Category Archives: Topshop

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.