Implementing a full funnel strategy to drive scalable growth

Who are Bombas?

Founded in 2013 by Randy Goldberg and David Hearth, Bombas is a comfort focused sock and apparel brand on a mission to help those in need. They discovered socks are the most requested item of clothing in homeless shelters, so it became their goal to donate one pair of socks for every pair purchased. So far they have donated more than 100 million items to community organisations!

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Client Testimonial

"Growth HQ has been a fantastic extension of our brand's Affiliate Team! Over the years, GHQ was able to stabilize AND efficiently scale our affiliate program, creating lasting relationships with revenue driving partners. The GHQ Team is organized, thinks creatively, and is on the cutting edge of the latest affiliate trends - highly recommend working with them!" - Colleen Powers, Affiliate Manager 

Brief

We began managing Bombas’ affiliate channel back in April 2021, and although their brand awareness was high, they had no dedicated resources looking after this channel. With their affiliate channel making up just 0.5% of their overall revenue, and +90% of that volume coming from bottom-funnel publishers, this was the perfect time for the Growth HQ team to step in. 

Our aim was to increase order volume and overall revenue from their affiliate channel by diversifying their publisher network. To ensure the full funnel was being utilised, we onboarded top and mid-funnel publishers, as we find this is where our clients get the most significant results.

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Approach

When it came to top funnel publishers we focused on the onboarding of Media Houses, Bloggers, Influencers and Influencer Platforms. With mid-funnel publishers, we focused on pushing new partners on review content and PR sub-networks, as well as adding Employee Benefits as a new vertical to test. We then conducted a tidy up of any non-incremental value publishers and avoided saturation of coupon and cashback sites. By integrating Bombas’ internal reporting into a combined view with affiliate network data, optimisations were made to a relative internal CPA, as opposed to the network CPA, ensuring we deliver value based on Bombas’ own attribution.

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30% of the quarterly budget was dedicated to testing new verticals and publishers, or new campaign elements within existing publisher campaigns. This led to a total of 18 new verticals added across partnerships with a hybrid flat fee and commission approach.

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70% of the total spend in the channel was on flat fee campaigns, with 30% on commission spend. This allowed for better coverage and sales across top funnel publishers that otherwise couldn’t be unlocked on a commission basis. All campaigns were forecasted back to a CPA to ensure the CPA target had the best chance of being met.

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Challenges

The big challenge for Bombas’ affiliate channel was its size – the sheer volume of partners and campaigns required to negotiate and close deals with, monitor, optimise and analyse. This took a lot of time and attention-to-detail to ensure quality was maintained across so many active partners and campaigns.

Ultimately, we were the victims of our own success as the vast majority of the publishers we worked with and added to the programme were Media Houses, Review Sites, Influencers and Bloggers. This meant the campaigns were particularly time intensive on content approvals in particular, as well as ensuring certain guidelines were met, rather than the traditional very top-level coupon or cashback campaign sign offs. 

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Throughout 2023, we actively managed and optimised around 300 partners across the whole year. We closed deals across 60 of these publishers, with each having their own managed campaign to orchestrate and ensure results against. 

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While the scale of the programme brought its challenges all year round, the greatest challenges lay in the run up and during their key period of Q4 and holiday season, Bombas’ (and majority of the retails world’s) biggest quarter of the year by some stretch. Targets were significantly higher, and with that the budget to achieve the targets was also similarly higher.

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The focus on affiliates from across Bombas’ business was also heightened due to affiliates over indexing in growth in this period, so campaigns had to be watertight both from a brand level but also from a performance level. 

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Results

• We successfully increased Bombas’ affiliate share of revenue from 0.5% to 9% of their marketing mix.
• +60% of channel orders in 2023 were driven from mid and top funnel publishers.
• 10% of all programme sales were generated from the influencer vertical we introduced to affiliates.
• All coupon publishers were removed by Q4 2023, while the channel still went on to deliver 46% year-on-year growth in affiliate orders in that same quarter.
• Over a 3 year period we reduced the yearly average channel CPA (including agency fees) by 9%.
• We drove 150% year-on-year order growth in the affiliate channel.

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