FASHION EMAIL MARKETING

Eighty percent of marketers surveyed name email as the most important channel for real-time personalization, according to Adobe’s Digital Marketing blog. Fashion retail brands that aren’t using personalization could have an untapped goldmine that’s waiting to be discovered.

Case in point: Alex and Ani, the jewelry and accessories retailer, used to send all their subscribers the same email – but conversions weren’t high. That led them to delve into their data to get a better sense of user behavior, preferences, and interests.

With those findings, Alex and Ani experimented with personalized emails. They sent targeted emails to re-engage people who had abandoned shopping cats, and deployed personalized emails and onsite experiences with dynamic recommendations. Their efforts resulted in a 73% increase in monthly email revenue.

Alex and Ani experimented with personalized emails

2017 guidelines? As the Adobe piece points out, it will no longer be enough to simply drop a contact’s first name into a standard email: “To be contextually relevant is to take into consideration where readers are now, where they came from, and where they are going next.”

Brands will need to deliver emails that appear to speak to consumers as individuals, based on their habits and behaviors. B2B companies have been doing this well for a number of years, but expect to see some crossover into the B2C retail world.

As Eric Stahl, VP of Product Marketing at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, puts it: “There is a bright future for email in the multichannel world… Email will leverage every interaction from the Internet of Things, location, behavioral data, and customer preferences to deliver messages to the customer in exactly the right context.”

Eric Stahl, VP of Product Marketing at Salesforce Marketing Cloud

With brands increasingly targeting millennials and Generation Z, they’ll turn to email automation programs that will help them delight consumers and build trust. Look for that in the form of more abandoned cart messaging, birthday emails, and “top pick” round-ups based on past purchases.