Our Top 5 E-commerce Marketing Tips For Your Online Fashion or Clothing Store

The fashion industry is the largest and fastest-growing e-commerce market segment in South Africa. This means there’s huge opportunity in the space, but equally fierce competition because of the low barriers to entry. 

The online fashion industry also has the highest turnover rate of any new businesses in the e-commerce space. You need to take advantage of every tool you can to make sure you stand out from the crowd and one of the most powerful tools at your disposal is digital marketing.

That’s why in this article we’re going to give you our top five digital marketing tips for ensuring your online fashion store thrives. If you’re not in the fashion industry, stick around too because a lot of these principles can be applied across industries.

If you’re ever confused about a term or abbreviation we use, feel free to look it up in our e-commerce marketing dictionary. 

1. Know Your Target Market to Optimise Ad Spend

Knowing who your end consumer is, is a vital part of any marketing strategy because it informs where you’ll reach them, what kind of messages you put out and what kind of products they want to purchase. 

This is doubly important for digital marketing, as one of the main strengths of the medium is the ability to precisely target groups of people with rich demographic filters. To take advantage of this, you want as much granular detail over who your ideal customer is as possible. 

Some aspects of your target market you might want to consider are: 

• Their age and gender.
• Their interests and hobbies.
• Their job titles or work experience.

Most forms of online advertising have scalable costs, so you can choose to pay more to show your ads to more people and vice versa. This is great because it allows you to optimise your ad spend by only showing the online ads to those people most likely to convert into paying customers. 

Also, you can monitor and see which groups of people you’re targeting are performing the best and choose to focus on them over time.

It’s worth noting that it’s possible to go too far and make your target market too niche, so you generally want to start broad and refine your target market down after running campaigns for a while to see what works.

2. Focus on User Experience to Streamline Conversions

User experience is critical for most e-commerce stores in ensuring users can become conversions in the easiest way possible. Every extra step, or a bad piece of UX design, is another potential dropoff point that could be costing you sales.

Especially in highly competitive markets like online fashion, you want to make sure your UX is optimised for creating sales as seamlessly as possible. Every lost sale due to bad UX is another potential sale for your competitors, putting you in an even worse position than before. 

Here are some basic principles every site should adhere to: 

• Streamline the checkout process. Don’t require logins unless it’s crucial as that creates yet another dropoff point for new customers. 
• Be upfront with pricing. Ambushing consumers with high shipping costs, or other unexpected additional costs, is a huge factor in cart abandonment. 
• Make your website safe. Use a reputable payment gateway and always ensure your online store is https secured. 
• Give customers choices, but not too many. You want to give customers easy access to as many sizes and colour options as possible without overwhelming them with choices. Experiment to find a good balance. 

3. Take Advantage of Shopping Ads to Boost Sales

Shopping ads are a relatively new invention, where you can display a catalogue of products from your site along with information like pricing. The most common platforms for shopping ads are Google and recently Facebook. 

Google hosts their shopping ads above paid search ads, making them a very appealing service for SEM focused campaigns. Facebook has recently launched shopping ads too, which appear in the feeds of targeted consumers. 

They’re a great tool for boosting sales because they can reach consumers right at the crucial point in the purchase funnel where they’re ready to buy.

Most contemporary consumers go through the funnel by first researching the products they’re considering purchasing, then gradually refining their searches until they’re ready to buy a specific product. 

You want to reach people near the end of the funnel with your shopping ads, as this is when they’re most likely to buy your products. 

Google shopping ads work better for branded products where consumers search for the specific product name, where Facebook shopping ads work better for other kinds of offers because you’re able to target customers based on past buying behaviours. 

4. Use Psychological Principles to Strengthen Your CTAs. 

The use of psychology in marketing is nothing new. People have been studying and applying the practice to marketing from as early as 1895, and the practice has evolved over the years along with our understanding of psychology. 

It doesn’t have to be complicated though, and there are a few easy psychological principles you can apply to make your online advertising CTAs more effective and more likely to create conversions. 

Here are a few things to consider: 

• Time sensitivity. By giving CTAs a time-sensitive component people are more likely to act for fear of missing out on the offer (loss aversion). E.g. “Sign up before 09/2020 to receive an exclusive rate…” 
• Anchoring. Anchoring refers to people’s natural tendency to cling onto the first piece of information you receive. This information then forms the basis of your near future judgements, so by “anchoring” a consumer’s mind on a specific idea or number, we can make our CTA more effective. E.g. showing “Was R499, Now R300” is much more effective than an offer that reads “Now only R300”. 
• Reciprocity. Reciprocity refers to the natural tendency people have to do something in return when somebody does something for them. This is why offers that reward consumers somehow for clicking on your CTA are so effective, as they naturally will want to reciprocate in some way and this can lead to higher conversion rates. 
• Personalisation. Always make your CTAs speak directly to the consumer. People are more likely to engage when they feel like they’re being spoken to directly. E.g. “Claim Your Free Sample” instead of “Claim a Free Sample”. 

5. Use Cart Abandonment Emails to Improve Conversion Rates

Cart abandonment emails are a system to automatically contact customers when they get partway through the checkout process without completing the order. They’re a common sight today on most e-commerce websites, and for good reason. 

There are plenty of reasons people abandon their online cart, from a problem with the checkout process to simply forgetting when their attention is taken away from the store.

Many of these can be remedied by implementing cart abandonment emails, and as many as half of all abandoned carts can be converted into sales with an effective cart abandonment campaign. 

There’s no good reason not to do it if you’re facing a lot of cart abandonment on your site. Remember that you may also need to focus on your user experience if this is the case, first-time sales are always better than remarketing sales. 

When setting up a cart abandonment campaign, here are a few good principles to get you started: 

• Show the items they left in their cart. People develop psychological attachments to things that are “theirs” much more readily than things that other people own. We can tap into this by reminding them that “this could be yours”, without using those exact terms. 
• Re-emphasise the value of your products. Include things like customer reviews or ratings. By showing them what they liked about the product in the first place, they’re more likely to reconsider purchasing. 
• Give them a reason to come back. You can include things like free shipping offers or integrations with your rewards programme; just don’t do this too much or you risk losing sales. 

Conclusion 

We hope these e-commerce marketing tips help your business’ online strategy. Whether you’re in the fashion industry or any other highly competitive online market, effective digital marketing can be the difference between life and death for your business. 

Remember:

1. Always know who your marketing is talking to.

2. Don’t neglect your user experience. 

3. Look into what shopping ads can do for your business.

4. Use basic psychology to make your ads more effective. 

5. Implement cart abandonment emails if you get a lot of incomplete sales. 

If you need help managing your business’ e-commerce marketing, whether it be fashion or any other industry, feel free to reach out with the form below: