How Le Col Took Its Affiliate Program from Side Channel to Strategic Driver

Le Col is a premium cycling brand known for its technical, race-grade kit. Founded in 2011 by ex-pro and former Team GB rider Yanto Barker, its mission is to help cyclists go faster and further on every ride.

The challenge

Part of the pack but far from the lead, Le Col’s US and UK affiliate programs were low down in the brand’s marketing mix.

The sports retailer wanted more brand awareness and new customers, and it knew affiliate marketing could deliver the solution cost-effectively. Its challenge was to follow in the slipstream of so many sports brands in realizing the channel’s potential as a strategic growth driver.

Le Col decided to mount a charge and called on Awin Certified Agency Acceleration Partners for support.

The solution

Platform optimizations

First, Le Col needed to broaden its partner mix beyond bottom-funnel contributors. The current group of publishers were focused on converting customers that knew the brand and where to find a discount for it, leading to a new vs. existing customer imbalance.

Luckily, being an Awin Accelerate user, Le Col had a way of generating actionable reports that showed which publishers were contributing above the final click in the journey.

Awin's Funnel and Journey Path Reports helped Acceleration Partners identify several different partner types that were either creating the first touchpoint with a new customer or converting them on their own. Adding these publishers led to a strong, full-funnel approach.

Acceleration Partners also implemented new vs. existing customer tracking within the Awin platform to support Le Col's acquisition goals. This highlighted which partners were over-indexing for new customer sales, providing a starting point for making the affiliate program more incremental.

Partner diversification

Following the removal of several low-quality affiliates from an extended partner audit, and by using the data collected from Awin’s Reports, Acceleration Partners was able to search through over one million Awin publishers to find good-fit options in CSS (comparison shopping services), content, card-linked offers (CLO), loyalty, and more.

Strategic additions like Adstrong (CSS), Linkby (content), Pluxee (loyalty), and Telus Health (rewards) gave Le Col some much-needed support and a way of expanding its reach.

Targeted placements

Following an extensive recruitment drive in the UK and US, Acceleration Partners then leveraged its relationships and deep regional knowledge to build a series of high-performing campaigns.

Sharing exclusive rewards with relevant closed-user groups such as Endurance Zone and Blue Light Card was one in a line of smart moves, with both partners eventually making Le Col's top 10 UK affiliate performers for 2025.

Le Col also offered fixed fees on top of commission to several cycling-specific partners. One example from the UK saw Cyclist Magazine and Future Publishing returning 4:1 and 9:1 ROI respectively, demonstrating the impact of niche media. What’s more, their evergreen content ensured Le Col would boost brand visibility and audience engagement long into the next year.

Launching and scaling the German market

After seeing how its other Awin programs had performed, Le Col wanted to take things further by launching a new program in Germany.

It got a head start by combining custom insights from Acceleration Partners’ APVision platform with Awin’s Sector Benchmarking report to identify top-performing partners in Germany. The likes of Rewardoo (content) and Benefits.me (loyalty) were recruited based on their performance for similar brands. By July, Le Col had onboarded 112 partners in the market, 84 of whom were either click-active or generating sales.

The speed at which Le Col managed to get started in Germany had it surpassing all expectations, leading its program to account for 7% of global affiliate revenue within six months.

The results

“Awin's tools helped us identify exactly the data we needed to drive Le Col's affiliate strategy. The platform makes it easy to see where partners are contributing in the customer journey and prioritize those that can achieve our advertisers’ goals. After building a success formula in the UK and US, we set up a new program in Germany to repeat it.”

At the end of 2024, Le Col’s affiliate program was operating as it should. Awin’s tools and the strategic activations from Acceleration Partners had a clear impact on revenue in the mature markets:

• US revenue +146% YoY
• UK revenue +16% YoY

Acquisition was another key goal for Le Col, and Acceleration Partners’ use of Awin’s Reports to spot promising upper-funnel and solo contributors brought a flood of new customers to the same programs by summer 2025:

• US acquisition +67% YoY
• UK acquisition +51% YoY

Those reports and Acceleration Partners’ audits also led to an improved mix of relevant publishers. In fact, the agency found that customers referred by affiliates in each market had a higher average order value (AOV) than those heading direct to Le Col:

• +39% higher AOV in UK
• +52% higher AOV in US
• +60% higher AOV in DE

By blending its expertise with Awin’s tools, Acceleration Partners put Le Col on the right track to global success.

Partner with Le Col in Germany, the UK, and US today.