Belk Drives 27% Incremental App Revenue Growth with RTB House

Belk, a department store with roots tracing back to the late 19th century, has been a staple in the fashion retail industry—known for offering excellent products at great prices and treating customers like family. Belk combines tradition with modern retail experiences, evolving with customer needs and technology. With nearly 300 stores across 16 states, a robust online presence, and an evolving mobile app, Belk is well set to grow its multi-billion-dollar revenue in the coming years.

Belk embraced the opportunity to drive e-commerce sales across the United States, focusing especially on regions without its retail presence. With stores concentrated in 16 Southeastern states, Belk needed to fully leverage its app to complement its website, maximize conversions from active shoppers, drive repeat sales, and sustain customer engagement. Performance campaigns became essential, focusing on scalable online strategies to meet strict revenue and ROAS goals while delivering strong results across digital platforms.

After successfully implementing web performance campaigns with RTB House, Belk took the next step by applying the same Deep Learning-powered capabilities to its in-app campaigns. By leveraging next generation dynamic retargeting tactics within the app, Belk aimed to drive repeat purchases from established customers while enabling novel product discovery and promoting strategic partners’ products through co-op campaigns. The strategy focused on deploying shoppable creatives—personalized content that boosts sales and reinforces the Belk brand and those of its strategic partners.

Our in-app campaigns have consistently exceeded Belk’s ROAS goals, enabling rapid scaling. To ensure the results reflected true growth, we conducted incrementality testing similar to methods used in medical trials. The results showed a 27% lift in app revenue and a 17% lift in web revenue, spanning both Belk-only initiatives and strategic co-op campaigns. In-app campaigns have thus become the primary driver of online sales from the display channel.