How Outway Socks generates over 9% of their total revenue at a 5x ROI with Social Snowball.
5x
ROI
Over 9%
of GMV generated from referrals
Over 500
new customers acquired monthly from referrals
.png)
Outway Socks is a multi-million dollar Commerce brand selling performance socks with a wide range of bold and creative designs. Founded by ex pro-cyclist Rob Fraser, Outway never disap-points on delivering continual innovation while perfecting their all-day performance products.
Challenges:
- The cost of paid ads has nearly tripled in the past 12 months
- Their customers had no incentives for generating referrals
- The other affiliate and referral apps they tried were lacking deal-breaking functionality that Outway needed
Solution:
- Automatically turning their customers into revenue generating affiliates
- Implementing a reliable attribution system to track organic sales and word-of-mouth
- Automating the admin work of managing an affiliate program and saving countless hours
Results:
- Increasing top-line revenue by over 9%
- Reducing blended CAC by unlocking a results-based decentralized customer acquisition channel
- Consistently and predictably generating revenue at a 5X ROI
Challenges
When Outway's founder Rob Fraser saw the cost of paid ads nearly triple in a 12 month period, he knew it was time tobegin exploring new customer acquisition channels and see what other growth levers he could pull.
Affiliate and referral is a channel we hadn't put much effort into really because we couldn't find a good solution and weren't satisfied with the other apps out there. That's why I tweeted looking for recommendations and Social Snowball was the only one recommended in the replies.
Rob knew that they sold very shareable products and that they were already acquiring customers from referrals However, without a reliable attribution system in place, measuring their word-of-mouth revenue was nothing shy of a guessing game.
There wasn't a good way to track our organic attribution other than calculating all the places that we do measure attribution and then categorizing all of the rest as organic and word-of-mouth.
On top of that, he was confident that Outway was leaving a lot of money on the table by not placing the right referral incentives in place.
Word of mouth has always been a big driver for revenue. Our product is a convention starter by nature. The question for us was how do we activate that digitally?
This wasn’t the first time Rob tried implementing a referral program for Outway. In fact, since launching Outway 6 years ago he had tested just about every other affiliate, referral, and ambassa-dor app that exist for shopify.
However, no matter which app Rob tested there was always key functionality that was missing, which ultimately forced him to sunset these other programs.
What so many brand owners don't realize is that there's so many 2nd, 3rd, and 4th order effects of running a referral program that you have to consider. All the other apps only looked at solving one or two problems and ignored the other issues it would cause.
Solution
After seeing a demo of the product, Rob and the rest of Outway's team began implementing Social Snowball's modern approach to an affiliate program. They spent the first week discussing best practices with their dedicated CSM, activating important features, and integrating with the rest of their marketing tools like Klaviyo.
The reason we decided to use Social Snowball is because it was the only app where the entire referral process was well thought from Shopify's end, the merchant's end, and the customer’s end, all while actually delivering on the goal of driving significant revenue.
Configuring the right incentives was a crucial part of Outway’s referral strategy. Rob wanted to make sureaffiliates were genuinely motivated and excited to share their love for the brand.
We thought offering generous flat fee per referral, paid in cash, would perform best. We didn't want to make it a percentage of sale because we tried to keep it as simple to understand for the customer as possible.
On top of automating affiliate activation from new customers, Rob made sure to capture referral value from their current fanbase. Outway's existing customers and owned audience were thrilled to finally have a productive way to share their love for Outway's awesome products.
We also wanted to get activation out of our pre-existing customer base and audience so we sent out an email to our multi-hundred-thousand list and let them know about the affiliate program, as well as built a really clean and simple landing page for the program.
Within the first 24 hours after launching, Rob was already confident that Social Snowball was the tool he had been wishing for over the past 6 years
It exceeded our expectations. We thought we could onboard 1,000 affiliates in our first week and we did that in 24 hours.
Finally being able to measure word-of-mouth attribution has also been game changing for Outway. They now are able to predict and forecast how much revenue they can expect from referrals. Having access to this data also shed light on their top supporters and biggest fans.
Now we are able to put a number on our word-of-mouth marketing and see how much revenue it's driving Being able to see who is sharing us the most uncovered who our biggest fans and supporters are.
Once things were fully up and running, Rob and his team were pleasantly surprised with how little effort the program took to maintain.
The nature of the program has a lot of virality to it. The fact that every new customer has the ability to share and refer means that the program basically runs itself. Our main job now is to stay out of the way.
.png)
Results
In 24 hours, they smashed their first week's goal of 1,000 signups. By the time that first week was over, they had over 5,000 active affiliates sharing their love of Outway to friends, family members, and social media channels.
To Rob's surprise, the AOV of referrals had increased from their averages.
We assumed that since we are offering a discount AOV would be suppressed but it turns out that since these are high trust salse, we’ve seen AOV actually go up on referral orders
Their goal was to drive revenue at a 3x ROI, so when the team realized that the program Facebook is good is good, if you’re getting 5 ROI on anything it's truly insane.
Our return on investment has been 5x, which is great. In a world now where a 1.5 ROAS on Facebook is good, if you’re getting 5 ROI on anything it's truly insane.
Although a high ROI is always great, it dosen’t matter much if it's only generating a small fraction of a percent of your top-line sales. Outway's referral program was attributing over 9% of their total revenue within a couple weeks. This increase in revenue with results-based-only costs has worked wonders for Outway's blended CAC.
Social Snowball is generating 8-10% of our total revenue, The longer the program is live, the more momentum it has and the more revenue it generates We're super bullish on it.
Social Snowball is now a key piece of Outway's tech stack. They consistently and predictably acquire thousands of new loyal customers at a consistent CAC, on autopilot.
.png)
Ready to automate your affiliate program?
