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Case study: OAK + FORT

The challenge

OAK + FORT is a Canadian fashion brand that provides accessible luxury for women and men who seek everyday essentials reimagined with a modern minimalist approach. Since launching its first boutique in 2010, OAK + FORT has grown rapidly, largely supported by grassroots marketing and word of mouth.

Brand loyalists were actively engaging on social media, but by the time OAK + FORT approached DAC in March of 2019, the company had not yet made an entrance into paid digital advertising. Ecommerce revenue, while growing at a healthy pace, was coming primarily from existing customers making repeat purchases.

OAK + FORT models

The solution

We saw enormous opportunity to better leverage digital for new customer acquisition and help OAK + FORT further accelerate its growth.

  1. Grow e-commerce revenue through new customer acquisition
  2. Support retail stores across Canada and the US in hitting their sales targets
  3. Raise awareness of new store locations and drive attendance for opening events
  4. Drive awareness and attendance for major sales events (e.g. warehouse sales)
  5. Measure sales outcomes from digital across both e-commerce and in-store purchases

Given the need to support both online and offline sales outcomes, we took our foundational Enterprise-to-Local approach to strategy and campaign planning. While it would have been easiest to grow total sales in major markets that included physical store locations, other cities could still prove to be lucrative markets for ecommerce. In other words, a localised media plan and campaign structure was required to optimise at the most granular level.

OAK + FORT banner ad

In collaboration with the OAK + FORT team, we assessed the revenue performance of each store against the company’s growth forecasts in order to determine baseline trends and identify areas of opportunity. The final media plan weighted spend across markets according to a complex model that balanced high-performance stores with locations we wanted to test for growth potential.

As OAK + FORT was already finding natural success on social media, we focused the investment on Facebook and Instagram campaigns. We leveraged custom audiences of OAK + FORT buyers to roll out lookalike targeting, while excluding existing customers themselves from being exposed to the ads. This ensured we kept our focus on new customer acquisition. We also built specific interest targeting lists to get in front of potential customers interested in fashion and relevant competing brands.

OAK + FORT Facebook ad

Carousel ads proved to be the most effective format as they allowed us to convey the overall OAK + FORT brand aesthetic to new customers through featuring multiple products. We worked in close partnership with the OAK + FORT marketing team to ensure creative was refreshed often and featured some of the most exciting items in current inventory.

In order to measure in-store revenue attributable to the campaigns, we implemented Facebook’s offline conversions API and worked with the OAK + FORT team to set up a regular data push of customer records collected at point-of-sale.

OAK + FORT ads

To support special events such as new store openings and warehouse sales, we also created two campaign types:

  1. Event campaigns to boost visibility of a Facebook event page customers could RSVP to
  2. Awareness-focused campaigns that directed to custom event landing pages on oakandfort.ca

These campaigns leveraged similar targeting to prospect new customers, but also included existing OAK + FORT customers and fans of the brand in order to maximise in-person attendance.

Building upon this revamped customer acquisition strategy, we also moved to help OAK + FORT maintain and grow these customer relationships. We began with a comprehensive audit of the email marketing programme from targeting to tagging, format to frequency. We benchmarked programme performance and established new goals. Out of this effort we delivered recommendations to meet these goals including:

  • Personalisation opportunities
  • Template and creative optimisations
  • Subject line improvements
  • Content strategy
  • Testing

 

The impact

Together with OAK + FORT, we proved that social media marketing can be so much more than awareness and aesthetics—even in the image-is-everything world of fashion. Our tailored campaigns drove measurable growth in a fiercely competitive arena. We’re now perfectly positioned to learn, optimise, iterate, and help take this thriving brand to the next level.

10x

total program ROAS in the first 90 days

$4.3M

from 39,000 sales attributed to FB campaign in Q3 and Q4

150%

ROAS in the first 60 days in Montreal market