Case Study: Sock It to Me

From humble but feisty beginnings at an outdoor market in 2004, Portland-based Sock It to Me has evolved into a mighty (and way talented) team of 40+ employees creating over 400 original designs and servicing over 4,000 wholesale accounts as well as their own web store.

Its growth has been fueled by its unique product offering, personal service, engaging brand personality, and high-impact philanthropy. Sock It to Me socks are offered in inclusive sizes for the entire family. The recent addition of colorful face masks are knit with special copper fibers, not just standard cotton.

In 2020, the company decided to expand its e-commerce capabilities to explore and capitalize on its website’s higher-margin potential. To spearhead these direct-to-consumer efforts, Sock It to Me selected performance marketing agency DMi Partners to help drive traffic to its website by exposing the brand to media outlets and influencers. A robust affiliate marketing campaign introduced the brand to new online audiences by getting them excited to wear awesome things that defy the world’s expectations.

Impressed by DMi’s solid performance marketing results and intelligent, brand-friendly approach, Sock It to Me invited the agency to take the reins on additional performance marketing efforts, which included SEO, PPC, and helping the company navigate a website redesign. The successful, ever-deepening agency-client engagement has defied expectations. Increased traffic to the e-commerce website has made ordinary revenues awesome.

Sock It to Me’s engagement with DMi began with affiliate marketing. Seeing those efforts quickly bear fruit led the company to engage DMI Partners to carry out an ADA audit of the Sock It to Me website. The agency now leads the way on all the client’s SEO, [paid search](/digital-marketing-services/search-engine-social-media-marketing/, and paid social efforts. The engagement has proved so successful that DMi Partners has essentially become Sock It to Me’s marketing team.

Table of Contents:

1. Objectives
2. Innovation & Creativity
3. Smart Execution
4. Human Touch
5. Results and Effectiveness
6. Soundbites
7. Client Testimonial

1. Objectives

As it sought to grow its e-commerce capabilities, Sock It to Me set three overarching goals: Drive more revenue through e-commerce. The brand needed to become well-known and established in the marketplace to drive revenues through its website, rather than relying on boutique outlets for sales.

Design an affiliate marketing campaign that builds brand recognition and excites customers with its unique product line. The brand needed to expand its reach and grow its audience by educating publishers about its offering. Build on the success of the affiliate marketing campaign to drive even more potential customers to the website. To gain the largest audience, drive traffic, and generate sales, the campaign needed to improve its overall performance marketing strategy.

2. Innovation & Creativity

Understanding that the strength of the Sock It to Me brand lay in its unique positioning and colorful personality, DMi endeavored to promote this character throughout the campaign. Just as the brand includes an original hand-drawn doodle with the receipt of every order, DMI made sure to position the brand as fun, fresh, individual, and cool. To do so, the DMI Partners focused on Sock It to Me’s distinct messaging and approach. They made sure that all new messaging matched and enhanced the overall tone and personality of the brand. The Sock It to Me brand was relatively unknown and was eager to gain ground in a highly competitive niche. DMi had to determine early on which demographic would be a good fit and focus its efforts there.

With a solid understanding of the product and its appeal, DMi set out to recruit a holistic mix of affiliate partners. Selected bloggers and influencers were each sent three to five pairs of socks and an attractive commission offer. One hundred forty placements (137+ click active affiliates and 30+ sales active affiliates), including mass media publishers, were secured throughout the partnership in 2020. Much of the affiliates’ content, which contributed 13% of total e-commerce sales, was repurposed for the brand’s social media. Keywords were researched and selected to drive traffic, increase sales, and match the brand’s messaging and tone online. Given the target audience’s distinct needs and preferences, the team had to think outside the box in zany and creative ways to maximize the impact of the brand’s unique voice. Top keywords for the website included: funky socks, cool socks, and funny socks. Additionally, DMi leveraged its creative team to produce fun and engaging brand-appropriate marketing collateral, like the History of Undergarments Infographic, to help the brand drive increased traffic and sales.

DMi Partners worked closely with the client to develop growth strategies and budgets for 2020 and beyond. The agency guided how to structure social creatives, create a cadence of product offerings that will not go out of date, and promote its bestsellers in ads.

The agency also went above and beyond to audit the brand’s website for ADA compliance. While not an innovative or creative task, the audit identified numerous ways the website could be creatively enhanced to provide users with the most compliant and frictionless experience possible.

The agency was able to creatively assist and influence the redesign of the e-commerce website, which launched in 2020, and improved the site’s navigation significantly. Understanding just how big a part emotion played in the target audience’s decision-making process, the agency designed an experience that would allow consumers to “Shop by Mood.” This brand-appropriate experience has proved successful with an 12% increase in conversion rate.

3. Smart Execution

The fact that the Sock It to Me brand was relatively unknown to consumers presented DMi with several challenges. To get a good grasp on these hurdles and develop effective strategies for Sock It to Me to overcome them all, DMi began with a thorough competitive analysis. The insights that DMi uncovered helped them determine which levers the brand needed to pull - and when. For example, understanding competitor’s promotional strategies allowed them to identify when a competitor’s 25% off deal would hurt Sock It to Me’s chance of exposure amongst affiliate publishers and allow DMi and the brand to shift strategy to offer increased commission rates during those time periods to help sweeten Sock It to Me’s brand apparel during competitive time periods.

DMi’s analysis also uncovered what commission rates the brand’s competitors were offering to affiliates, which allowed them to gain market share where they could. The insights gained also helped DMi secure placements with publishers and affiliates where the Sock It to Me brand would stand out. For example, the brand was pitched in a different light to Business Insider to demonstrate its value and relevance to that specific audience.

Key publisher placements include:

• The Spruce: The 8 Best Sock Subscriptions of 2021
• Business Insider: 34 Space Toys for Kids who Love Outer Space
• Refinery29: 34 Can’t-Miss Single’s Day Codes to Use Right Now
• My Subscription Addiction: Sock It to Me Review
• Men’s Journal: Looking for Valentine’s Gifts Outside the Box?

4. Human Touch

Working with a brand that responds to customers with personalized, human-sent communications, DMi knew how important it would be to make sure its entire approach included a human touch. While agencies often describe themselves as extensions of their client’s marketing department, in the case of Sock It to Me and DMi Partners, the teams became more and more integrated as the results came in DMi’s white-glove approach fostered a collaborative, unified team environment. As the client’s trust in DMi increased, so did the creative and logistic cooperation levels between agency and client.

5. Results and Effectiveness

The Affiliate Marketing program’s success deepened the clients’ trust in DMi’s capabilities so significantly that they let the agency take the lead on several growth initiatives for 2020 and beyond. Affiliate Marketing: The affiliate program garnered 140 placements throughout the campaign. 137+ Click Active Affiliates and 30+ Active Sale Affiliates generated 84,000+ clicks and contributed 13% of total e-commerce sales. SEO: The team achieved a #1 ranking on the search term “socks.” 90%+ of top priority keywords achieved a first-page ranking. 50%+ of top priority keywords achieved a top 5 ranking. The website’s organic page ranking also delivered a significant ROI. PPC: Currently reaching PPC revenue and profitability goals after stripping the search campaign down to only the most profitable efforts in Q1. Website: DMi helped the client navigate a site redesign and e-commerce platform migration, specifically as it relates to SEO, UX, and tracking.

With no previous paid search and paid social benchmarks, DMi was forced to take an experimental approach. The agency hit all revenue goals on paid search, and they continue to experiment strategically on the path to transforming the channel into a revenue driver. When tasked with helping Sock It to Me navigate its site redesign, DMi’s SEO team expertly managed new site issues and developed strategies to improve rankings overall. They helped the web designers improve navigation and guided the structure design, including the taxonomy of products and the title page. The website now ranks highly in search for 50-60 core keywords with site, speed, and accessibility scores that match.

6. Soundbites

1. 140 affiliate placements secured
2. First-page ranking for key search terms
3. PPC revenue and profitability goals achieved

7. Client Testimonial

“DMi has acted like a true partner in business development every step of our journey together. They came to the table with a concrete plan to boost traffic to our website via SEO, Affiliate, and paid media strategies. Woven into those strategies were nuances that indicated they were paying attention to our brand and our consumers, which only affirmed the commitment they had to our success. Early on they exceed our expectations on all levels. In addition to the transparency and collaboration they offered us every step of the way, their support and insight were instrumental to the success of our website migration project. They continue to guide us with tactics to improve site speed and maintain ADA and WCAG compliance and are now focused on helping us maximize out traffic opportunities. We’re lucky to have a partner like them!” - Sock It to Me, CEO, Iwa Hooe