Engaging with customers is the best way to build loyalty and put your brand on the map. Check out our top tips for starting your own fashion brand right with customer engagement as one of your highest priorities.
1. Put Yourself in Your Customer’s Shoes
If you were a customer shopping with your brand, how would you like to be treated? Customers aren’t robots, and there’s no algorithm out there that can provide you with the ideal customer engagement practices.
Instead, there’s a human quality to engagement that you can’t ignore. Learn what really matters to your customers, and engage them with empathy to build genuine, lasting relationships that will solidify your brand’s market share in the fashion industry.
2. Make Engagement Personalized
Just like no garment fits every person perfectly, Sewport CEO Boris Hodakel says that you must make your engagement practices personalized as well. According to Forbes, personalizing your customer experiences increases loyalty, and this approach also helps your bottom line.
When you personalize abandoned cart emails, newsletters, sale notifications, and other forms of engagement, customers are more likely to buy your garments. Research has found that customers are much more prone to purchase items that they didn’t intend to buy when customer engagement is personalized, and customers are less likely to return items that they bought based on personalized engagement.
Take Tiffany & Co. for example. Why is this brand ranked highest in customer engagement? Because it bends over backward to come up with automated tools that help customers make purchases. For instance, this company’s engagement ring finder mobile app boosted its sales by over 20%.
3. Give Rewards for Reviews
Nobody likes doing things for free, but if you sweeten the deal, your customers will be much more likely to leave reviews, follow you on social media, and perform other desired actions.
Rewards systems that give customers incentives for behaviors are inherently personalized, and setting up a personalized rewards system helps you create a positive feedback loop that keeps your customers perpetually engaged.
4. Use Social Media to Share Customer Stories
Consumers don’t like engaging with brand-generated content, but they love engaging with customer-originated posts. Try retweeting a customer’s praise of your brand, and share excellent photos of your fashions in action on your Instagram timeline.
You can also try pairing reviews on your website with pictures of your fashions to create social media posts that are bound to go viral.
5. Make It Easy for Customers to Reach You
Put your email address everywhere, and make sure your customers know that they can reach you on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
In addition to your contact buttons on the top and bottom of every page of your website, try adding a hyperlinked email address to the header of your homepage.
6. Showcase Your Team to Humanize Your Brand
Nobody likes interacting with a faceless brand. While it’s obvious to you that the people you work with are great, your customers won’t know that until they see your team in person.
Add a section about your team to your “About Us” page, take headshots of each member, and add short bios. For bonus points, add some extra images of your team members at work. Customers are more likely to engage with fashion brands they trust, and humanizing your brand is one of the best ways to build a personal connection.
7. Retain Customers with a Streamlined Mobile Presence
When a customer invites your brand onto his or her phone through your app, you gain the opportunity to send push notifications and make your loyalty program easier to access.
These days, however, consumers don’t want to have 50+ apps crowding for space on their smartphones, which means you may want to rethink your mobile strategy.
While you might still want to offer one or more apps for your brand in the Google Play and Apple App stores, don’t count on your customers to download or use your mobile apps.
Instead, make your mobile site the main pillar that supports your brand’s mobile presence; with the wonders of HTML5, it’s possible to make a mobile site that’s just as intuitive and user-friendly as the best downloadable app.
8. Make Your Business Relatable with Pop Culture References
Don’t go overboard with Star Wars or Jurassic Park references, but a few nods to pop culture here and there can show your customers that you’re into the same things they are, which builds trust and camaraderie.
When French designer brand Vetements unveiled its Titanic sweatshirt in 2015, for instance, this pop culture-steeped piece of apparel made waves throughout the fashion world.
Even though it retailed for over $1,000, this hoodie still managed to sell out almost overnight, which just further demonstrates the enduring power pop culture has to shape our buying decisions.
9. Focus on Proven Practices
Flailing every which way in pursuit of the ultimate engagement techniques will end up wasting resources. While adding new tools to your kit is important, it’s more vital to build on the practices that have worked for you in the past.
Whether it’s personalized emails, social media engagement, or your loyalty system, focus on proven practices to reduce the risks in your engagement strategy.
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— Will Corry (@slievemore) May 7, 2019