Starting or managing an ecommerce business is no doubt a tasking job, even more for stores and brands that focus on a specific niche like fashion.
To be realistic, almost everyone’s email inbox is crowded with all sorts of emails competing for attention. These range from work mails, personal messages, ads from competitors, and so on.
With all these in mind, how do you stand out from the crowd, bearing in mind the crowd gets even more stuffy on a daily basis? In this blog, we’ll tell you all you need to know about email marketing and why it is necessary for fashion brands, even more than it might be for many other ecommerce businesses.
Why Email Marketing is a Fashion Brand’s Best Friend
Every ecommerce business needs ecommerce email marketing strategies without doubt, but some need to implement them even more than others. One of such businesses are fashion brands. Why? Let’s break it down.
1. Direct Access to Targets
For a start, email gives you direct access to your target audience and recipients, much more than social media ads and posts. With social media, algorithms and trends decide how far your reach gets.
Also, social media ads depend on a lot of complicated metrics you might find difficult to measure. In contrast to these, emails can be personalised and recipients segmented to ensure each recipient or group receive only emails relevant to them and their needs.
2. Revenue
According to recent studies, email marketing generates an average return of $42 for every $1 spent. That alone should be enough reason to rely on emails as the default means of reaching out to customers.
For fashion brands, where impulse buys and seasonal marketing are common, that’s a statistic you can’t afford to ignore.
Profit making isn’t the sole aim of your ecommerce business. The satisfaction of your customers should be a priority too. With that in mind, let’s put the numbers aside for a minute.
3. Brand Endearment
Email lets you tell your brand’s story in a way that Instagram captions or TikTok snippets can. If you tell your stories right and carry customers along, they will stop seeing your brand as a business, but as family too.
For fashion brands, email marketing isn’t just a tool but a runway of its own. Every campaign should be intentionally designed to captivate, convert, and keep customers coming back for more.
So, consider every email you send out as a chance to build a relationship, showcase your aesthetic, and turn subscribers into a community that lives and breathes your style.
4. Test and Tweaks
Whether your fashion brand is a luxury label or a street thrift wear, email marketing can be tweaked to fit your business.
There are many email marketing strategies and tips that have been tested and proven to work for fashion brands.
What’s more, these email marketing strategies can be implemented both by brands just starting out and ones that already have a corner of the market.
Email Marketing Strategies for Fashion Brands
Remember when we stated earlier fashion brands need email marketing far more than most other businesses? That assertion will be confirmed in the email strategies. Let’s get to them right away.
1. Build and Segment a Subscriber List
Let’s say you have a fashion event planned out to showcase your products. Such an event might attract a lot of people without doubt, but the invited guests will be more curated.
That analogy can also be applied to your email list. A small but engaged list of fashion enthusiasts and customers who can’t wait to hear from you is worth more than a huge database of everyday email recipients.
So, how do you build and segment a subscriber list? Firstly, you can use time popup ads on your website with discount offers for visitors who subscribe to your emails.
Another way to organically build an email list is through social media. Leverage your social media handles by teasing exclusive email-only content.
You can create content on fashion related tips and promise to continue or complete them via emails.
2. Craft Emails That Capture the Mind
Besides the basics of covering the body, fashion is all about aspiration and emotion, and your emails need to show these.
For a start, your subject line should be craftedto make recipients stop scrolling and click open.
Remember it is your first impression. Ensure to personalize the mails as close to the recipient as you possibly can.
Also, we recommend you use high resolution images of both your brand logo and products. You can use a model or two if your budget can cover that.
3. Timing is Everything
In the fashion industry, timing can make or break a trending style of outfit. This applies to your emails as well.
Sending out emails too often makes your brand annoying to customers, and sending too far and in between will make customers look for alternatives that keep them in the loop.
We recommend 1-2 emails a week, while you adjust send out frequency based on your audience’s response. You can find out the best time to send out mails based on your email segmentation.
Generally, it is best to send out mails around 9am, or even earlier in the morning as most people go through social media and emails before leaving their beds.
4. Use Automation Software
The common excuse many ecommerce business owners give for not doing this is the supposedly expensive subscription cost of email marketing software.
The fear is unfounded as you don’t need to break the bank to slay email marketing. There are platforms with diverse premium offers you can adopt for a better email marketing experience.
For example there is Klaviyo, considered by many as the gold standard for e-commerce, with its next level segmentation and automation features.
There’s also Mailchimp, popular for its user-friendly and budget-friendly packages which makes it perfect for smaller brands or startups.
Many ecommerce businesses also use Omnisend and lots of others that meet their email marketing needs. Pair these software features with analytics to track opens, clicks, and conversions.
5. Test and Tweak
Every high-end fashion brand today started from somewhere, making mistakes, learning, and growing along the way. Thankfully you don’t have to reinvent the wheel as you can learn from their experiences.
This applies to your email outreach as well. Keep testing new strategies and tweaking the ones you already implement, till you arrive at a sure fire combination that works magic for your brand.
Even then, continue tweaking and testing as you can find even better strategies no one thought of. AI-driven strategies are in vogue now and interactive elements like polls are gaining traction.
Also Read – How to Write Ecommerce Emails
Conclusion
Email marketing for fashion brands isn’t just about selling clothes and other fashion items, but about selling a lifestyle and feeling as well.
The good news is you don’t have to rack your brain to craft strategies never before known to man. All you need to do is adopt these strategies, and tweak them to suit the nuances of your ecommerce fashion brand.
If you need more in depth details and tips specific to your brand, you can book us for a FREE discovery call right away.
