Fashion marketing is all about staying on top of style trends and matching them to the target markets through creative, highly personalised advertising. Sales channels are no longer restricted to brick-and-mortar and eCommerce.
As a fashion marketer, your plans should also include flash sales, pop-up concepts, in-app purchases, marketplaces, and social shopping. In other words, a true omnichannel strategy.
Marketers must also anticipate seasonal changes and the need to stay in tune with consumers as they prepare to purchase for the next season. All these factors make marketing automation the logical solution to keep your customers engaged.
While marketing automation is not ‘new’, it’s still the most effective way to personalise communication and be relevant to every customer offering. It can help you scale up communication without having to do the manual work all the time. Plus, it’s always evolving to become even more sophisticated.
With slick, effective automated journeys, you can consistently keep your customers engaged and active and, in turn, generate more revenue. Marketing automation tools can track potential customers across multiple channels and campaigns.
With the right platform, you can collect, store, and act upon your customer data to send bespoke messages to each individual based on your business – it’s a powerful way to build customer loyalty and boost sales.
As with nearly everything in marketing, you need well-planned strategies to succeed with marketing automation.
This is one of the most effective automations fashion retailers can work with. Around 75% of people leave something in their abandoned cart instead of checking out. But these are not lost opportunities – the fact that a customer placed items in their online shopping cart signifies their interest.
Sending them an email a few hours later reminding them of their abandoned cart might reignite their interest in the item. Statistics show that these reminders typically have an open rate of 50%, with 10% of customers subsequently completing the purchase. You could also include recommended products in the email that may be more suitable than their original choice.
This is the best automation to build customer loyalty. Tell them that a purchase is only the start of their journey with you. For example, you might send a “We hope you enjoy your new item” email with recommended fashion accessories, followed by a “How to care for your new garment” communication.
UK-based clothing retailer Boden does this well: it used marketing automation to send personalised product recommendations of their swimsuits with balmy beach images at the start of the Spring season. Coupled with a discount incentive, the timing of the Facebook campaign was spot-on.
This is a golden opportunity to show that you care about your customers, irrespective of whether they make another purchase or not.
Integrating social media ads into marketing automation with what you want the customer in the workflow to act on is also popular.
Let’s say you create a flow for customers who just bought a pair of leather boots, and the goal is to make them purchase winter accessories. After recommending these accessories through a few contact points via automation, you can add that customer to a list of people targeted with a social media ad. And guess what? The ad talks about the accessories!
It’s also possible for the segments you use for social media advertising to be signposted as you go, depending on whether your contacts engage with your adverts. Use these signposts in your automation to send emails to those who have purchased from an advert, but take care not to repeat the same ad to them.
You can also flag contacts who have clicked on something but didn’t buy anything and reroute them in your automation flow. Social media automation is a great ally for your social media strategy, as you can see where each contact ends up in the sales funnel.
Segment customers that have been inactive for a certain period, then try rekindling their excitement for your brand. Start with a simple “We miss you” email and if it doesn’t elicit some interest, try offering a discount or voucher if it’s part of your strategy.
This approach has paid dividends for UK department store chain House of Fraser. It uses marketing automation to carefully segment its customer base and target specific demographics to launch personalised campaigns and promotions.
Some brands are also starting to incorporate predictions into their workflows using churn scoring. This gives you a number between 0.00 and 1.0 (where 1.0 is a churning customer). Customers with a 0.75 churn score automatically get an email or SMS with an attractive offer and product recommendations module to activate and inspire a new purchase.
There are several other steps you can set up in your automation, but if the response is low, you might have to let them go at some stage. Inactive, unresponsive customers can hurt your campaigns down the line.
Research shows transactional emails have a much higher open and engagement rate than traditional marketing emails. Use it to your advantage!
Generate added sales and revenue by setting up automated “Thank you” emails after a purchased item has been shipped, or an account has been created. Recommend some accessories or other items the customer might enjoy. Why not also follow up on a purchase to see how they liked it?
There’s a wide range of marketing automation solutions and strategies available to fashion brands.
Discover the possibilities and let Voyado help you deliver the personalised journeys your customers expect.
We love all things customer and product data, and would love to chat about your brand’s individual challenges, and how our solutions can help.
