Eight Sleep: Raising awareness of sleep fitness

Eight Sleep is the world’s first sleep fitness company. Leveraging innovation, technology and personal biometrics, Eight Sleep brings its members better sleep and more energy, every morning.

With their first ever activation on Strava – the Cool Down Challenge – Eight Sleep challenged users across the US to log 120 minutes or more of activity. Athletes who completed this – across a wide range of Strava activities – gained access to 20% off the best-selling Eight Sleep Pod and a chance to win a $5,000 credit for sleep and recovery products on eightsleep.com.

Why Strava

As a sleep fitness company, Strava’s audience of active people was a perfect fit for Eight Sleep. And sponsored challenges were the ideal way to engage users, not only to drive brand awareness in this key segment, but to directly generate revenue through purchases. The targeting capabilities of Strava, combined with the naturally athletic nature of Strava users, meant the Eight Sleep team could zero in on exactly the type of audience that were likely to identify with their value proposition: that sleep is a vital component of an athlete’s performance.

Impact

With almost 56,000 participants and over 600,000 unique impressions in their first-ever challenge, the brand was pleased with the unique reach, participation and engagement. But the real performance came with a high clickthrough rate following challenge completion, and ultimately, purchases. In fact, just accounting for directly-attributable revenue, this single challenge drove in excess of a 7x return on investment. The true return is also seen by the team as significantly higher due to long term brand awareness and affinity created by the activation.

As well as the anticipated impact of the challenge on revenue and awareness, the brand received several requests from high-profile athletes and even sports teams to collaborate off the back of the activation – something that resonated hugely with Eight Sleep’s close relationship with fitness and high level athleticism, and desire to differentiate the brand from competitors.

Learnings and Next Steps

Eight Sleep were pleased with the performance of their challenges and want to continue the momentum with future activations on Strava. But like all good marketing functions, the Eight Sleep team want to optimize their future campaigns for increased efficiency. One key future learning is around frequency: understanding the most efficient use of spend relative to return, and avoiding audience saturation, by strategically choosing when to run challenges. Another relates to long-term multi-channel attribution; in essence, how to give logical “credit” for the correct marketing touchpoint.