Email marketing for fashion brands

One of the most competitive fast-paced industries is fashion. If you’re a fashion designer or own a fashion ecommerce company, you should be taking advantage of email marketing as a marketing channel. Email marketing offers you the opportunity to connect with your audience and build an engaged community of fashion-forward subscribers. On top of this, an effective email marketing strategy can help you get massive returns on your investment. Interested to know more?

How can you capture emails and grow your list?

First things first, let’s talk about how you can capture emails and grow your list. You’ll need a website or landing page to embed your subscription form on. You can then direct your fans or customers to the page to complete your form and sign up.

A common subscription incentive used in the fashion industry is to offer a discount on the subscriber’s first purchase in exchange for their email address or even free delivery.

Most fashion brands add their subscription box to the bottom of their website, so as not to distract their audience from their products.

If you sell or design products for males and females, you could consider adding a gender checkbox to your subscription form to help you with your targeting later on.

Why email marketing and not just social media?

Social media is a wonderful digital channel that can help you connect with your target audience, the social landscape is however, ever changing. One of the main reasons why you’d want to use email marketing vs social media is because email marketing offers you more control and is a more stable channel.

As social media is governed and reliant on each individual channel's updates and changes, you are reliant and bound by any algorithm changes and changes to features. You do not own the data you build up over time on social channels, therefore if you lose your page, or it gets shut down, you have to start from scratch. Email marketing however has been around for ages and allows you to own the database you build over time. This means you have more control over how your emails are managed and who you use to send and design your campaigns with.

Main benefits of email marketing:

• It’s a cost-effective channel.
• It’s really easy to set up and execute.
• There are lots of opportunities for testing in a low-risk manner.
• Studies show people prefer receiving promotional content via email campaigns.

Additional resource: Email marketing vs social media.

How often should you send?

How often should you be sending out email marketing campaigns? It depends on you and what you have to say. On average fashion ecommerce retailers send an email campaign once every 3 days, but the figure vastly differs across brands.

Our recommendation? Send when you have something of value to offer and when you want to create engaging experiences with your audience.

Designing your email campaigns

We took a look at a few fashion brands and their email design preferences to help you design your emails. Most of the brand’s we looked at:

• Prefer to use a white background, this makes their products stand out.
• Include strong branding and cohesive elements.
• Lots of visuals are included.

You can also view our very own unique email templates that are geared towards the fashion industry:

Style Defined

Sassy Lifestyle

Stylista

Packed with Deals

Goals for your fashion email marketing campaigns

It’s important to set clear goals for your email marketing campaigns.

Your goals can include:

• Building your own email list/ Create a community.
• Engaging with your community.
• Address a need your audience has.
• Increasing sales.
• Tell your story

Fashion email marketing ideas

• Inspire your audience through your brand values.
• Address a need: Offer tips, tricks and styling advice.
• Tell your unique story in your unique voice.
• Show behind-the-scenes footage.
• Humanize your brand by introducing your team.
• Run themed promotions with exclusive offers to subscribers.
• Curate collections or outfits for your audience to add value to their lives.

Fashion email marketing trends

As is seen in social media channels, the fashion landscape is ever-changing and the trends that we’re seeing emerge through influencers are being echoed in email marketing campaigns.

Sustainable fashion: Sustainable fashion is a hot topic and we see a lot of email campaigns focusing on this particular area of fashion. Focusing on more sustainable materials and services.

Diverse audiences: Fashion has evolved a lot over time to be more inclusive of diverse consumers, including older models, same-sex couples, different body types and ethnicities.

Fast fashion for the masses: Taking runway looks and making them accessible to the masses is a big fashion trend at the moment.

Regardless of what type of fashion genre your brand falls in, email marketing can help you connect with your audience in a personal and cost-effective way. Sign up to a free Mail Blaze trial and see how email marketing can help you grow.