If you own and market a clothing or fashion brand online, chances are you use social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok etc to get your brand out there in front of your audience. These platforms are fantastic at bringing brand awareness to your store, allowing you to build your own community of followers and engagers who love what you do.
But one BIG problem I have with these platforms is that at any moment in time, these social media channels can drop your organic reach over night. When that happens, you’ll notice your engagement drops and your promotional drops won’t be as effective.
The smart thing when it comes to these tier one traffic platforms, is that you should be utilising them from an organic and paid stand point. Meaning you combine both the organic (free) reach you get as well as paying money on their ad platform to consistently buy attention.
One thing I notice a ton when talking to fashion brands is that they tend to forget the power of email marketing as part of the marketing funnel.
It’s great to use social media platforms as part of your marketing funnel, but email marketing is a very effective way to build customer loyalty, engagement, and give your customers a sense of personal touch and exclusivity.
When done right, email marketing can yield a great return on investment. The reason for this is because it’s a lot cheaper to continually remarket and engage your audiences. It also helps to encourage your potential buyers back into your sales funnel in order to complete a purchase. Ie. Cart abandonment which is a huge issue in any ecom brands sales funnel.
So let’s talk about some email marketing best practices and the type of email campaigns that will help you build more authority, trust, loyalty and ultimately drive more sales and ROI for your clothing or fashion brand.
Welcome Email
Your welcome email series is the first 1-1 interaction your brand has with a customer. It’s like a first impression. So make sure it’s impactful, has a unique style and doesn’t come across as too pushy.
You’re trying to nurture a relationship with your new leads & customers. So lead with value, share your mission, tell your story and why you are in business, what point of difference do you have to the marketplace, what causes do you support etc? What impact are you trying to achieve?
You can break this welcome series up into a three or even four part sequence, going more in depth about your story, mission, point of difference etc in each email.
If someone has opted into your lead magnet, remind them of the offer that attracted them to sign up in the first place. As mentioned before, don’t come across as too pushy. You surely don’t meet someone for the first time and ask them to marry you, right? The same analogy can be related to emails.
Your welcome email is going to be one of your highest open rates, along with order confirmation emails. It’s a great opportunity to engage with your new prospects and customers.
Here are some ideas you can include as part of your welcome email:
– “We appreciate you!” – Start with a polite thank you for signing up or becoming a customer
– Tell your story and why you started this business. (People love a good story! They are great for engagement)
– Deliver on any offer that you promised on the signup form
– Social media links to connect further
– Include a CTA: Have a call to action to check out your blogs, your new collection, reviews from previous customers etc.
– Include a 10-20% discount to lure your subscribers back to your website to make a purchase.
Leverage your welcome email to create an emotional connection with the reader and engage with them as best you can, after that… mention your store and show them around.
Utilise Your Content Through An Email
Your fashion brand should be producing useful content on a consistent basis. You do this by creating videos and images that demonstrate your garments, how they are worn, what items match with certain accessories, what are some of the benefits (if any), how to take care of your fashion items etc etc.
You get the picture right?
All this type of content serves to engage your website visitors and social media followers. It indoctrinates them further into your brand and delivers great value and positive associations.
Emailing your subscribers with this type of valuable content is one of the best ways to retain your subscribers.
Here are 10 content ideas you can create for your fashion brand:
- Tips on how to mix & match clothes from your collection
- Guide on how to care for your garments for better longevity
- Interview with you the brand owner and why you started your brand
- Share a behind-the-scenes look at how you create collections
- Share an “Outfit of The Day”
- Share a prototype or sneak peek of a new product in the making
- 10 mistakes to avoid when buying your product
- 10 ways to style your product
- A day in my life as a fashion brand owner
- User Generated Content – Testimonials, reviews, feedback, unboxing, before and after results, product demos etc
Content like the ideas above help to engage and educate your audience, build trust, authority and a liking toward you and your brand. All these elements add up to develop a stronger bond with your prospects and customers.
So get emailing your content and develop those relationships further. It pays off in the long run!
And!!
Because of this engaging content, your open rates and clickthrough rates will be in good shape, which will keep your deliverability rates in a healthy state. This signals to inbox service providers & spam filters that your emails are valuable. And because of that, your emails will have a low probability of landing in the spam folder.
So all in all, emailing good content has many benefits that help your brand to grow.
Promoting a Sale With Email
Who doesn’t love a sale?
If your audiences are engaging with your content and expressing how much they love your fashion items, you can be sure they’ll pounce on you the minute they hear you have a sale going on.
One of the best ways to announce a sale is through email. You can let your followers and engagers know on social media that you’ll be announcing a sale at a certain time to people on your list. You can also email your list of engagers about the sale and when you’ll be announcing it.
The only way for any of your audiences to avail of your sale is via an email you send to your engaged list as it will contain a special link for subscribers to click on and visit your exclusive sale.
For anyone interested in your sale, you can be sure they’ll be checking their inbox waiting in excitement for your sales promotion email to arrive. Your job is to build hype and exclusivity over a period of time. Portraying the sale in an exciting way to convert people.
So how should you approach this?
Here’s some points you can follow to do this the right way:
Scarcity: Using genuine scarcity can be a great way to motivate your subscribers to take action on the sale. No one likes to miss out on a great offer. You can always use ‘offer valid till stock lasts’ scarcity but if you want to add on to it, you can also mention time-scarcity i.e. offer valid till a particular date.
Instructions: Make it clear with steps and instructions on how to avail of the discount. If there is a promo code, mention it in the email and provide an easy to copy method.
Occasion: If possible, attach the promo with an occasion or theme e.g. Year-end sale, Black Friday sale or your brand’s anniversary sale, etc.
Segmentation: It’s always best practice to send relevant content to the right target audience. This will enhance your engagement rate on email and yield better revenue returns.
When running a sale relevant for a particular type of audience, exclude the rest of the list.
One example of this would be – if you are running a promo for a particular kind of shoe, exclude people who would have recently bought that pair of shoes.
Post-Purchase Email
You just made a sale! Congrats!
You know when the best time is to ask for a sale?
Right after the initial sale was completed. Their state of mind is in consumption mode, so re- engaging them with the right offer that’s relevant to their original purchase makes sense.
A post purchase email doesn’t have to try and influence the customer to make another purchase, you can use it for other call to actions that will enhance your business in some way.
You can use a post-purchase email to:
- Request feedback or testimonials
- Ask for referrals (make incentives for all parties involved)
- Ask them to share on social media
- Upsell or cross-sell other items in your collections
- Thank them for their purchase and let them know that they can reach out to you if there are any issues, even after they have paid for the product.
Post-purchase emails enhance the customer experience and make it memorable so that they return to your brand the next time they have to buy something, thereby driving up customer loyalty and lifetime value.
Abandoned Cart Email
One of the biggest issues that consistently faces any ecommerce brand, is shopping cart abandonment. According to the Baymard Institute, 69.57% of online shopping carts are abandoned. Think about that. For every 100 potential customers, 70 leave their shopping cart and do not complete their purchase.
That’s a chilling fact and one that needs to be addressed!
Some of the main reasons why cart abandonment occurs is –
- Shipping, taxes & other fees were too high
- Website wanted the prospect to sign in to make their purchase
- Delivery times were too slow
- Check out process was too slow/complicated
- Prospect had trust issues with the website
The good news is that it’s not all lost.
Using cart abandonment emails can actually recover 18-20 percent of sales that were thought to be lost.These emails give people another nudge to buy the thing they like so much that it made it to the cart. So there’s a high chance it will convert.
What goes into creating a good email cart abandonment sequence?
- Include a picture of the item that’s been left in the cart with messaging that explains what the prospect forgot to purchase
- Offer an incentive to come back and buy in the form of free shipping or some discount
- Include links to customer support or instructions on how to find answers to common questions. Sometimes, people don’t buy at the endpoint because they have some doubts e.g. will I be able to exchange the shoes if they don’t fit me? Does the material of this T-shirt shrink on the first wash?
- Use social proof to let the person know that others like them in their “tribe” have bought the product and have achieved their desired outcome from it.
These emails are sent within a few hours after the abandoned cart. You can test the number of emails you need to send people to convert. Usually, it should be about 2-4 emails.
New Collection’s Launch
As a fashion brand, you’re bound to create new clothing lines, accessories, introducing new categories in your store etc etc. What better way to create awareness for your new collection, then to email your leads and customers about it.
Some email marketing ideas to test for your “new collection’s launch” email:
Add a link to check out the new collection: Don’t just send people to the home page and leave it upon them to figure out where to find the new collection. Lose unnecessary friction by sending your subscribers to the actual page where all the information regarding the new collection can be found in one place.
Images & Videos: Shoot professional, aspirational image and video content to create excitement around the new items. Fashion visuals are one of the most important parts as they help your target audiences to imagine how they will look and feel through these visuals.
Send multiple emails: Not all of your subscribers will see the first email you send announcing your new collection. So send multiple emails ( based on the size of audience and business) to create a buzz around your launch.
Conclusion
The email campaigns mentioned above are the primary ways to use email marketing to retain your subscribers and increase sales for your store. You can also add other campaigns such as “Out of Stock/Back in Stock” emails, “Reactivation” emails (subscribers who are not engaging with your email), or “Product Recommendation” emails.
You can test out other types of campaigns and measure the level of engagement.
