ShopStyle Collective x Saks Campaign

In 2021, Saks engaged ShopStyle Collective as a trusted partner to unlock the full power of influencer marketing. Together, we launched an extremely comprehensive campaign to promote priority products, brand messaging, and key sale moments through high-quality, shareable content in an always-on, monthly cadence.

We identified and cast 36 fashion, beauty, and wellness/lifestyle-focused influencers, grouping them into 3 strategic creator genres to drive traffic and sales, to drive conversions of sale price items and highlight designer promotions, and to drive brand awareness and engagement. And as part of our ongoing commitment to DE&I, we filled the campaign with creators of different backgrounds, genders, ethnicities, and religions, and also prominently featured creators who were expecting.

Our 3 differentiated influencer segments produced unique content with distinctive messaging, creating a range of Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and blog content, optimized to each individual's top-performing platforms, emphasizing Saks as their go-to luxury e-commerce destination. They encouraged their audiences to refresh their wardrobes throughout each season, highlighting the breadth of Saks' products and brands. These influencers created almost 1400 pieces of high quality content containing stunning imagery and videos on their Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and blog pages. This content resulted in 27 million impressions and 1.1 million engagements, totaling $4M of social media value.

In addition to increasing sales and impressions, we performed a brand lift study that proved that, by leveraging audiences’ trust in influencers, Saks saw a 22% increase in brand awareness, 192% increase in how much customers spent from the previous spend period, and a 153% increase in new customer acquisition. Overall network sales, traffic, and orders all grew +200% for Saks from fiscal year 2020 to fiscal year 2021 due to the successful collaboration between Saks and ShopStyle Collective. And 66% of prospective Saks customers reported that seeing a social video/blog/post from influencers is currently the best marketing strategy out there.

We also performed a test & learn campaign that validated that Saks’ current strategy–using influencers to target luxury apparel consumers–continued to drive the most sales.