog post on the Tri Fit site every year

PERFORMANCE – TIER THREE

PERFORMANCE is the top tier of Tri-Fit’s affiliate/athlete program. Not only does the user get an incredible amount of support from the team, but they get Tri-Fit apparel and a custom Tri-Fit tri-suit, but they also get bonuses based on race performance in major events, 10-15% commission on sales and even annual bonuses. This tier is more for pro-triathletes, so entering this tier is on a case-by-case basis.

Connecting with publishers

As you may be aware, publishers now require brands to have an affiliate program for product reviews to go live – so connecting with his top publishers; 220 Triathlon, TRI247 and Endurance Zone, was his first port of call. Tri-Fit had already won a bunch of awards and had reviews live with the publishers we work closely with, so our technology simply added links into their reviews for Tri-Fit to track how well these reviews were doing.

Tri Fit set up these publishers with generous commissions and no discount codes, meaning the publishers could earn around 10% for every successful transaction. Not bad for an AOV of £210.00.

220 Triathlon are a huge testament to understanding their audience and doubling down. We’ve had reports from Rob Slade at 220 Triathlon that Tri-Fit’s affiliate account has grown by 700% since they joined Avelon and they’re now prioritising the amount of coverage Tri-Fit receives due to how well it performs.

Dan from Tri-Fit said, “Avelon has really helped TRI-FIT to streamline and simplify its affiliates program. It is now an essential tool which we consult regularly to help track performance. Being able to easily see how our affiliates are performing is essential for us to be make informed decisions on what is working, what is not, and also our ROI.”

What were the results?

We like to be brutally honest about our results: we didn’t see any return for the first 3-months because were still building out of automated functionality for link placements and Tri-Fit were building their ambassador strategy. For this reason, we had a bunch of clicks but no sales to begin with.

From April 2024, our top line statistics are below:

Month	Clicks	Sales	Total sales
April	19	2	< £200.00
May	11	5	< £600.00
June	362	21	< £3500.00
July	955	42	< £9000.00

Conversion rates for Tri-Fit have also been incredibly high for their core ambassadors / publishers. The below table shows the biggest month of July 2024’s conversion rates:

Affiliate name	Clicks	Sales	Conversion rate
220 Triathlon	554	23	4.15%
Kellie Branagan	376	14	3.72%
TRI247	18	2	11.11%

Rob Slade from 220 Triathlon gave us this comment about working with us, sparked from the success of their promotion of Tri-Fit’s products, “Avelon has been great for us so far. We’ve just ticked off two record months in a row for commission revenue. Something like 70% up YOY!”

Whilst it’s helpful seeing exactly what affiliates are driving revenue, it’s more interesting to properly dive into the numbers of where sales are coming from with publishers. The below table is for 220 Triathlon specifically, whilst the table below this is for ambassadors. It’s also worth noting that these stats from 220 Triathlon are from one article, which can be found here.

Country	Clicks	Sales	Conversion rate
United States	556	25	4.50%
United Kingdom	317	21	6.62%
Canada	43	2	4.65%
Germany	29	1	3.45%

One interesting statistic is timeline to purchases are much higher with Tri-Fit Athletic vs other brands, especially when segmenting by average order value and social affiliate vs publisher (ambassador vs magazine). The below table is for orders between £150.00 – £300.00:

Affiliate type	Average TTP (days)	Tri-Fit TTP (days)	Change %
Ambassador	11	16	45%
Magazine	14	22	57%

We don’t work on anecdotal data, but it would seem the reason for this delay for a user to purchase is due to the price and how premium Tri-Fit Athletic is as a brand. Tri-Fit has a 60-day attribution window on Avelon, so we’re looking forward to seeing more delayed purchase data over the coming months to see what influences people’s purchasing decisions.