10 Tips for Online Fashion Retail Brands
Pay attention to the product’s packaging
Some online fashion retailers show attractive product packaging to visitors to increase perceived value of their products. Their effort here is to compensate for the experience lag as compared to if they were in a physical showroom. Showing product packaging gives customer glimpse into product’s delivery experience before they place an order. MrPorter ensures that the packaging delivers everything which customers can expect from a high fashion store. From the embossed pattern on the paper, to the crisp foiled logo and high quality boards and papers, to the hand finishing and fabric accessory ranges. They show their packaging on their website.
Be good at communicating visually with your customers
Talking about physical fashion stores, product display is a critical component of a customer’s showroom experience. Brand owners invest heavily on displays to make the product look larger than life. On the other hand, with emergence of Social commerce when information sharing is becoming more and more visual, you can’t go too far if you don’t have a streamlined process for content production. With product photos, imagine as if your customers are looking at your product from your eyes. Let your photos communicate as much visual information that your customers need to be convinced about the product value. Here are some of the angles to be covered when you present your product as picture to your customers: fasteners, material of the fabric, stitch, seam & lining, emblems, and brand tag.
The products you sell, should all seem to belong to the same family
In Online fashion retail, it’s important that the product selection is in-sync with brand’s own aesthetics, theme & values. Bigger fashion retailers usually have style director who oversee and edit the upload of new products (in case of start-ups, this role is played by the company owner). They ensure that the selected products are not only sophisticated, high-end, creative and editorial but the products are also in-sync with the brand itself. Not only all the new products belong to same family but also the product presentation (which at times includes the type of models who pose wearing it).
Be the style maker with fashion blogging
There are many retailers out there who have little idea when it comes to using blog to drive exposure for their business. They’re stuck in the mindset of only writing to sell whereas fashion blogging has evolved so much today that Fashion bloggers are being invited in the fashion shows and sitting in the front row. You need to evolve beyond typical content creation mindset, for example:
- Show behind the scenes in your blog
- Tell them what issues you face as a retailer, ask for help from customers
- Share interesting interaction between your employees and customers as stories
- Reach out to other bloggers. Go an extra-mile – Name an item after blogger and award them with a gift.
- Run contests for bloggers.
Drive traffic from news trends on celebrity dressing
Make sure you post what’s valuable to your demographics & psychographic even if that doesn’t relates to what you’re trying to sell.
Be open with your customers
If you screw-up, don’t censor. It’s OK to mess-up. Be open about it. If a particular vendor is consistently getting negative reviews from customers due to quality or misfits, instead of blocking the reviews, block the vendor. Take it as an opportunity to engage with the customers who placed the order. Write a blog post about it, explaining what went wrong. Your customers will appreciate it and be more loyal to your brand.
Use pop-up sign-up form
Pop-up sign-up form is one common feature used by all the leading fashion stores. If you enable a popup sign-up form on your store and a new visitors opens your website, a sign-up form emerges and greys out the site in the background to show only a popup signup form. This is a great way to increase the number of newsletter subscribers or registered users of your store.
Keep the ideal frequency of your emails proportional to your ability to deliver value with each email
Those of you who’re wary about the frequency of your newsletters to your subscribers, you might be pleasantly surprised to see how many fashion retailers are pushing the limits by bombing their subscribers with tons of high quality fashion content every day. But, why they’re able to get away with such high email frequency (while you may not) is because of their ability to offer value to their subscribers consistently in all their emails.
Avoid selling on your homepage
Fashion retailers use home page to engage with the visitors / customers, by communicating the message of the business and build relationship & trust. Leading Online Fashion Retailers don’t show product pricing on their homepage. Instead, they encourage them to experience their store from their home page before going into product pricing.
Always be new
While working with many e-commerce businesses, we have experienced how unorganized many retailers are about uploading/adding new products to their store. But first, why does it even matter? It matters because if you’re adding new products and they are going unnoticed by your returning visitors, they might feel they’re shopping from dead stock. There is a psychological difference between ‘uploading’ new products and launching them as new fashion collection.
Sell a look
Adding related products section (for example – ‘you might also be interested in’) to the product page is a popular way for e-commerce retailers to encourage users to buy more products, related to what they originally came to buy. When you see these recommendations, you might wonder – ok, I might be interested in buying ‘this’ with ‘this’ but will they go well together? It’s like saying that you can buy this tie with this shirt but how will this tie look with the shirt – go figure out yourself. Until you don’t have enough customer data and an efficient algorithm to show intelligent related product suggestions, instead of showing related un-matched products, it’s better to show a complete look.
Source + More Tips [ILoveFashionRetail]
