Category Archives: Retail

Email marketing: still fashionable?

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 The next time you open your email, and 90% (Lacy, 2012) of us do this every day, consider what happens to those marketing emails you receive from your favourite retailers. Do they head straight to the bin or are they a great way to keep in touch with the latest offers?

From the retailers’ perspective the advantages of sending marketing emails may seem obvious (Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick, 2012) and typically include;

  • Low cost – substantially less than direct mail.
  • They encourage immediate action – customers are able to click through to the website for an immediate purchase.
  • Faster campaign deployment – great for fashion retailers where speed is of the essence.
  • Personalisation – it is easier and cheaper to personalise e-mail than for physical media or on a website.
  • Monitoring – measuring success is everything when been able to justify any advertising strategy and email open-rates, click rates and completed sales are all quantifiable.

The current Topshop campaign is a current example of email marketing; it’s a personalised email offering the easy purchase of the look of the moment with no need to shop beyond the email click-through. Even if no purchase is made the retailer maintains a good customer relationship.

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So how does a fashion retailer make its emails stand out when over 800bn marketing emails are sent each year (Forrester Research, 2014) and only around 19% of these emails ever get opened? (Chaffey, 2015)

According to research there are key rules to follow when compiling a marketing email:

  • Make the subject line punchy and attention grabbing, e.g. ‘Offer ends soon’ make the recipient feel they need to take action now.
  • Keep it brief, too many words is a turn-off. Have a visual message with the option to click-through.
  • The email needs to be mobile compatible, 48% of emails are opened on mobile devices (Litmus, 2014).
  • When to send? – Marrs (2014) argues the best time to send emails is during the daytime when for most people they have most time to check emails. Weekends and Mondays are often avoided as people have personal lives to live and well, no one likes Mondays! However there is no universal agreement on this question with some preferring early evenings when the recipient has more time to relax and check emails.

Email will remain an effective marketing tool to be used alongside other social media channels as long as it proves a cost effective way of reaching a target audience. Industry average click rates may seem low at less than 5% but a retailer able to create interesting content and increase click rates to just 7% will see massive returns on high volume email campaigns and with a target audience of over 3.9bn email accounts (Radicati, 2014) this has to be the optimum goal.

 

REFERENCES

Topshop digitises Fashion Week

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Topshop is taking London Fashion week around the Country when they take over large digital advertising billboards in Manchester, Leeds, London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Glasgow to highlight the latest fashions straight from the catwalk. Working with twitter they will identify the trending topics from the Capitals Fashionistas before updating the Topshop cloud with hashtag identifiers such as #colourblocking and #floral. The fashion conscience may then tweet @topshop with the hashtag of their choice to receive a virtual wardrobe straight to their mobile.

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The visual impact of digital billboards has much greater potential than the traditional billboard. Static images are a thing of the past, images can change in seconds, colours change according to the time of day, products not generating tweets can be dropped or how about weather dependent content – started raining, no problem lets advertise rain coats! Ocean Outdoors who provided the screens for the Topshop campaign clearly believe they are on to a winner as they http://www.oceanoutdoor.com/ expand across the Country.

Of course Topshop is primarily motivated in this venture by the sales it generates, respondents who receive individualised tweets are able to make immediate purchases but is there more to be gained? With its potential for personalised communication with individuals who have chosen to follow an organisation’s Twitter feed, Twitter clearly increases the scope for interactive communication by organisations with their customers (Burton and Soboleva, 2011).

For the marketing team at Topshop could there be a better way of assessing the effectiveness of their advertising spend, customer reaction is immediate and the resulting sales are quantifiable which is not something that may be said about an advertising campaign in print media.

So is the future of fashion advertising now in digital? For those shoppers in the Cities with large digital billboards the opportunity to feel a part of a major fashion event through social commerce is an attractive one but the rest of the Country may have to wait a little longer. The traditional advertising platforms will argue that tie-ins with Fashion Week allow relatively short-term windows of opportunity to push sales, build customer relationships and show the latest styles. However studies show that increased customer interactivity can lead to high source credibility (Fogg, 2003) and the public is keen to participate. So it would appear that digital billboards are here to stay and those retailers looking to innovate and open communications direct with their customers will surely look for impactful campaigns that grab the interest of the public in a highly visual medium.

 

REFERENCES

  • Burton,S., Soboleva, A. (2011) Interactive or reactive? Marketing with Twitter. The Journal of Consumer Marketing. Vol 28. Iss 7 PP. 491-499
  • Mortimer, N. (2015) Topshop and Hunter to leverage digital OOH ads during London Fashion Week. The Drum. (Online) Acessed: 18th March 2015 Available at: http://www.thedrum.com/news/2015/02/18/topshop-and-hunter-leverage-digital-ooh-ads-during-london-fashion-week
  • Fogg, B.J. (2003) Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. Boston: Morgan Kaufmann.

 

The importance of Mobile Apps for fashion retailers

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It is no surprise that in the fast developing digital environment there is a great demand for fashion at our fingertips. Mobile apps are a highly significant development in mobile communications, indeed all digital communications, as they highlight a change in the method of delivering interactive services and content via mobile phones (Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick, 2012). In our digital environment more and more people spend infinite amounts of time on their mobile devices enabling them to browse for share and buy products.

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According to Ratcliff @ Econsultancy (2015), there are 7 reasons why retailers should have an app:

  • The competition has one
  • Some people just love using apps
  • Increased conversion – According to an ABI Research survey 40% of US respondents who had downloaded a retailer app said they bought more of that brand’s products.
  • You can communicate with your customers instantly – you can use push notifications to immediately inform users of information updates or relevant news
  • Ease of payment – Smartphones in built technology can allow users to pay in-store instantly (Apple are currently doing this)
  • Improving in-store experiences
  • Extra value

The goal of apps for most organisations will be to increase awareness and sales, although the latter will generally be limited to publishers or specialist software developers (Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick, 2012). Specifically for fashion retailers with fast turn around, apps enable them to communicate new products and offers directly to their customers. Furthermore this selling channel is convenient, user friendly and more personal for the customer.

 

H&M launched their first transactional app in 2013. As a user I find the app to have good usability and interaction and often use it instead of the website to purchase clothes. The scan feature of the app is particularly interesting (See the print screen images below). It allows users to scan the barcode of an item in-store in order to view, buy and share the product online. For retailers, these smartphone-enabled mobile apps represent a growing opportunity in the omni-channel (Taylor and Levin, 2014). This is important as fashion savvy consumers will want to take advantage of all channels when buying their products.

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Images from H&M app (2015)

New image recognition apps are being noticed by fashion retailers (Hickey, 2014). Apps such as SnapFashion and Style-eyes allow users to upload images of items they like and the app then searches for the item letting you know where to buy the item or similar alternatives. Although these types of apps are not always 100% effective, they do present an opportunity for fashion brands to adopt a similar feature linking to items in their catalogue.

 

However there are drawbacks of launching a mobile campaign. Apps need regular maintenance and updating in order to ensure they remain interesting, attractive and relevant. Additionally, Moth @ Econsultancy (2013) states Data from our new Mobile Commerce Compendium shows that, more than anything else, consumers want to be rewarded with exclusive offers if they download a retail app, with 38% of respondents selecting this as an important feature for smartphone apps.

 

Mobile Apps have quickly become an essential part of all major fashion retailers customer offering and look to be a permanent fixture in the future ecommerce relationship between seller and buyer. The App design must reflect the image of the fashion retailer if it is to remain an attractive and fun shopping experience.

 

REFERENCES

 

Can click and collect save the high street?

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The working assumption of many commentators has been that the growth in on-line retail, together with the economic downturn, would lead to a widely predicted demise of many high street stores. In 2013 the BBC reported analysis from PwC and The Data Company that retail chains in Britain shut an average of 20 shops a day last year (BBC, 2013).

 

Click and collect delivery allows online shoppers to browse for and purchase products on-line but pick them up in a physical store. This delivery option has become a growing trend due to its convenience and cost effectiveness and is ideal for customers that work during the week so that they don’t miss the delivery man at home. Moth @ Econsultancy (2013) states that 80% of UK consumers have reserved a product online for in-store collection, while 20% do this at least once a month.

 

There are numerous advantages for the retailer and the customer. For the retailer the problem of delivering to the customers home has always been finding an acceptable and profitable balance between customer convenience, distribution cost and security (Fernie and Sparks, 2009). Click and collect therefore reduces the problems of trying to deliver when no one is home, decreases lost or stolen parcels and is more cost effective than making peak time deliveries direct to the customer. Importantly, for the retailer, the click and collect service brings customers in to their stores and this therefore presents the opportunity for impulse buying. Shoppers are able to see what’s on offer and potentially notice and take advantage of in-store only deals.

 

For the customer there is less wasted time waiting at home for a delivery and it is easier to return goods in the store without having to repackage and arrange collection.

 

The popularity of click and collect has recently been seen by John Lewis. Customers are able to pick up their items from John Lewis stores as well as around 100 Waitrose stores. Simon Russell, director of retail operations development is stated as saying click and collect has overtaken home delivery at “just over 50 per cent over the last few months” and this grew to 56 per cent over the busy Christmas period (Telegraph, 2015). Although John Lewis’s counter sales are falling they have argued that their physical stores are an important part of their multi-channel shopping strategy.

 

 

On its own, Click and collect, will not save the high street, it is clearly best suited to those retailers who have both an online presence and a substantial high street geographic footprint. Independent shops unable to invest in an equivalent strategy will be further disadvantaged but any strategy that keeps the big name retailers in bricks and mortar and encourages customer footfall must be good for our High Streets.

 

REFERENCES

  • BBC. (2013) High street chain closures soar, says research. BBC Business. [Online]. 18th Feb 2015. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21611772
  • Moth, D. (2013) 14 reasons behind John Lewis’ 44% increase in online sales. Econsultancy. [Online]. 18th Feb 2015. Available at: https://econsultancy.com/blog/11417-14-reasons-behind-john-lewis-44-increase-in-online-sales/
  • Fern, J., Sparks, L. (2009) Logistics and retail management: emerging issues and new challenges in the retail supply chain. London: Kogan Page
  • Gosden, E., Ruddick, G. (2015) Click and collect overtakes home delivery at John Lewis. The Telegraph. [Online]. 18th Feb 2015. Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/shopping-and-consumer-news/11324611/Click-and-collect-overtakes-home-delivery-at-John-Lewis.html