The need for fashion brands to evolve and adapt their marketing strategies is more important in 2023 than ever before. Bringing the designer's vision to life and connecting them to consumers and buyers, fashion eCommerce marketing helps to drive interest and sales in your products. As such, it's an essential part of any fashion designer's journey to success.
A few fashion brands did well during the pandemic, although the vast majority needed to quickly change tack in order to stay afloat. Sadly, many didn't make it past the lockdowns. Some pandemic challenges, like supply-chain issues and manufacturing delays, remain, and because consumers are tightening their belts, a different approach is needed.
At Eventige Media Group, our long experience in helping fashion brands gain visibility and sales place us ideally to provide advice on what's required. So, we decided to put together this fashion eCommerce marketing guide to help you get the results you crave.
Using Fashion eCommerce Marketing in Challenging Times
How do fashion brand owners get ahead during these tough times? The answer is to leverage the power of fashion eCommerce marketing to nurture customer relationships, along with developing great omnichannel buying experiences.
So, to help you navigate through the landscape, come with us now as we look at how to put together resilient strategies that grow your brand, even during challenging conditions.
Technology Trends in Fashion Marketing
Inflation, inventory shortages, and reduced customer spending has caused many fashion brands to turn to technology in their search for sustainable solutions. Here's just a selection of the current eCommerce store integration trends that help to boost customer retention and sales.
- eCommerce Platforms (a.k.a. Online store/website) - helping to drive traffic, develop brand awareness and capture sales made on your website.
- Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) Tools - useful for communicating via email and SMS in a way that strengthens the relationship bond between brand and customer.
- Order Management Systems (OMS) - customer satisfaction is key to driving sales, and an OMS provides an overview of all your order in one location.
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Tools - allowing you to manage your goods as they pass through the supply chain, you the logistic info you need to keep a firm grip on your stock.
Fashion brands have been leaning into these technologies and more to address some of the biggest challenges they're facing. These options allow for tight management of every aspect of your fashion business so that no part of your operation is providing friction.
Omnichannel Customer Engagement
When you glance at the most successful fashion brands right now, they tend to share a commonality - they all embrace omnichannel customer experiences. The reason for the success of this approach is that customers don't differentiate between the different shopping channels.
They expect the same seamless journey from start to finish, whether the touch point is via email, SMS or shopping at your store. Customers can also be demanding bunch, having a high expectations in terms of the personalized service they receive.
Centralized Data is Key
Whether communicating with customers using fashion Klaviyo email marketing, SMS marketing or via social media, a seamless experience needs to be provided to meet customer expectations. However, without a CRM in place, it's very difficult to implement omnichannel experiences without a large amount of customer data.
Even an experienced fashion email marketing agency needs a large resource of constantly updated customer data in order to segment your messaging for optimal personalization. A CRM is vital to the process of creating uniformly great buying journeys for your customers.
Email Marketing Trends in Fashion eCommerce
While email marketing might seem old compared to the many new social media platforms, it remains one of the most productive channels available. This is especially true for fashion, which boasts an impressive average 22% clickthrough rate. Let’s take a look at some of the fashion Klaviyo email marketing trends for 2023.
Hyper-personalization - when your fashion brand is able to create a highly-personalized experience, you're able to stand out from the crowd. Segmentation and the use of customer demographics allow vendors to deliver hyper-personalized messages at every point of the buyer's journey.
Elements like on-page product recommendations based on customer interests, along with abandoned cart reminders and content that piques interest, are great ways to drive traffic and conversions. Info can also be communicated using their first name, making the customer feel you're talking directly to them.
Email Marketing Flows - Another increasingly popular method used in fashion eCommerce marketing is automatic email flows. However, it can be a delicate process, as everything needs to be set up perfectly in order to offer a smooth experience. You can't be there 24/7, but your email flows are, giving the impression someone is always at hand to help.
A range of auto-emails can be generated for:
- Cross-selling/Upselling opportunities
- Email subscription confirmations
- Purchase confirmations
- Abandoned carts
Automated emails like these are proven to increase revenue by as much as 320% when compared to regular emails, so you avoid them at your peril.
Customer-First Data - Once upon a time, third-party cookies can retailers lots of what they needed in terms of customer data. However, since the data privacy laws were changed, fashion brands needed to consider new ways to gather customer-first data.
In order to combat this issue, the most successful brands have been utilizing a number of methods to gather the data with the customer’s consent via measures like:
- Post-purchase feedback forms
- Questionnaires
- Sign-up forms
- Surveys
Every bit of information you glean from this kind of fashion Klaviyo email marketing strategy can be used to segment your subscribers and provide targeted, revenue-enhancing sales.
Retaining the Customers You Have
As every marketer worth his or her salt will tell you, it's much cheaper to retain the customers you have than to obtain new ones - 5 times as much, to be exact. This is not a fact that’s lost on the most successful exponents of fashion eCommerce marketing, as retention measures are increasingly being used.
This is another area in which the automation side of Klaviyo email marketing comes into its own, with timely reminders to customers that you exist:
- Countdown to birthday email flows
- First-purchase anniversary floors
- Happy birthday flows
Building customer loyalty can be a slow process that takes time and energy, and these auto-emails do much to ensure that your customer won't forget about you. When sent at exactly the right time, these flows can provide a timely boost to your bottom line.
Boost Your Fashion eCommerce Marketing & Thrive
Times may be challenging in the fashion industry at present, but as we've seen, there's much that can be done to tip the balance in your favor. It's all about offering a highly-personalized experience for your customers, as well as keeping your brand in front of as many eyes as you can.
That said, if your core business leaves little time for marketing, our team is available to drive your label forward. As a fashion Klaviyo agency with a proven track record of delivering results as Klaviyo experts, you can trust us to implement the recommendations, and then action the tasks. You can rest assured your Klaviyo setup will be maximized for sales, growth, and increased retention.
We look forward to hearing from you and showing you what we can do.
