In today's episode, we'll be diving into a crucial aspect of online marketing – building an email list for your fashion e-commerce brand. So, whether you're just starting out or looking to grow your existing business, this episode is packed with valuable tips to help you succeed.
Here are 9 benefits to having an email list:
1. Building a Direct Line of Communication
Unlike social media, emails land directly in your subscribers' inboxes, ensuring your message gets through. This direct connection fosters a stronger bond with your audience.
2. Building Brand Loyalty and Trust
Consistent, valuable content builds trust and loyalty over time. Trust leads to repeat purchases and enthusiastic brand advocates.
3. Driving Repeat Business and Customer Retention
Keep subscribers in the loop about new collections and offers to encourage regular visits. Re-engage past customers with enticing incentives.
4. High Conversion Rates and ROI
Email marketing boasts impressive conversion rates and ROI. Engaged subscribers are more likely to become paying customers.
5. Data-driven Insights and Market Research
Your email list offers invaluable insights into customer behavior. Analyze metrics for informed decisions and better results.
6. Less Reliance on External Platforms
Reduce dependence on unpredictable platforms by owning your communication channels.
7. Personalized Marketing Campaigns
Segment your list for targeted content. Personalization elevates the customer experience and drives conversions.
8. Promoting New Product Launches and Exclusive Offers
Make subscribers feel special with exclusive access to product launches and deals.
9. Adapting to Evolving Marketing Trends
Email marketing remains adaptable. Utilize automation, segmentation, and responsive design to stay current.
In conclusion, building an email list is a cornerstone of your fashion e-commerce brand's marketing strategy. Join us in the next episode, where we'll dive into strategies for attracting subscribers. See you there!
The world of SEO is constantly changing, and it often leaves business owners falling behind and frustrated. As the owner of a fashion e-commerce brand, you're likely well aware of the importance of understanding the latest trends. Just like the fashion world, trends in marketing keep changing.
But if you're struggling to keep up, don't worry. We've got the best SEO tips for fashion e-commerce in 2022 right here for you.
How SEO Works and Why You Should Care
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of taking steps and making changes to help your content and your website rank higher on search engines like Google. SEO involves organic marketing, as opposed to paid advertising.
Marketing e-commerce businesses can get tricky since you face so much competition. When a user types in a search, such as "women's boots" or "eco-friendly fashion," you want to try and get your business to the top of the search results.
To get your content to rank higher, you need to understand how to optimize it. You want Google to understand the content on your site, and one way to do so is to follow some recommended best practices. Google's Webmaster Guidelines is a good place to start.
So why should you care if you're on the first page or the tenth page?
People won't be able to find your shop if it's buried in the search results. Instead, they'll go with a competitor that ranked higher and landed on one of the earlier pages.
Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly
Mobile shopping is bigger than ever and will soon become the norm. Almost 54% of all web traffic comes through mobile devices like smartphones.
Almost everyone has a smartphone these days, and shopping is easier than ever from our phones. That said, you need to make sure your website looks good on mobile devices. It should also be easy to navigate to offer a good e-commerce experience.
Unlike brick and mortar stores, e-commerce stores have to focus entirely on the digital experience. So make sure it's a good one!
Optimize Your Website for Speed
You want your e-commerce site to load as quickly as possible. The likelihood of a person leaving increases the longer it takes to load a web page. Over half of mobile users will leave a website if it takes more than three seconds to load.
Three seconds is all it takes to lose a customer.
Slow loading times impact your bounce rate. A bounce is a single-page session on a website. Depending on the design of your site, a high bounce rate can be a bad thing.
If the success of your site means that users have to view more than one page (such as a products page), then a high bounce rate is bad.
As a fashion e-commerce brand, you want to offer a stellar customer experience. You want people to stick around and browse your products and learn more about what you offer. That means optimizing your website for speed.
Make Product Pages Easy to Shop
Your product pages should be easy to navigate and understand. It should be easy to browse products on both a computer and a mobile device.
Make it simple to browse colors and patterns and see information about sizing.
Product pages also shouldn't be too distracting. The focus should be on the item and not the background. You don't want people to get visually fatigued, so avoid bright and distracting backgrounds.
Make categories easy to find. If you sell fashion jewelry, for instance, you want to make sure users can select the type they want. Let them browse by metal type or by different gemstones.
Lastly, you must use high-quality visuals of your products. Customers might want to view the item from different angles or see it on a model if possible.
Make Your CTA Stand Out
Your call to action (CTA) needs to stand out, both visually and as a message. It should be clear but compelling.
The CTA button should guide them to the next step. That's why you should choose a color that catches their attention, such as red, pink, or another eye-catching color.
Popular calls to action for e-commerce sites include "Add to Bag" or "Add to Cart." After a user adds something to their cart, you might have a CTA that says "Checkout" or "View Cart" or "Continue Shopping."
Make the process easy to follow and understand, and your customers will have an enjoyable experience.
Monitor Your Analytics
You need to monitor your analytics to determine if your efforts are working and whether you need to adjust your digital marketing strategy.
Here are some analytics you need to regularly check:
Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors to a website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. It indicates that the visitors did not find what they were looking for or found the website unappealing.
Click-through rate (CTR): The ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page, email, or advertisement. CTR is used to measure the effectiveness of an online marketing campaign for a particular website.
Cart abandonment rate: The percentage of online shoppers who add items to their shopping carts but leave the website without completing the purchase. It indicates that the website may have usability or pricing issues, or that customers are not motivated enough to make the purchase.
Events per visit: The number of interactions that a user has with a website during a single visit. These events can include clicks, page views, downloads, and form submissions.
Number of new visitors: The number of visitors to a website who have not previously visited the website during the selected reporting period.
Conversion rates: The percentage of website visitors who take a desired action on a website, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or downloading a file.
Average session duration: The average length of time that visitors spend on a website during a single session.
Days to conversion: The number of days it takes for a website visitor to complete a desired action on a website, such as making a purchase or filling out a form.
Sessions: The number of times that users engage with a website during a specific period. A session starts when a user lands on a website and ends when they leave the website or are inactive for a specified amount of time.
Devices: The types of devices that visitors use to access a website, such as desktops, laptops, tablets, or smartphones.
Pageviews and unique pageviews: A pageview is recorded each time a page on a website is loaded or reloaded by a user. Unique pageviews represent the number of visits in which a specific page was viewed at least once.
Average time on page: The average length of time that visitors spend on a specific page of a website.
Source and channels: The source of traffic to a website and the channels that are used to drive that traffic. Examples of sources include search engines, social media, and email campaigns, while examples of channels include organic search, paid search, and social media advertising.
Exit pages: The pages on a website where visitors exit the site. Identifying exit pages can help website owners determine where visitors may be encountering issues or losing interest in the site.
It might sound like a lot, but keeping an eye on these numbers will help you fine-tune your marketing strategy. If you're feeling lost, a business consulting session can help define your goals and put you on track.
Create a Fashion Blog
SEO helps you bring in more traffic and build your brand without paying for ads. However, one common mistake businesses make is they don't put out enough quality content.
Creating a fashion blog is a great way to get started in SEO for fashion brands. You'll drive organic traffic to your website and boost your ranking. As a result, more people will discover your brand, and you'll bring in more sales.
This is also a great opportunity to link content with your social media accounts. Create share-worthy content and post your latest blogs on social media.
Discover the Best SEO Tips for Fashion E-commerce in 2022
We never stop learning about SEO, as the best practices keep changing. However, these are some of the best SEO tips for fashion e-commerce in 2022 and beyond.
Start with these steps, and then learn how to grow your fashion brand when you book a consultation with us online. We'll teach you everything you need to know about optimizing your website, marketing your e-commerce business, and much more!
Learn how to do market research for your fashion and clothing business
Market research is a critical component when you’re launching a product, trying to improve your existing product, or when you’re just looking to be a step ahead of your competitors. It will provide you with all the information you need to make a better business decision.
Can you answer these questions?
1. I know exactly WHO my ideal client is, WHAT their needs are and HOW to serve them best.
2. I am clear on what I sell to my clients, including any products or services that I offer.
3. I have conducted thorough market research to validate my business idea.
If you can’t answer ALL these questions, then I highly recommend watching this video. It doesn’t matter what stage of business you’re in whether you are a startup or established business you should always be performing market research.
In order to remain in business and stay relevant, you should not only anticipate change, but you need to be able to predict change too. That’s how good your market research needs to be!
The importance of market research cannot be underestimated. Market research provides you with important information that will help you identify and analyze the market needs, your customers, and your competitors so you can flourish for years to come.
In this video you will learn how to identify who your ideal client is, what their needs are and how to serve them best. You will gain clarity on what products or services to offer and you will learn how to conduct thorough market research to validate your business idea.
Learn the best strategies and tips on how to get more done, grow your business and achieve your dreams of running a successful clothing business.
In this goal setting and time management video, you will learn how to work in 12-week sprints. This method lets you focus on one major goal in your business per quarter. I will give you access to a system I created called the "Entrepreneur Success Calendar" to organize your personal and work life. It gives you a framework to work with so you know exactly what to do at the start of the week so you are better able to balance work with family life (if you happen to be a "momboss" like me).
Hello everyone and welcome to Chase Your Dreams podcast. I'm so happy that you can join me here today. This episode is about knowing who your ideal client is.
This is SO important and I cannot emphasize this enough, to anyone who is starting a business. Not just a clothing business, but any business. I would say it all starts with knowing who your customer is and who it is that you want to serve. Because it gives you the clarity of the product that you want to produce once you know who it is that you are creating the product for. Then you'll have a lot more clarity around it, around the product that you design for them and also around the messaging when it comes to marketing that product. Who is it that you are addressing it to? Who is it that you are selling to?
Top 5 Questions When Starting a Business
Just as a general overview here, I would say the top five questions when starting a business. Here are five questions that every entrepreneur should be asking.
First, what's the reason for your business? Why does it exist?
Number two, who is your customer? And this is what I'm gonna go over with you today.
Number three, what do you offer them? What is the problem that you are solving?
Number four, investigate your market, do market research and validate. Is there a need for your product, and what currently exists in the marketplace?
Number five, what's your business model? How are you gonna market your product, what are your channels of distribution?
These are probably five important questions that you should be asking when you are starting a business.
Today, I'm gonna talk about your ideal customer.
How I'd like to structure this podcast is going over the clothing brand owners checklist. This is a checklist of things to look for when you're starting a business.
It's a checklist that I put together for emerging designers, new business owners when they are starting a fashion company, clothing business or clothing brand.
These are the types of things that I wish someone had told me when I first started my clothing business. So just a little bit about myself and who I am. I am an apparel business consultant, and SEO specialist with 20 years apparel industry experience- a decade working for big brands like Reebok and Club Monaco and 10 years of running my own clothing design company called Punch Brand.
I have both experiences, I was able to apply my work experience into my business although when I starting out, I didn't have the business knowledge. I just had to figure a lot of it out on my own, but luckily I had the industry, and work experience behind me, that was able to pretty much help me to sustain my business and be able to run it for 10 years. So now, really what my purpose here is to help designers build a purposeful and profitable clothing business so they can make a living doing what they love. This is really what the podcast is about.
Know Exactly Who is Your Ideal Client
Let's get started, if you happen to have this checklist in front of you, you can look at it. We're gonna talk about number one and number two today: number one on the checklist says, “I know exactly who my ideal client, is, what their needs are and how to serve them best”.
I emphasize the word exactly who my ideal client is.
When you are trying to define your ideal client, some of the questions that you should ask are: Are they male or female? What do they look like?
So if you can be as specific as you can in terms of what their hair, eye color is, their height, weight, how old are they, are they single, married, divorced if they have any children. How many and how old... What type of education do they have and what do they do to earn a living?
These can be demographic questions, and I think it helps you get very clear and specific on who this client is. I like to even give the person a name and if there's a person that you can even think of that's real, you can find and you actually can find a picture of this person print it out and have in front of you. You can look at them and to you, it's a real person, right? If her name is Sarah, for example, then you know who this person is.
These are some of the questions that you can start asking while you put these things together. If you wanna get more in depth into it, get more specific, you can ask questions like, what type of books do they read? What are their favorite blogs to read? Podcasts? Where do they like to hang out online? Are they on any social media channels like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. What people do they like to follow online?
Who or what inspires them? What did they like to do in their free time, and are they happy with where they are in their life? As you start asking more and more of these questions, it just becomes much more clear to you who this person is. So that you are able to better cater to them, to design the right product for this person.
Then I would take it one step further. Once you've identified this person if you can try to find people out there and actual people that fit this description and reach out to them as many as you can. I would say, at least 10-15 of them reach out and talk to them in real life, have a conversation with them.
Have a call with them and if you can, in person, if not on the phone or video conferencing, but really you want to get to know this person and when you ask them questions, really listen and pay attention to what they're saying because this is gonna give you a lot of insight into the way they think, the way they purchase things.
What are their purchasing habits? How often do they shop? Where do they shop? What brands do they like? What are their favorite brands where they shop? What boutiques do they like to shop at? So, if you know that these are the places they like to shop then those are the places that you may eventually want to be able to get your line into.
So this is all part of the market research.
Be Clear on What You Sell to Your Clients
Number two on the checklist says, "I am clear on what I sell, what I sell to my clients, including any products or services that I offer. I have conducted thorough market research to validate my business idea". These are all the things I just talked about. Trying to understand where these people shop, how often they purchase, what brands do they like? What are some of the things that they find is lacking in the market that they wish existed? If there's an ideal product out there, what would it be?
Once you've gathered this information, you can then start building on and planning your line and designing according to this ideal client. Because when you know that an actual person exists and is out there looking for your stuff, then there’s a better likelihood of selling your product once it's ready for launch, and once you're ready to get it out into the market. By doing your customer research ahead of time, knowing who your client is, understanding the problems that they have and how you're gonna solve it; then solving those problems… you're gonna end up way more ahead than somebody who just doesn't do this research and just starts going and starts designing things and producing things and spends a lot of time and money making stuff. And in the end, it doesn't end up selling.
This is my advice to you, and this is why I chose this topic for my first episode is so that you do not waste time and money, which, as a small business owner those are your most valuable resources- time, and money. You don’t want to waste them. So if you put the time upfront in the beginning to do the proper research to validate your ideas and to do the market research, by talking to your ideal clients; that's gonna put you ahead. You don't wanna end up investing in $20- 30,000, in product and finding out that it doesn't sell. Don't do that! I beg you. I know people who have done that.
So yeah, this is my best advice to you for anyone who is starting out and so I really hope that you find this advice to be helpful and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me. My email is hello@glynistao.com and of course, don’t forget to go download the checklist after this episode.
