How we Helped a Shoe Retailer Increase their Digital Footprint

Founded in 1977, the Quarks Group is a shoe retailer with close to 40 bricks-and-mortar stores across Western Canada. In 2003, Quarks understood how popular online shopping was becoming with consumers and enlisted Metric Marketing to build their first e-commerce website. They wanted to be able to sell shoes to a much broader audience than those who visited their retail stores.

Our goal in 2003 was to create an e-commerce site. Since then, we’ve built a number of content management system (CMS) sites for Quarks. Each subsequent version is more contemporary and functional, designed to meet the needs of current customers and improve marketing opportunities. Recent updates included a refreshed home page, a product reservation feature for in-store pickup, and back-end automation to produce retargeting ads for new products added to the Quarks POS system.

Once we had established a consistent brand presence for the Quarks e-store over time, our next goal was to find ways to drive traffic to quarkshoes.com and enhance the user experience while there. To do this, we optimized the site's performance, determined Quarks’ audiences online, defined the company’s positioning online and then developed campaign messaging that spoke to the needs of customers as they made decisions throughout their purchasing journey. We employed ongoing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as a long-term strategy to ensure users would organically gravitate to the Quarks brand in relevant searches.

Our final goal was to leverage Quarks’ owned media channels—including social media and email—to boost traffic to their e-commerce site. Their social platform metrics told us that Facebook and Instagram would be best for connecting with the audiences who were most ready to purchase their products. Making sure to keep the cost-per-acquisition rate low, we used Lookalike Audience (a Facebook product), dynamic product retargeting ads and digital ad templates—all designed to encourage conversion. In terms of end value, Quarks earned $7.00 for every dollar spent on social media advertising.

With our email marketing strategy, we segmented audiences to provide more meaningful content that would resonate with targeted readers. In other words, they began emailing smarter, not harder. By offering valuable content instead of spammy offers, we helped Quarks gain a loyal following that drove more than 1,500 sale transactions in 2017 alone.

We continue to hone the performance of the Quarks site to ensure users will find content they need or find useful or relevant. We also employ tactics to promote further sales, such as an abandoned shopping cart reminder. Users who abandoned products in their shopping cart received a follow-up email reminder. This type of automated email generated more than 150 sale transactions in 2018.

During 15 years of service, we've raised the Quarks shopping website from a simple e-store to an e-commerce powerhouse and top revenue generator for the company that beats out most bricks-and-mortar locations. Metric has committed to a yearly revenue growth goal of 15 percent, which we’ve always met or exceeded.