Trying to grow your fashion brand’s sales through the roof? Here are 9 of our most effective marketing strategies for fashion stores on Shopify.
Encourage user generated content
User generated content is the ultimate social proof. 80% of brands that have employed effective content marketing strategies have been successful. It shows your audience that your customers love your outfits so much that they want to proactively post their looks. Customers want to see how your clothing looks on real people like them, not just models. They want to know how your apparel fits on people with body types like theirs and they want to see what other people have paired your pieces with to create eye-catching outfits.
And the best part is that you don’t really need to put a lot into incentivizing your customers to create that content. Most of them will be happy to post it if you promise to repost their content or give them a shoutout. And reposting their pictures and videos works in your favor - shoppers who land on your socal media profile and other digital properties will be able to see that you’re a established brand with lots of customers… and they’re not turning themselves into guinea pigs by testing your clothes.
Collaborate with influencers
Since you’re in the fashion business, this tip is for you more than anyone else. And no, you can’t really say that you don’t have the budget for it. If you don’t have a huge budget, you can still use influencer marketing and work with micro influencers. And the benefit of this is that even though micro influencers have smaller audiences than your regular influencers, their audiences tend to be more engaged and they even trust these influencers more (especially since a lot of them even know the influencers personally).
You can use sponsorships, product collaborations, channel takeovers, and much more in your influencer marketing strategy, but what you need to make sure of is that you pick the right influencers. These influencers should match or resonate very strongly with your buyer persona.
Set your store up for Instagram shopping
Instagram is a huge deal for every fashion business right now. But it isn’t just for you to post product pictures as a marketing exercise. You can even use it to directly drive sales.
All you got to do is set up your business account on Instagram, add the necessary details, and link to your Shopify store. After that, you’d connect your Instagram profile to your Facebook page, upload your product catalog, turn on the shopping feature, and you’re good to go.
But hold up, we’ve got another hack to help you get more value from Instagram. The ‘Gram is all about engagement - if you don’t keep your community engaged, your community isn’t going to keep you paid.
If shoppers have questions, you need to answer them immediately, whether they ask the questions in your DMs, WhatsApp message or as a comment on a post. That’s where your Engati chatbot comes. The bot is integrated with your Shopify store and can answer questions in your comments and DMs, and even reply to mentions in posts and stories.
Forrester has shown that 53% of online shoppers quit their purchases if they don’t get answers to their questions instantly. A Shopify chatbot from Engati, deployed on Instagram, can answer these questions as soon as they’re asked, thus helping you win more sales.
Use Google Shopping ads
Google Shopping listings pop up right at the top of the search results pages, they’re obviously going to be the first thing that your customers see when they’re searching for a clothing piece. It’s common sense that you should try to get your apparel listed high up there. Google Shopping Ads are a great way for you to make that happen and capture the most valuable real estate on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Integrating Voluum.com with your Google Ads account can provide additional insights into the performance of your Google Shopping Ads campaigns, helping you optimize your advertising efforts.
Even though Google is the 800-pound gorilla in the world of search engines, you might not want to be looking solely at Google’s Shopping Ads. It could also be quite a good idea for you to try out Microsoft Shopping campaigns.
Run giveaways
This is one of the most powerful hacks that you can use to drum up some hype and get some attention and traffic to your Shopify store. Giveaways can go viral with very low investments and can help you get a lot of traffic, leads, and sales. They can also enable you to earn a ridiculous amount of user generated content for your fashion brand.
But you need to clearly define the goals that you want to achieve from the giveaways and contests that you’re running. Decide whether you’re running it to earn brand awareness, increase social media engagement, promote certain products or new releases. This will help you frame your strategy more effectively and enable you to plan and run the contest in a way that helps you best achieve your goals.
Launch a loyalty program
Right off the bat, this might sound more like a customer retention tactic than a marketing hack, but hear me out - increasing customer retention is the ULTIMATE marketing hack. It’s so much easier to get an existing customer to buy more from you than it is to acquire a completely new customer who may have never even heard about your fashion store in the first place.
A loyalty program, when done right, can increase your average order value and purchase frequency substantially, thus allowing you to take your customer lifetime value through the roof, earning more revenue with less effort than you’d have to make to acquire new customers.
Play on scarcity and urgency
This is a brilliant way to use psychology in your favor. The scarcity effect and the urgency effect essentially involve showing your customers that supplies of a product are low or that a discount or special promotional offer will last only for a very short period of time. That stops them from delaying a purchasing decision and even plays on the fear of missing out. You’ll basically be using loss aversion to get shoppers to make a purchase immediately so that they don’t lose out on a product that is scarce or on a deal that they won’t get again anytime soon.
Dive deep into content marketing
Content marketing? For a fashion store? Okay, don’t sound so shocked. There’s a lot of value that you can give your customers. There’s so much more for you to talk about, you don’t need to limit yourself to just posting pictures of your latest outfits everywhere. You can talk about styling certain types of clothing articles, picking the best pieces for specific occasions, what kind of articles would help your readers pull off the look that they’re aiming for, and much more.
Instead of just seeing yourself as a fashion store, you can start looking at your brand as a trusted fashion advisor that just happens to have the clothing articles that your customers are looking for.
This would get your customers coming back to your store quite often, and if you place your products well in your content, there’s a very high chance of them flowing from your blog to your shop. Content marketing would even help your store get discovered more when readers send your content to their friends and acquaintances. For instance, In email marketing campaigns, it can be difficult to strike a balance between a professional and a casual voice. Here are some pointers to help you strike that perfect balance.
Kick off a referral program
Referral programs can sound basic, but the impact they can have on your business is the furthest thing from mild. You’d definitely trust a recommendation from a friend much more than you’d trust something you just read on the internet. It’s the same principle here, you’re winning the trust of new customers by simply piggybacking on the trust that they have on their friends.
If the apparel you sell is absolutely amazing, you’ll have a bunch of customers recommending your brand to their friends organically. But you don’t need to leave it up to chance. You can motivate them to refer you by incentivizing them with discounts, freebies, and more.
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