How email marketing techniques can enhance fashion brands

Email marketing is an important marketing channel for brands to engage with consumers for various purposes and retain returning customers (Ansari and Mela, 2003). It can be an excellent tool for fashion brands, it is inexpensive, has high potential to drive profit, it is permission marketing and can be easily automated (Chittenden, 2003). It provides the opportunity to build relationships and sustain trust through customer loyalty and with fashion brands relying on images for attraction email marketing allows for some enticing visual campaigns. In order for fashion brands to maintain customer relationships and create engaging email campaigns brands need to send out emails worth opening, that catch the eye of the recipient and have an offering that boosts the brands attractiveness in turn influencing purchasing decisions and impulse buying (Dawson and Kim, 2010). As stated by (Sharma, 2010) impulse buying stems from relationship purchasing and with the amount of data online fashion brands have on user purchase patterns email campaigns can be tailored to the individual to promote this form of hedonic purchasing.

Increasing conversion through segmentation

Online fashion brands generally hold a lot of customer data, this information can be used in event driven emails as part of engaging users with an attractive campaign. Event driven emails are prepared using sets of triggers allowing fine tuning of campaigns and matching user behaviour. Brands that do this well have experienced huge percentage gains in email driven revenue, Totes Istoner, a rainwear brand in the US have managed a 7000% conversion increase through this technique and it only took them 14 months!!

You can consider using event driven emails such as:

• Similar product mailings.
• Abandoned shopping cart mailings.
• Reward incentive mailings.
• Flash sale notifications.
• Birthday mailings.

These types of segmentation can lead to some impressive conversion margins, each option can be personalised to ensure communication is informative and specifically tailored to engage a user.

Language Personalisation

Self relevance is a well-established means of increasing message elaboration (Wheeler et al., 2005). Therefore providing the email with the users name and adapting the language tone to something attention grabbing can increase recipient interest. People tend to orientate towards their own name (Wolford and Morrison, 1980) but be careful not to “fake familiarity” with email subscribers as it may turn off some readers but do acknowledge individuality.

The language shown in the above email is fun and tailored to the target persona, the subject line to this email was “Uhoh….. something you like has came back in stock. The tactic used here to deploy this message is triggered by on site behaviour (Lambrecht el al., 2013), this data matching and monitoring approach could be incredibly useful to fashion brands around the holiday periods to encourage shoppers to take action before holiday shipping dates and in time for promotional periods.

Layout

Great email campaigns must offer multiple avenues for the user to stay connected on all types of platforms. Designing the right email to not only gain click rate but to display platforms to take a user further into a brand is key (Gross, 2006). The imagery used in fashion branding can cause some space issues on emails as the focus of the email is to sell the products based on image so email design needs to be simple yet informative.

This email layout from Chanel is simplicity at its finest. The email represents the brand with one image, one headline and one description. Centrally providing links to all subscription methods that the brand offers.

Reward your loyal customers

Giving back to your best customers, can keep them coming back. Set up automated emails that are sent when a threshold trigger has been hit and the customer has reached a certain purchasing level. Not just a points programme but after a customer has purchased something offering a discount on the next purchase can be a good start (Experian, 2014), increasing impulse buying. Many brands run a magazine or article alongside its fashion line so rewarding the customer to cheap subscription fees or free availability for a set period may also generate and sustain interest (Coulter, 2015) as the consumer will be up to date in multiple ways.

Fashion Brand Jaeger are a great example of a generous and attractive loyalty strategy:

They run annual campaigns on expenditure triggers and the benefits available all play a part in enticing and engaging with the customer. Schemes that offer a physical reward such as private event invitation and personal shopping appointments will motivate consumers to spend that extra cash and unlock the added bonuses, which in turn gets the consumer into the store. Extending the loyalty benefits to navigate towards other brands also improves B2B relationships and can lead to brand enhancement through these types of partner schemes.

Limitations

• Spam – Permission is key to email marketing so ensure subscription methods are clear so the user knows what they are clicking and will expect to receive notifications. If you send too many emails out it can negatively impact the brand and give consumers a bad view. Customers may also send reports to the email provider which may report your brand to the web host as spamming people can cause website shutdowns so be sure to limit your outreach.
• Inactive Subscribers – Keeping campaigns enticing and worthwhile can be beneficial to your subscriber list so don’t always assume the email log you have is always going to be good. Consumers change and fashion changes even faster so be wary on investing into campaigns without some form of subscriber response.

For further reading please check out the case study below:  

Personalisation in Email Marketing – this study determines the usefulness of how personalisation can impact brand attractiveness and influence click rate.

References

Ansari, Asim, Carl F Mela. (2003). E-customization. Journal of Marketing Research 40(2) pp. 131–145.

Chittenden, L. and Rettie, R. (2003), “An evaluation of email marketing and factors affecting response”, Journal of Targeting, Measurement and Analysis for Marketing, Vol. 11 No. 3, pp. 203-217.

Coulter, D. (2015)  How ASOS built a brand mag with over 500,000 monthly readers. [Online] Available: https://contently.com/strategist/2015/04/27/fashionable-content-how-asos-built-a-brand-mag-with-over-500000-monthly-readers/ Accessed: 23rd April 2016.

Dawson, S. and Kim, M. (2010), “Cues on apparel web sites that trigger impulse purchases”, Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management, Vol. 14 No. 2, pp. 230-246.

Experian Marketing Services. (2014). The coupon report: Benchmark data and analysis for e-mail marketers. Tech. rep.

Lambrecht, Anja, Catherine Tucker. (2013). When does retargeting work? information specificity in online advertising. Journal of Marketing Research 50 pp. 561–576.

Sharma, P, Sivakumaran, B, and Marshall, R. (2010) “Impulse buying and Variety seeking: A trait-correlates perspective,” Journal of Business Research, vol. 63, pp. 276-283.

Wheeler, Richard E. Petty Jamie Barden S. Christian. (2009). The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion: Developing health promotions for sustained behavioral change. In R. J. Di- Clemente, R. A. Crosby, M. Kegler (Eds.) Emerging theories in health promotion, practice, and research 185–214.

Wolford, George, Fred Morrison. 1980. Processing of unattended visual information. Memory & Cognition 8(6) 521–527.