There are many ways to engage with your apparel web store’s audience, from sharing content on your social media channels to creating your own compelling website content. You’re likely already doing these things, but are you missing one of the other very useful and engaging marketing tactics? 

Email newsletters are a great avenue for fashion eCommerce brands to keep their customers engaged and informed without waiting for them to come to their website or social media channels. Newsletters help brands stay top of mind, establish authority and, of course, notify readers about new or interesting products and promotions. 

However, despite all of these useful qualities, email newsletters can sometimes be overlooked because they can seem like a lot of work, or that they’re hard to get right. But like any kind of marketing, there are tactics you can follow and metrics you can use for measuring your success, including the number of subscribers, open rates and click-through rates.

Use your brand voice and keep it consistent

The best fashion eCommerce newsletters are imbued with the brand’s voice, which is then maintained and developed over time. Some brands find value in letting other staffers take over their newsletter temporarily (similar to an Instagram takeover), but regardless of who writes it, your newsletter should keep a consistent tone.

Athleisure brand Entireworld has a great newsletter that is fun, casual and inviting. Their welcome email is filled with original GIFs, funny copy and even a video of their founder. Importantly, the newsletter stays true to the tongue-in-cheek tone they’ve established across their website and social media.

Devise a content strategy and schedule

Instead of cramming all types of content into the one email, keep it simple by focusing on one topic or kind of content per email. Establish a schedule with different content focuses for different days of the week or month, allocating promotional emails to certain days and informative/educational emails to other days. You want to avoid overwhelming your readers with too much content all at once, which could send them clicking elsewhere.

Once you’ve decided on your schedule, stick to it, whether it’s weekly, bi-monthly or monthly. This will benefit your brand in a number of ways. It will create a sense of urgency and expectation for your latest release, help you maintain top-of-mind status with your audience, and avoid the spam folder. (On that note, be clear on your newsletter sign-up page about when and how often your subscribers can expect to hear from you.)

Be informational as well as sales-driven

Your email newsletter is a valuable sales-driving tool, but it should also offer content that adds to your brand and engages your audience on an informative or entertaining level. Marketo suggests a balance of 90/10: 90% information, 10% sales material. This is because consumers get tired of constantly being told to “buy buy buy.” Customers want to also learn how to style apparel and accessories, how they’re made, and who else wears and enjoys them.

Aim to strike a balance, with the idea that less is more when it comes to hard selling. You’ll likely see your informative content compelling people to click and buy. Use one main, clear call to action to direct readers to check out your latest products, promotion or content on your website.

Feature unique content

Unique content can be a strong impetus for subscribers to sign up, so try including special newsletter-only content such as backstories on designs and the inspirations behind them, or behind-the-scenes content such as outtakes from photo shoots. Be sure to include alt text on your images, as not all people enable images in their emails, and therefore they might not see what the image is. This is particularly important if your CTA is in your image.

Service-style content or advice can also be greatly appreciated by subscribers, for example, styling advice, garment care advice, or information on how to increase longevity of products made with special materials. This kind of useful content can help your brand become a trusted source of information, beyond simply a source of clothing.

Include newsletter-only offers

There are still a lot of people who don’t care about unique content, and just want deals. Newsletter-only offers are a great way to build your brand’s email list and entice people to sign up and then keep opening your emails—just be sure to mention them in your subject lines! When word gets out about these special offers (either from you or your subscribers) others will also be encouraged to sign up.

Special offers could include first looks at new collections, first dibs on sales, and subscriber-only sales or discount codes. You could also feature special competitions with unique rewards, only for subscribers. However great your offers may be, there will always be some people who want to unsubscribe for whatever reason, so be sure to make it easy for them to do so. Again, don’t risk getting sent to the spam folder!

Establish a connection with your audience

Customers who have a strong attachment to a company spend 23% more than average consumers who don’t have that attachment. That’s why it’s important to nurture your customers with this special content that connects with them and reminds them why they follow your brand and signed up for your email newsletter.

Inboxes are more personal terrain than your website or social media, so you should feel free to talk to your audience more personally in your newsletters. Bring personality and connectivity to your brand through playful and engaging content. This will help you establish longevity with your customers.

Reformation does this well with their eye-catching imagery, lively copy, and by featuring their followers in a special section of their newsletter, called “You guys being wild in Ref.” This includes photos that customers have posted to social media of themselves wearing items by the brand, and further encourages and deepens that valuable sense of community.

Conclusion

Our marketing team works with a range of fashion and apparel clients on a regular basis to help improve and optimize their eCommerce email marketing campaigns. Want help developing and distributing your brand’s email newsletter? Contact us for strategy consulting and support with technical integration and execution.

An apparel About Us page is important, as it allows customers to see the people behind your products. Anyone can sell a garment, but modern customers want to shop at stores that align with their values and have fashionable or trendy clothes. Creating an apparel webstore About Us page is tricky. There are many moving parts and sections that go into building a good one. While some companies keep their About Us page simple and straight to the point, others go all out. Instead of spending hours trying every method under the sun, we’ve applied our years of web design experience to create a list of must-haves every apparel site About Us page should have.

The Importance of an About Us Page

An About Us page is crucial for every brand, business and website to have. This page is where users understand the voices, people and faces behind the site they are viewing. An About Us page also gives you more credibility, trust and content for Google to analyze for SEO purposes. This landing page is the one place where you can highlight the biggest selling points of your eCommerce business. The overall goal for your About Us page is to leave a strong impression on your customers for them to feel about shopping and engaging in long-term business with your company.

Tell Your Story

If you do not know where to begin your apparel About Us page, the first step should be to tell your story. While writing the story of your brand, answer questions like: 

• How did you start? 
• Why did you start? 
• What were some successful and unsuccessful steps along the way? 
• How long have you been in business? 
• How have you helped others? 
• What does your company value?

If you have a brand guideline, you can pick up the majority of your story from there. The more you explain your story, the more authentic and credible you are. You will also want to keep the verbiage on this page in your brand’s “voice”. 

There are many ways to showcase your company’s story. Some brands like the Fawn Shoppe keep their page simple:

While other brands like Schuler Shoes, add pictures, designs and a timeline:

Include Links & Call to Actions

Never miss out on the opportunity to include links and call to action (CTA) buttons on any of your pages, including your About Us page. Internal links and calls to action redirect your customers to other pages on your site. This gives your customers more opportunities to see your products and other pages you want to highlight. More people visiting other pages can boost your engagements and impressions. For apparel companies, the links and CTAs you will want to include are social media, emails, product pages, careers, blogs and frequently asked questions. 

Highlight Your Sustainability Efforts

You’ve probably seen fashion sustainability problems all over the news. Many apparel companies are responsible for adding more harmful waste on our planet. Second to oil industries, clothing and textile companies are one of the largest polluters in the world – producing 20% of the world’s waste per year. Fast fashion brands like Boohoo and Shein made headlines this year as a means to show customers and other businesses that apparel stores need to change. Consumers are actively searching for brands that support sustainability. They want to see how you are helping the issue, what organizations you partner or support and how they can help through shopping with you. While we have mentioned them in a few other blogs, United By Blue is an online apparel firm that has committed to remove one pound of trash from oceans and waterways for every product purchased. Your About Us page is the perfect place to showcase all the ways you are contributing to saving the environment. This section will explain sustainable brands or collections you have as well as organizations, nonprofits or charities that you work with. If your company has any special programs or initiatives like recycling older garments or specific sustainable fabrics, you will mention it here as well. For more help on honing your sustainability efforts, check out this guide.

Explain Your Values

For many apparel brands, sustainability efforts coincide with their values, but there is so much more you can add. Your brand’s values are the ethos that drives your brand. All companies need to explain their values on their About Us page. This allows customers to see if they have aligned values. You can further define your values by showing any social causes or organizations that you support. Many consumers are looking for brands that support not only sustainability but accessibility and diversity as well. Seiko does an excellent job at highlighting their accessibility efforts:

There are many ways to share your values with visitors to your website. Schuler Shoes breaks theirs down to a second About Us landing page where they discuss the projects they support, their mission statement, vision and values:

Express Why Your Apparel Webstore Over Others

While you do not want to come off overly confident or rude, you do need to express why consumers should shop from your apparel webstore over others. In this section of your About Us page, you will let customers know why you are the expert in your field. Facts, business history, sustainability, inclusivity and unique product details or safety will be top factors  to mention. You are promoting yourself, but you want to stay humble and on-brand at the same time. Refrain from including competitor names and items and always stay respectful. 

Include a Gallery of Images or Videos

Since you are selling apparel and accessories, many of your customers will want to see what your items look like on real people before they purchase. Therefore, your apparel brand can flourish if you include a gallery of images or videos of your models, influencers or past customers wearing your garments. There are many ways to implement this idea on your About Us page. You can sprinkle these photos throughout the page, or you can have a section or carousel dedicated to showing off your products. Since inventory changes, you will want to update your images or videos after an item sells out. On each image or video, make sure to include a link to the item, so if customers show interest, they can head straight to the product page. Creating a photo or video gallery can take loads of time and knowledge on specifications and file types. A credible marketing agency can help you size and place everything so the results look professional and on brand.

Use Testimonials

Testimonials and reviews add more credibility and trust to your customers. This gives your company an extra boost on why customers should shop with you over other similar businesses. While choosing which reviews or testimonials to include on your About Us page, try to keep it to three separate captions that are short, give positive feedback and relate to your values or quality. Apparel brands that decide to add these reviews to their About Us page typically place them on the bottom or sides of the page. Make sure to preview and test out the best place to add these.

There are many moving parts on an About Us page that need constant monitoring and updating. While you can do it on your own, it will take a lot of time, effort, knowledge and testing. At InteractOne, we have a team of professionals who have been working and implementing the information on About Us pages and more for many of our high profile clients. So before you spend many hours and dollars trying to create the perfect About Us page for your apparel site, contact one of our members to make the job easier.

When you launched your eCommerce website, you no doubt envisioned your brand developing a loyal audience. If you’re indeed fortunate enough to have customers who are so happy with your products that they talk about them on social media, forums, review websites and blogs, you have an opportunity that needs to be capitalized on. 

User-generated content is defined by SproutSocial as “content created by a brand’s user,” which can be “anything from images to videos to blog posts. The user could be a brand’s customer, site visitor or social follower.” This content is extremely valuable to your business because it’s basically one shopper telling another that your products are worth spending money on. 

As we’ve outlined before, engagement on social media builds trust. User-generated content helps brands achieve trust by demonstrating evidence of value through social proof. This helps you increase traffic, engagement and conversions on your eCommerce website. Read on for tactics for how you can do this by utilizing user-generated content.

Feature your customers via social media posts

Posts on channels like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter are the main types of user-generated content that brands can leverage. They could include selfies and other images of customers wearing your products, unboxing videos and review videos. By reposting customer content on your own social media channels and featuring it on your website on a dedicated page, you open your brand up to many more potential customers.

Some brands choose to give their customers a nickname when they repost their audience’s content, for example, Réalisation Par. When they post a photo of a customer wearing their clothing they call them “Dreamgirl.” When it comes to Facebook, try to share users’ posts that have viral potential—videos are great in this instance. And with Twitter, make sure you share images as well as glowing written reviews, as visual content really stands out on the platform.

Start a hashtag campaign

The key to creating a successful hashtag campaign is to be clear and engaging. Make it easy and fun for your audience to participate and they will be much more likely to engage with your hashtag. It can also help to have something that incentivizes and motivates your audience to engage. That’s why hashtag campaigns that also involve a giveaway or some form of competition are so effective. Another thing to keep in mind when creating a hashtag is simplicity. Choose a hashtag that people can spell and read easily on their phone. Too many letters or multiple words in a hashtag will scare off users and cause plenty of posts to go unnoticed due to misspelling. A hashtag such as #LoveYourOutfit may sound great in a marketing meeting, but in execution it could cause problems. How does the hashtag look without capitalization, which many users won’t attempt? #loveyouroutfit will look like a mess of letters when seen in a social media timeline. Where as #LoveYou is much simpler and still applicable. Brevity is the soul of wit, especially when it comes to hashtags.

You can also try a competition where all the customer has to do to enter is post a photo with your chosen hashtag, and where you declare a winner at the end who gets an exclusive item as a prize. Make the terms and conditions clear, including how you will pick the winner (for example, pick at random, or pick the one that achieves the most likes), and a clear end date for the competition. The legalese that’s required for these types of competitions is important to get right and it can be tricky to do so. That’s why we recommend partnering with a firm that has experience in implementing and monitoring digital contests.

Ask customers to answer questions in a Q&A

Set up a question and answer (Q&A) page or section on your website, and ask your customers to answer questions about your products. This is a tactic that has helped Amazon become the eCommerce juggernaut it is today, as Q&As are effectively FAQ for each product. The more questions your page can answer without the shopper actually having to contact your customer service, the more likely they will be to convert. In a study by Aspect Software, 69% of millennials said that they feel good about a company when they’re able to resolve an issue on their own.

You can ask your audience to answer questions via your social media channels, your newsletter, in pop-up ads on your website, and via email after they make a purchase. You could also have pop-up ads on your website that offer a discount in exchange for their feedback.

Encourage customers to share photos in their reviews

Shoppers can be distrustful of models or paid advertising, because nearly everyone has had the experience of  ordering products online only to find they don’t live up to expectation. Often, in the case of apparel, it doesn’t fit as expected. But when a customer is able to see a product in a natural environment—in another person’s home, or on someone with a similar body to them—it can make all the difference, and be the tipping point to purchase.

So when you enable product page reviews, be sure to enable—and encourage—photos in reviews. Yotpo is a reliable service that we often use when building customer reviews and Q&A sections for our clients’ websites.

Share blogs that feature your products

Much the same as reposting satisfied customer selfies and review videos, sharing positive reviews and articles by bloggers that feature your products will do wonders for reinforcing your brand. By showing that a person or publication considered you worthy of writing about and that they took the time to share your products on their platform, you will gain even more trust and credibility.

Acknowledging your press and reviews on your website and social media also shows that you’re paying attention to what’s being said about you and that you care about feedback and criticism. Engagement is more important than ever nowadays, so prove that you’re active and open to it.

Get high-profile customers to take over your social media

Social media takeovers can help build trust and engagement, which leads to increased conversion rates. Often they are done with high-profile social media users, or influencers, as a way to grow followings and social clout, but they can also be done by employees as a way to share more behind-the-scenes content. However, if you’re looking to gain traffic and conversions, you’re best to go with someone with a following themselves. Read our recent blog about the rise and power of nano-influencers, which are a more affordable type of social media influencer you could utilize here.

Set a clear framework on what is expected in terms of timing, types of content and the number of posts. Will it be just Instagram Stories or grid posts as well? Or will you stick with Facebook or Twitter, or another platform? Whichever you choose, be sure to communicate clear guidelines on your brand’s do’s and don’ts.

And finally, use a third-party social monitoring platform such as Hootsuite to keep an eye on all of your pages, assets and interactions. This means you won’t have to be manually checking all of your platforms constantly, which will save you time and provide more analytics to make your reporting easier.

Conclusion

Developing an effective social marketing program takes experience, strategy and lots of fine-tuning. At InteractOne we work with our clients to review and improve their social strategies to increase engagement and conversion. If you’d like to learn more about how to utilize user-generated content to grow your audience and sales, please get in touch.