Fashion brands use email marketing to bring their latest collection into the minds, hearts, and closets of their customers. That’s why email marketing and marketing automation are so important.
Fashion and apparel is an exciting industry. But don’t be mistaken, the competition is just one click away. So marketing has to be FABULOUS to even stand out. We want to build a relationship, but how?
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- Walk through the success factors for selection of the right email marketing software
- Customer Experience benchmark included
- Show the process and checklist of selection of new software
- Examples of real life campaigns, and details on what you need from your ESP (Email service provider) to make them a success.
This guide starts with campaigns not to miss in your marketing plan. Along with every example, you get details on what you need from your ESP to make them a success.
Then we shift gears into strategy mode, with the outline for a successful email strategy. But first, let’s dive into Fashion Marketing and the Customer Experience benchmark.
Chapters: Fashion marketing is inspiring customers to buy your fashion products. Brands use marketing to get their pieces in front of their target audience in an attractive way. We need to stay in tune with our audience and build our brand. While keeping an eye on the business side of fashion: the retail math of sales and profits. Ask a consumer “What is fashion marketing?” and most will answer: (luxury) fashion, haute-couture, and big brand retailers. Of course, the industry is much bigger. With niche audiences, lifestyle brands, sportswear. Sales channels reach far beyond brick-and-mortar and eCommerce. Think about marketplaces, pop-up concepts, in-app purchases, social shopping, etc. Fashion marketing is unique because of the fast pace and cyclic nature of the fashion industry. You can’t run the same campaigns for multiple years like in other industries, so fashion marketers need to keep up with the latest trends and find creative ways to advertise their newest products. This year, brands go into full “delight-mode” to bring a delicious online Customer EXperience (CEX). Wouldn’t it be great to benchmark yourself to the competition, learn from the winners? A 5 to 10 point improvement per year is a healthy ambition. Both for brands that are digital natives, or are now bricks and clicks. There are surely enough quick wins laying around. At its core, fashion marketing is tied to merchandising and product. With each promotion there are following dials to turn. What you’ll find is that some advanced tactics are easier to implement than basics. These are the quick-wins and tech assisted opportunities, where you can quickly leap ahead. The average 38:1 ROI of email marketing is hard to beat. The beauty of email is that it works across all stages of the customer lifecycle. We’ll run through amazing fashion and apparel email examples to include in your fashion marketing plan. You probably already have a welcome email, but let’s be honest – for most brands, it’s more of a “welcome placeholder”. With a lot of opportunity for improvement in those crucial first 2 weeks. Time for a make-over! Benchmarks show that 90% have a welcome mail, but only 29% of brands even try to gather data in their welcome program (let alone optimize their flow). What does a perfect welcome email flow look like? As the welcome campaign is completely automated, most of the work is done after a one-time setup. After that, it is mostly testing and fine-tuning to optimize it even more. This is the first rule: Don’t jam everything into a single welcome email. Your welcome program goals: This can be anything from: Personalize your welcome design and content A great example of a welcome campaign comes from this Jones Bootmaker case study. They trigger a campaign to stimulate in-store shoppers to go purchase online at 30 days post in-store signup. The email has 2 segments for gender and a personalised hero image with customer’s name inside the shoe for added attention. This drives home the ‘Exclusive offer for you’ offer. With personal recommendations and imagery an additional 1 in 60 customers bought online from just this email. Add your own charm Here is a fun first email to welcome you to the club by Tottenham Hotspur. It uses dynamic images to show a personalized shirt. What you need from your email marketing software for a great welcome series: You might remember the now-iconic 2004 campaign of H&M + Karl Lagerfelt. A unique collaboration and an exciting brand moment. People were lining up around the corner to get designer items for crazy prices. So how can a fashion and apparel brand do a pre-order campaign? It is actually not that complex. There is no need for much hype or big campaigns to pull it off. Exclusive product drops And, just listen how great this sounds: “Pre-shop the drop” on the sunday before bigger sales of the year. Let’s clear up any confusion. Newsletters are NOT about news unless you choose them to be. Newsletter is just the name we give to the email we regularly send – no news required. Newsletters are the ideal place for fashion brands to show off their new season styles. This email is an example using new technology called AMP for email. It allows subscribers to select and browse different categories all from within the email. A newsletter lets you create an experience around your brand and add value to people’s lives that goes beyond buying a piece of clothing. An example of value based email comes from JoJo Maman Bebe. Because of Covid they had to turn their potty training course into a virtual event, excellently promoted in their emails. The campaign even won the Dotties award for ‘Best crisis-communication campaign’. Being there for customers when times are rough. What content to use? Publishers are also an amazing source of content inspiration. Their whole business is about strong fashion and lifestyle content. Insidehook does this very well. They send a content-driven newsletter with a commercial touch. Their topics are gear, style, home, news, and fun. Name and Frame to add instant personality. Add context to your items Even a simple quote, tip or story added can make the difference. If you are already making great content for a blog, Youtube, or Insta – your newsletter can be the portal to it and drive additional visits. A flash sale is a short-term promotion. It’s here and gone in a flash. Fashion flash sales last between 22 – 72 hours, but it can be as short as 3 hours! Flash sales are great for a quick boost to your bottom line. That’s why they’re so popular with eCommerce stores. Just have a look at the most flashy, salesy, and profitable shopping day of the year: Black Friday. At goggles4U, almost 40% of total revenue is attributed to email marketing. The end of the season is a natural time for Flash sales, with a bigger discount. But it doesn’t need to drain your margins, in this example, they are able to give big discounts – but only on part of their collections. Fitness brand GymShark got 650,000 orders in the first 5hrs of their BlackOut Flash Sale in 2019. In the first hour sales topped $400,000! The goal of a flash sale is to stimulate impulse shopping. In fashion, you will see they are used to clean up inventory, but the influx of revenue doesn’t hurt either. Creating an engaging promotion, without repeating yourself isn’t easy. Urban Outfitters does a great job. ‘As Senior Digital Designer for Urban Outfitters Europe, me and my team are often challenged to deliver engaging promos that don’t feel too explicitly ‘Sale’. Used throughout the year over the course of a week, our ‘Deal of the Day’ marketing messages give a feeling of urgency – wait and you’ll miss it! Look at how UrbanOutfitters keeps the promotions design feeling consistent, while mixing up the type of promotion. What I like especially is the community based “Molly’s deal of the day”. Include your customers or your employees. Get inspiration for your community email from these employee newsletter examples. It builds a connection, focuses on the Urban Outfitters community, and brings social proof into it. Great detail is the promo code: Molly. Flash sales are past the stage where they were a “dumb” tactic to unload the out-of-season “leftover” inventory. It is a fine art, and you’ll see there are products made just for flash promotions. Luxury fashion retailers are in on the game and offer flash sales while keeping their brand image intact. How? – by inserting exclusivity and anticipation. Post-purchase emails are powerful for fashion and apparel brands. You just rounded off your purchase, now it is time to enjoy it. The combination of transactional, service, and marketing grabs attention with higher opens and clicks. It generates sensational results. Here is an example from the shoe brand Grenson. There is no hard sell in there, they choose to give product tips and ask for feedback. This post-purchase email example from Grenson shows exactly why post-purchase is so powerful. With an open rate of 70% of its after-sales email program, customers are clearly interested in tips on how to look after their new shoes. ThirdLove combines the post-purchase transactional emails with a fun on-brand style, prompt to browse more products, information to get the perfect fit and asking for a review. What you notice directly is that transactional emails have a different color scheme than the following mails. They ask especially about the fit, which is one of their brand promises. The review creates User Generated Content to show alongside the products (and help other shoppers). What you want from your marketing tools for automated post-purchase emails: In the apparel business, the timing of product, production, and marketing is critical. While basics have only one or two seasons a year. Fashion brands can have 4 – 6 selling seasons per year with five lines for each season. (Fast Fashion is of course a different story.) Last year was a “tiny bit” different with the pandemic. Big and small brands needed to adjust for unsold seasonal products. The trend is to shift to products that can carry over into the next season in a “three-season strategy”. Less prints and more apparel and basics make that the inventory has a longer life and less chance of excess inventory. A brand that nails the season is Protest sportswear. Their emails have a very clean look. Predefined email templates save them a lot of time and still manage to capture that “in the season” feeling. How do they do that? The emails include recommended products based on individual preferences and some very cool animated imagery. What you want from your email and automation marketing tools for seasonal emails: Shopping days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday are prime time for eCommerce email sales. Fashion brands can make a killing in just a few days. And it shows, email frequency goes up, and urgency stimulates time-limited offers. According to CNBC, Black Friday sales were up 22% hitting an all-time high of $9 Billion in sales in 2020. Every online store you ever subscribed to will want a piece of the pie. So consumers get a lot of emails. Your challenge is to stand out in the inbox. The hype has turned Black Friday to become Black Friday week(s). The reverse is also happening – not every brand is hopping on that bandwagon. You want to give your campaigns a stunning design or original touch to make an impression, along with the limited-time-only discounts. Don’t be afraid to do something different. Here are two examples of brands that took an original point during Black Friday. Allbirds went the complete opposite of Blackfriday – adding 1eur to their prices and donating it to Mother nature. For Cyber Monday they promoted caring for yourself and a healthy lifestyle by sponsoring a sports event. Reactivate your lost subscribers during sales With advanced analytics you can see the movement between active, inactive and other groups. A sankey diagram like above shows exactly what happens to your engagement groups over time. You already know cart abandonment campaigns bring back a lot of revenue. A shocking 77% of online shopping carts are abandoned even before making a purchase. Fashion brands can expect to win back 6.4% of abandoned carts on average, just from abandoned cart email. Shifting to a next level cart abandonment Implement the basics along with more advanced message filters based on: Basket value (and product margins) An abandoned cart mail can be service focussed too. 7 quick Abandoned shopping cart tips: What you need from your email marketing solution: You will lose customers over time, it is a fact of life. With the right marketing campaign in place, you’ll be able to re-engage and win-back part of them before they become ‘lost’. We really like Wild and Gorgeous’s ‘miss you’ email. It has a warm tone of voice and an inviting look and feel. The message isn’t only cute, customers get a promotional discount code to persuade them to have another look. What you need from your email marketing solution: Building a mature email and automation program is a step by step process. But contrary to what you might expect, you can easily adopt very sophisticated tactics early on. As long as they are prioritized. The first thing is to choose the right email marketing software for your fashion brand, eCommerce and brick-and-mortar store. The best email marketing tool allows you to do every campaign in your plan. So it depends on what you want to do with it! You already saw what you need from your email marketing software with each type of campaign. It is not just about finding the best email marketing software, the ideal ESP should also have: Put together your Fashion email software selection checklist Get all the info in the download What about the details and specific features to look for in your software? Let’s go through them, and mix in some expert insights. Naturally, you want to support your customers during their complete shopper journey. So you want to match your email to the stage of the individual. Fashion email automation does just that and increases the relevance of your campaigns. A welcome program, profile enrichment, re-engagement, and win-back campaigns are mainstays in email automation. The most effective automations for Fashion brands throughout the customer journey are: The best fashion email automation solution must include: Email is your direct and instant channel to communicate with your customers. An engaged list makes your marketing campaigns have a bigger impact. So when it comes to your email list, the bigger the better. More subscribers means better results, without the extra work. It makes sense to start with the people who already love to hear from you, in places you are already in touch with them. Before moving to any paid list growth, focus on customers, fans and visitors first. Make maximum use of your website and eCommerce store: Well placed overlays and smarter pop-ups show that there is a lot to win. Think about promotional prop-ups that match the currently browsed. A specific exit intent pop-up to reduce cart abandonment, and even a self learning (smart) pop-up. Have a look at these real life case study numbers fashion by Sleeknote. More inspiration in their article here. 2. Present an irresistible incentive 3. Optimize your sign up forms To choose the best fashion email marketing software, you are looking for: If you want to improve your email marketing performance, segmentation is a great place to start. It means being very intentional about your email list and who you send any email campaign to. Offer content that the audience group is more interested in, and the results are more opens, clicks, and revenue per email. For example, if you put a product category on sale, you can send promotional emails to people who have previously bought or have shown interest in that category. With strategically tailored audience segments in hand, decisive targeting becomes much easier. Here is a clear profile targeting example. Here is some more information on how ecommerce, data and profile targeting can work together like in the example. Customer profiles directly inform the product lines for your stores. But it’s important to understand that creating a segmented email marketing strategy doesn’t have to be based on just a few fixed segments or data types. Buyer personas are a go-to marketing tool in content marketing and marketing automation, and adopted in fashion business. Other than segmentation, buyer personas are made to represent a general image of the brand’s client types. Fashion brands use buyer personas to deliver tailored offerings and messages. Keep a keen eye on discount shoppers. Everybody loves a good deal. Sales promotions are the bread and butter of most fashion brands and eCommerce shops. Whether you sell online or in brick and mortar stores, promotions stimulate sales and increase revenue. Promotional emails bring an offer to your customer’s attention. What the best Fashion email tools have: Smart marketers use their time wisely. The point of your marketing calendar is to get organized, save time and produce better (and more consistent) results during the year. We’ll do away with last-minute ad-hoc promo’s as much as possible. A great promotion is well-timed, when prospective customers are looking for what you offer. In Fashion marketing, this is tied to the merchandising calendar. So with a blank canvas, start charting the selling cycle and seasons as the foundation. Layer on promotions and other activities from there. If you have the same SKU’s as last year, re-purpose campaigns, but update the visual merchandising gives a boost to bottom-line. There are different sub-categories of calendars, you can do one specific for content marketing, blogging, social, paid promotions, etc. The marketing calendar visualizes your planning and deadlines to hit. Keep your team to stick to the plan and focus on your marketing output. It is good to have a global year outline and detail the planning further by month and quarter as it comes closer. So you can plan with enough time, and produce better work and results. What you need from your marketing software: Product recommendations are a must-have for any eCommerce business. These days marketing automation goes three steps beyond “others also viewed”, “often bought together”, “popular in this category”. The right product recommendation performs better than a general offer. This goes double for product recommendations in email marketing. So we want an email recommendation engine that can handle that for you. Automated product recommendations are faster and better than the smartest marketer ever could on gut. And without any of the work. Product recommendations should result in the best matching product for that person at that time. Automated tagging and AI based recommendations Zalando, for example, has their “Algorithmic Fashion Companion”. This is a digital outfit recommendation tool, based on machine learning and AI, providing customers with unlimited outfit suggestions. The tool makes it possible to automatically generate a ‘complete the look’ feature on product pages. Crowdsourced and Personalised recommendations Below is a ranked list of products the AI suggests are a good fit for the customer. The affinity score reflects the order they will appear in the recommendation block and how confident the AI is that this is the right product for the customer. The higher the affinity score, the better the product fit. It isn’t a guarantee that the customer will buy the product, but the higher the confidence, the more likely we’ll see a conversion. We know they’ll have a higher engagement rate, so more click throughs in emails, longer web sessions, and more page views. Your email and best web personalisation software should offer: A modern customer experience means that your Marketing tools work together in an omnichannel way. Your customer can switch and pick up their journey uninterrupted in a different channel. While the marketer can use all the data gathered and coordinate campaigns from a central place. This means the MarTech stack needs to integrate the most important pieces. Avoid custom integration if at all possible Still, it is way more practical to look for out-of-the-box integrations and possibly Managed onboarding. This makes for a quick and easy implementation. The keys here are speed and cost. No need for extensive IT implementation or maintenance. Ask for other platform users that also have the same eCommerce platform integrated. That is as clear as it can get, you’ll know there is expertise. Even with popular eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento Commerce, BigCommerce, Prestashop, Opencart, etc, the depth of the integration can differ greatly! What you want at least is: Keep your list of wishes nearby during the selection Marketing for fashion and apparel is truly exciting. There is so much potential to improve and build out brand, relationships and revenue. As fashion brands use email marketing and automation to connect with their customers. I hope we took you one step closer to Master Fashion email marketing. We’d love you to download this guide for later reading and have a look at everything extra that is in there: If you’ve enjoyed the guide be sure to reach out and tell us (or your colleagues)
Fashion marketing for brands with ambition
Fashion marketing benchmark, how do you stack up?
Anatomy of modern marketing campaigns
1. The 9 best email campaigns not to miss in your strategy
1. The perfect welcome email sequence
2. Pre-order fashion email marketing campaign
3. Newsletters and editorial content
4. Flash sales and End of Season sales promotion
5. Post-purchase and aftersales emails
6. Seasonal promotions and new product introductions
7. Special shopping days and events
8. Next level Cart Abandonment emails
9. Re-engagement & lost customer win back
2. The 8 Success-factors for your Fashion Marketing Strategy
1. Pick the right email marketing software
2. Automate campaigns throughout the whole shopper customer lifecycle
3. Actively grow your email list
4. Segment shopper profiles and cluster persona’s
5. Promote your products with dedicated sales mail
6. Plan your merchandise & marketing calendar
7. Automate Product recommendations
8. Make Retail, eCommerce, and Marketing platform work together
Conclusion: Fashion email marketing success What is fashion marketing? A strategy for brands with ambition
And yes, Crocs are also a part of fashion and apparel.Fashion marketing benchmark, how do you stack up?
The yearly benchmark report from dotdigital, does exactly that. The scoreboard below shows how eCommerce and fashion brands score on email best practice, omnichannel adoption and user experience. Have a look at the scoreboard:
Get the full benchmark together with our guide here.
A fashion marketing benchmark like this measures how well you are using all the options available – email experience, omnichannel experience and (overall) user experience.Anatomy of modern marketing promotions
Email and marketing automation plays a big role here, because it is The top 9 fashion emails not to miss in your strategy
You want to carry a customer from first interest to its first purchase, second purchase, and beyond. Inspiring shopper loyalty keeps your average acquisition cost down.1. The perfect welcome email sequence
The perfect welcome email program takes the new subscriber through a 2-week email flow where the subscribers get a special set of mails. This is the first rule: Don’t jam everything into a single welcome email. Of course you can fine-tune the number of mails and optimum time period once you get it going.
Your welcome program is the only chance to make a first (inbox) impression. It can become a huge driver for email marketing success with those 3 B’s of Best Beginnings: Brand, Base, and (dollar) Bills.
1. Base: Ask, tease, and track readers so they share information about themselves and their preferences. This gives you extra insight to use and personalize your messages from the get-go.
* Filling in their preferences,
* Adding items to their wishlist
* A giveaway, contest, survey or coupon that gathers more customer info.
2. Brand: Introduce your brand, give customers insight into who you are, what you stand for, and your products. It’s all about building a relationship, where they get to know you and what to expect. This will help readers better understand your business, get a first spark of your personality, and build an emotional connection.
3. Bills: Get a first conversion, or step towards that (viewing products, create a wish list, etc.).Outstanding inspirational fashion welcome campaigns
The right mix of elements makes your welcome program shine. Your brand voice, personality, and marketing goals determine where you put your emphasis. Think about the mix of relationship, brand, or conversion you want to go for. 
2. Pre-order fashion email marketing campaign
How can we generate that same feeling of excitement for our own campaigns? Customers should be shouting: “I Need to have it!” or even “I Need to have it before anyone else!” It’s called Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). FOMO for an exclusive or great deal can be triggered in the minds of your customers. And it is not that hard.
Campaign success starts before the product is launched. Brands that understand the art of pre-order fashion campaigns know it’s an amazing email marketing tactic.
The biggest benefits of pre-order campaigns:
Take a look at the campaigns by Italian shoe retailer M.Gemi. This classic mail campaign embodies the perfected pre-sales exclusivity. The sales campaigns are previewed only for email subscribers. Their running “Made for Mondays” Drop campaign means they offer limited edition shoe styles every Monday 10 AM (not kidding).
High demand items can come back in limited numbers. Or you’ll have time to build up anticipation and quickly sell out. Similar to McDonalds bringing back the Mac-rib (so sorry to bring up McDonald, but it has similar campaign features).
What you want from your email marketing software:3. Newsletters and editorial content
Newsletters build that all-important share-of-mind and reinforce your brand. The best newsletters have you coming back to open it – every time. There are plenty of opportunities to add editorial content for an engaging mix.
Editorial content is a powerful way to: 
Adidas Gameplan A brings content into practice. High-performance gear – for the high performance lifestyle. Their topics are Mindset, Lifestyle, Ideas, Inspiration and Career. It is telling that the welcome email sends you a weekly success planner, now you know: Adidas and Gameplan A aren’t kidding.
Insidehook labels their deal of the day “Kind of a big deal”. The product promotion at the bottom is called “Stuff we love”. By picking the right headlines, you can let your brand shine through. Instantly it becomes less sales-ey and more appealing.
Content without context is just noise. We love this example from Nancy King from years ago of their recurring travel guide series. It brings the excitement of travel and destinations into the brand. It could have been a flat product promotion, but is “framed” so your readers will see it much more as an experience. 
What the best Fashion email tools have:4. Flash sales and End of Season sales promotion
How Urban Outfitters keeps the flash sales fresh
Although used to drive excess stock, the creative is still designed in a way that makes the product feel desirable, and is in keeping with our brand DNA.’
– Rachel Bedford, Senior Digital Designer
Flash sales are also for Luxury fashion
Think members-only, “velvet rope” experiences. The short promo time – makes it extra effective. It is now… or never. Combo of price incentive, fear of missing out, and scarcity.
An effective flash sale promotion series has 2 to 4 emails. Starting with a (pre)sales announcement, the start/launch email, a last day email, and a last call.
What the best fashion email tools have:5. Post-purchase and aftersales emails
Use post-purchase emails to:
Crafting an extended post purchase flow
Here we see an example from ThirdLove with a post purchase flow with 5 emails over 19 days. Obviously you need to have a bit of time to use the product before you can ask for the review.
Full size version here at MailCharts.
And ThirdLove does something smart in the Review mail as well. Showing the stars for voting inside the mail, will increase response.
“We’ve purchased from over 1,000 brands and see there’s no “one-size-fits-all” approach to post-purchase campaigns. Post-purchase flows are brands’ opportunity for a deeper relationship with newly-earned customers. Take the time to focus on these sequences— use personalization, segmentation, or otherwise— it is a huge coup for growing customer value and earning advocates for life.” — Nataša Jovanoska, MailCharts6. Seasonal promotions and new product introductions
Seasonal promotions and themes
7. Special shopping days and events
Crafting a memorable black friday promotion
We love this Black Friday example by Everlane. It is just a minimalistic text-based email – like they do sometimes to switch up their normally inspirational, designed emails.
Contrary to popular belief, the data shows that inactive customers are more likely to re-engage during Black Friday. They have a much higher likelihood to graduate to more valuable customer profiles. The rate at which an at-risk persona decays to inactive is reduced three-fold whilst the chance they become loyal increases.
Gifting
Special shopping days signal the intent for consumers to shop both for themselves and others. So think about gifting as well, which goes double for days like Mothers day, Fathers day, Valentines, etc.
What the best fashion email tools have:8. Next level Cart Abandonment emails
Depending on your brand, you want to implement a two or three-stage abandoned cart program. These are even more effective in driving purchases. 
Cart contents
Product Category
Customer Purchase data
Coupon and discount usage9. Re-engagement & lost customer win back
How to trigger the re-engagement and win back
This is where some sophistication comes in. Triggering solely on email engagement is not enough. You want to make 100% sure that you are not sending a re-engagement email to a shopper that just bought a product!
Instead, use email data in combination with the last purchase date or website visit to your ecommerce platform to trigger a customer winback or reengagement program.
What to put in these emails?
Well, every email is a re-engagement email. But for these you should do something else than normal. 
2. The 8 Success-factors for your Fashion Marketing Strategy
1. Pick the right email marketing software
On the surface, email software might look the same, but there are huge differences. Especially when comparing vendors, the differences quickly start to show.
Let’s start with the must-haves every business needs and zoom into the features that make the best eCommerce email marketing service.
Here is a list of basics that you would need to look for in any email marketing and automation software.
Throughout the guide we’ve noted the requirements and things to look for along with campaigns. Be smart, look at what you will be doing and turn it in a checklist for you to use to inform your software selection!
2. Automate campaigns throughout the whole shopper customer lifecycle.
Customer lifecycle phase Definition Your goals Campaigns and tactics Acquisition Fresh leads and potential customers Drive sign ups and traffic,
Gather data List growth campaigns, lead capture pop-ups, subscribe incentive Window Shopper Customers who are in touch, but haven’t transacted Brand awareness,Drive first purchase Welcome series
Newsletter
1st purchase programSingle Purchase Customers with one recent brand transaction. Drive repeat transactions and loyalty Up and cross sell campaigns,
Loyalty program
PromotionsRepeat purchase Customers with multiple recent transactions with the brand Nurture and increase customer lifetime value Repurchase program
Newsletters
Back in StockLoyal customer Existing customers who have not transacted in a while (On the verge of lapsing) Prevent churn Re-engagement program Renewal emailsBest customer and VIP program Lost Customer Customers who haven’t transacted for a long time Win-back/ Reactivate Lost souls campaign
Win-back campaign
Resubscribe program3. Actively grow your email list
List growth is a must-have pillar in your email marketing plan.7 Quick wins for list growth
Consumers expect you to give them value over time. But it takes more effort than that to get them to sign up, so be sure to give them a convincing reason.
Research shows that most people sign up to receive promotions, but you have a full arsenal of incentives to choose from. Incentives like free shipping, discounts, inspiration, fun, content, and community-based benefits.
Contests, giveaways and quizzes do very well on social media channels, especially if they have a viral component to it.
The more visible your sign up is, the more people will sign up. So it needs to be an eye catcher. The design, form-fields, wording, and type of sign up all influence your conversion rates. Just a different headline, visual or incentive can dramatically increase your sign up rates. Or use animation, social proof as key tactics to boost on-site newsletter signups. So it is worth it to A/B test those.4. Segment shopper profiles and cluster persona’s
Look for these audience slices to get started:
You can dynamically segment and communicate from any type of available data, giving you a lot more freedom.Buyer personas and RFM segmentation
Marketers rely on multiple personas. Use 2 to 3 to start. Fast-not-first-fashion brands like Zara and H&M cater to a lot of customers. Zara, for instance, uses an impressive 10 to 15 buyer personas. Marketers agree that customer personas and segmentation are critical. Marketing preferences, behavior, and profile-driven segmentations are most suitable.
You can tag discount shoppers in order to convert them to full-price (or higher margin) buyers. If you can predict the likelihood of a second purchase, this informs long-term decisions about discounting, lead generation and (sign up) incentives. 5. Promote your products with dedicated sales mail
Specific email promotions in fashion and apparel:6. Plan your merchandise & marketing calendar
Many will use spreadsheets (Excel, Google Docs) or project management tools to keep their calendars going. Efficient use ties it into your Marketing Technology.
Holidays and special events
Also keep an eye out for yearly holidays like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and events like back to school or start of the holidays. A good start is an Ecommerce Marketing Calendar. Don’t miss out on additional sales opportunities. It is smart to keep a yearly marketing calendar with all the key dates throughout the year to include in your email marketing and social media campaigns. 7. Automate Product recommendations
There is now AI functionality available that automatically generates tags within your marketing platform, it even scans and processes images. You can generate tags such as color, garment type, gender, and style very accurately. Merchants can enrich their product data, and target customers with the right product recommendations.
Analyzing product images and tagging means you have an additional level of segmentation. Filter product recommendations based on color or material, for example. You can use this data and recycle meta tags on your website pages to use in product and recommendation filters.
On-site product recommendations are often limited to page-level logic (looking at this page, others also viewed). Mature product recommendation tools for your website and email newsletters are smarter than that. They can offer Crowdsourced and Personalised recommendations.
8. Make Retail, eCommerce, and Marketing platform work together
A lot of integrations can be custom-made or via APIs. So everybody will say they can integrate with everything.
Each ESP sets up their features a bit differently. How they do it is something to evaluate in your selection. To make it clearer, ask for a demonstration of your main use-cases in your selection. We showed you the emails to include in your strategy (and what you need to get them done). We reviewed the best Shopify email marketing apps to help you choose a tool with great integration and ecommerce features.
In the full report here they are there each per chapter, as an easy reminder of what to look for.Conclusion: Fashion marketing success