Email marketing is comparatively inexpensive, yet it is one of the most neglected marketing channels. This made us delve deeper into how online fashion retailers manage their email marketing.
For an ecommerce fashion brand, email becomes one of the most important communication channels with your customer. Why? Email marketing lets brands reach out to their prospective and current customers with offers, news, product launch and more.
For a more detailed discussion, we picked 5 ecommerce fashion brands – Jabong, KOOVS, Myntra, Styletag and FashionAndYou. We chose 5 factors that must be kept in mind by such fashion brands while sending emails. Apart from this, we will be analyzing emails in terms of relevance and personalization.
If you are a fashion ecommerce brand engaging in email marketing (or haven’t yet), use these factors to make a checklist against what you are doing right and where you can improve.
Frequency Of Emailing
This includes all the transactional emails, the promotional emails, and the cart abandonment emails.
With emails, less is more. After all, you wouldn’t want to spam your customers’ inbox with too much of ‘you’ unless it is a time-sensitive, relevant email, like a transactional email.
The confusion of ‘more’ or ‘less’:
According to Smartinsights, if you ‘over-mail’, the customer will ‘emotionally unsubscribe’. And if you ‘under-mail’, then you will lose out on sale opportunities.
Jabong likes to remind regularly and sends emails every day. How does that work for them?
They send a different offer each day.
The downside: Although the opt-in for the newsletter was maximum 3 emails per week, they bombarded the subscriber’s inbox with their offers on a daily basis.
Subject Lines- First Point Of Contact
The days of ‘ALL CAPs’ are gone. Now it is the age of relevance.
To win an open rate, you have to be gentle and subtle in your subject line without overselling yourself. Remember, that people respond to phrases that we use in our everyday life because it is more human.
What to consider while crafting a subject line? Personalization, relevance, length, punctuations and more. The key is to describe what is inside your mail, crisply.
Let’s take an example of Jabong (red), StyleTag (neon green) and FashionAndYou (blue)-
Notice how Jabong consistently keeps a short subject line that is crisp and friendly.
Styletag and FashionAndYou opted for longer subject lines, jammed with offers to such an extent that the subject line was truncated automatically.
If you were to draw a comparison among them, Jabong’s subject line would pass off as more friendly and appropriate.
Content- The Art Of A Good Welcome
When you get your mail opened, welcome your customer with an attractive visual content.
Provide a relevant landing page in the CTA of the visual. Avoid linking everything to the home page. Your graphic should be attractive and the text should be highly visible. Do not forget to optimize the same for mobile views as 41% of emails are opened and read on mobile.
Here is a look at KOOVS’ newsletter. They have definitely nailed subject lines, and content too.
They leveraged a celebrity’s fashion sense in their subject line and welcomed the subscriber with a beautiful graphic, and well-placed CTAs that lead to respective pages.
Personalization- Are Your Emails Connecting Or Commercializing?
When you mail your customer, you are not just mailing an offer or information, you are mailing experiences.
How will you personalize through your email newsletters?
Address the customer by name, or make recommendations based on browsing behavior. Don’t just sell, give fashion tips on colors, trends etc. for some days. It is the extra effort in being friendly that makes all the difference to be more engaging and give the customer a great experience.
Jabong’s personalization strategy is friendly, trendy and smart! From dressing tips to trend alerts, their promotional emails are attention grabbing. Here is a look at their smart tips-
Once the subscriber signed up for their newsletter, Jabong sent recommendations based the browsing behavior such as – the types of dresses, the colors, and the most visited categories.
This is where Jabong and KOOVS draw in their similarity. Instead of sending recommendations that are specific to the subscriber, they chose to send it in the form of tips and trends. Against each of their tips, they have a well-placed CTA to lead the subscriber to the store.
Why is personalization in emails important? Personalized emails increase CTRs and conversion rates by 14% and 10%, respectively.
Cart Abandonment Emails- A Second Chance
It is frustrating is when customers abandon their cart, but rewarding when you can make them complete their purchase with cart abandonment emails.
According to SalesCycle, ecommerce brands who sent cart abandonment emails received 46% open rate leading to 35% of the returning customers completing their checkout processes!
Cart abandonment emails, ideally, should be sent soon after the customer abandons the cart, and a follow-up email of the same in consecutive days. (Read our 10 Best Practices Of Abandoned Cart Emails for an in-depth explanation.)
Must include elements of a cart abandonment email:
- Image of the abandoned products in the cart
- Recommendations
- Calls To Action.
For a better understanding, let’s take a look at Myntra’s abandoned cart email.
This email was sent with a very clear subject line within 24 hours of abandoning the cart-
Hey <subscriber name>, you left these awesome items in your bag, grab them now.
Myntra leveraged urgency and also recommended relevant products. The details of the abandoned cart product were clearly mentioned with unmissable CTAs linked directly to the checkout. If your brand hasn’t started taking them seriously, then you should take this cue from Myntra.
Therefore, send emails at the right time and remind your customer that his shopping cart is waiting for his final checkout.
These are the 5 basic factors that fashion brands should consider in executing their email marketing. Even if you are a smaller fashion brand, with these context in mind, you can slowly work your way up to achieving more click-through rates, ROI, and a successful email marketing campaign.
Just looking fashionable is not enough. Be fashionable in the way you market yourself. Set a trend!
[Contributed by TargetingMantra]
