With online shopping becoming more and more popular – the online fashion and clothing markets are also booming.
The good news is that there’s more business to go around for everyone. The bad news? Well, there are more businesses looking to take advantage of the boom.
This means everyone needs to be thinking of how they can use digital channels to best drive the success of their business.
In this article, we’re going to go over our top 3 tips for how to stand out from the crowd and best market your fashion or clothing business online.
1. Email Marketing for Fashion and Clothing Businesses
Surprisingly, one of the most effective platforms we’ve found for creating conversions in the clothing industry is simply email marketing.
Now, don’t get us wrong, you can’t get start spamming people with emails and expect to make sales.
It requires a deliberate strategy and a more delicate touch.
First, you want to consider how you’re going to grow your subscriber list. This is absolutely vital because if your subscriber list isn’t full of the people who are actually going to buy your products, you’re shouting into a void.
Consider your ideal target audience – and then consider what kind of content they’re likely to engage with.
You also can’t just ask people to sign up – you need to offer them something relevant in return.
Are they very price-conscious? Offer them an exclusive deal for signing up.
Are they fashionistas? Offer them a free “look-book” or style guide for signing up.
You get the idea. Good email marketing is about creating value for both parties. So, start by considering how your customer benefits first – and then look at how you can monetise it.
Another very important consideration is frequency. You never want to “spam” your customers with emails – there’s no faster way to make them lose interest or unsubscribe.
Email Conversion Funnels
In addition to the regular “mailer” format – another form of email marketing that we’ve seen work amazingly is creating a “conversion funnel” over the platform.
What we mean by this is setting up a “flow” of emails to guide new customers through the buying process.
You want to start with a “soft sell” – for instance sending them a special offer upfront to encourage a first-time purchase.
After this, follow up with supplementary material that adds value to them – but also makes the benefit of your product apparent.
After you’ve primed them with a few of these – end the chain with a harder sell. This is where you directly encourage them to buy your products – for instance by adding another limited time offer or informing them of upcoming sales.
Email Remarketing
Email can also have amazing results for remarketing campaigns.
It’s relatively easy to set up an email campaign that targets abandoned carts – and send them hyper-personalised emails about what they missed out on. Doing this can lead to immediate increases in conversion rates by reconverting these “lost sales”.
2. Social Media Marketing for Fashion and Clothing Businesses
Another great platform for clothing or fashion businesses specifically is social media.
Just like with email marketing, though, you can’t just start a social media profile and expect people to follow you.
You need to consider how you’re adding value – and demonstrating the benefits of your product in the process.
Thankfully – in the fashion industry this process is relatively self-explanatory. For most businesses, your clothing is going to be inherently tied to some form of self-expression of lifestyle.
Whether you’re selling sports clothing, evening wear or swimsuits – consider what the emotional benefit of your clothing brand is and focus on promoting that.
Ask yourself, how are your clothes designed to make people feel. Sexy? Comfortable? Sophisticated?
Start with these considerations – and create your social media presence from there. By doing this you’ll effectively be promoting a lifestyle brand – with the side effect of creating more sales for your business than you ever would have otherwise.
3. Website Marketing and Optimisation for Fashion and Clothing Businesses
Last, but far from least, if you run a clothing business online for long enough – you’re going to want your own website.
You can get pretty far these days with third-party platforms – you’re even able to sell directly over many social media platforms – but for maximum control and user data, there’s simply no comparison.
Once you have one, however, the battle is far from over. Your website can make or break your conversion rate – either enhancing what you can get anywhere else or diminishing it.
You want to make the purchase process across your website as seamless, intuitive and attractive as possible – in that order.
Design is important – but all too often people are carried away with design to the detriment of the website’s practical functionality.
Site Speed for Fashion and Clothing Businesses
For media-rich websites like online fashion stores – site speed is a very important consideration.
Having a large number of unoptimised images on your site is a surefire way to tank site speed – and conversion rates.
You want to be thinking of site speed when you’re making your website – not after. It’s something that’s much, much, easier to prevent rather than fix later.
Make sure your developer follows all of the site speed best practices – such as “minifying” the size of your website’s code, deferring loading for nonessential elements, optimising images and implementing compression as needed.
Conversion Optimisation for Fashion and Clothing Businesses
When it comes to optimising conversions – intuitiveness and ease of use are what you need to focus on.
Look at a typical buyer’s journey on your site – whether it starts from a landing page, or they’re brought to a specific product from an ad.
Now, consider that each additional step is another opportunity for people to “drop off”. This is the most common cause we see for websites having poor conversion rates.
In an effort to promote other things – usability gets left behind and sales suffer as a result. This is obviously never ideal – so consider your user journey early and often when making any changes.
Conclusion
We hope this helped you on your path to the best ways to market your fashion or clothing business online.
The best advice we can give, honestly, is to just experiment with all the different options – and see what works for your brand.
There’s no substitute for experience when it comes to marketing. Learning to read the market and see what resonates with people is very much an acquired skill.
With that being said – keep at it and sooner or later you’ll learn what works for your business.
If you enjoyed this article or found it helpful, check out more e-commerce marketing content on the inSyte blog or listen to the inSyte Podcast.
This article was brought to you by Syte.
We’re a specialist e-commerce digital marketing agency dedicated to driving up your bottom line.
We have tons of experience managing digital marketing campaigns across the entire fashion industry. If you’d like to defer to a team of professionals instead, feel free to reach out with the form below or check out our case studies page to see what we’ve been able to do for our clients.
