The purchase power behind a small fashion ecommerce email list
Fashion friends, if you have an ecommerce store and are yet to prioritise email in your marketing strategy, I wrote this is for you.
Have you ever thought:
I don’t want to bother people by email.
I don’t have anything to talk about.
I don’t have a very big email list.
I don’t have time for email marketing.
No one reads emails anyway, do they?
If any of these myths are stopping you from starting your email marketing, let’s test them out as we dive into what happened when one of my fashion ecommerce clients in Australia started to show their subscribers some love with some regular inbox action.
I don’t want to bother people by email
With just 265 email addresses collected over a number of years, this client has previously sent emails to their list just a few times each year.
Like many fashion ecom business owners, they were putting all their eggs in the social media basket. With 10 times more followers on Instagram than they have email subscribers, it seemed like a no-brainer that their time was better spent on Instagram, right?
Here’s the thing though, it takes a fraction of a second, very little effort and low intent to hit the follow button on Instagram, which translates to a much less ‘ready-to-buy’ audience.
But when someone gives you their email address and opts in to hear from you, it’s up there with giving you their phone number and a clear indication that they want to hear from you.
There’s a lot more intention behind signing up for an email list than there is hitting the follow button.
If someone joined your email list when they purchased from you, and your brilliant product made their life better in some way, they’re in your gang now. They trust your brand, they’re likely to buy from you again and they want to hear from you.
There are 265 people who added their email to this list. We should give them what they want!
I don’t have anything to talk about
If you have a product, you always have something to talk about. And the people who signed up to your email list expect you to talk about them. They didn’t sign up for radio silence.
Think seasonal retail events, new product launches, limited editions, email-only content, best sellers, style inspiration, behind the scenes, collaborations, sneak peeks of upcoming products, giveaways and other promotions…
For this client we’ve chosen to experiment with promoting their best selling and lowest priced product regularly (alongside other promotions).
The idea being that it’s a low price, low risk purchase for first time buyers. If they love the product and the customer experience, they’re more likely to invest in a higher priced product next time. It’s also a product that comes in seasonal styles and repeat customers happily purchase multiple times.
I don’t have a very big email list
Back to these 265 email addresses.
I migrated this list over from Mailchimp to Klaviyo because Klaviyo can do far sexier things with your customer data and is a really powerful email marketing platform for fashion ecommerce brands.
We were essentially starting with an underused list with limited data of email open rates and link clicks, so the strategy to start off with was simple:
Commit to sending regular emails - a minimum of two each month
Gather more insightful data to guide the future email marketing strategy
Here’s the data from sending the first four emails to this underused list, three of which were sales focused, one was to promote an event:
At 39-44% the open rates were great, the click rate above average for the apparel industry and the conversion rate was slightly under the 1% industry benchmark.
Each of these four email campaigns resulted in a sale, totalling $848, which is not to be sneezed at for a small boutique one-person brand.
Not bad for the first month!
Compare that to their Instagram, which in the same time period published 12 pieces of content, including Reels, plus Instagram Stories, and generated $895 in sales.
That’s roughly the same revenue from four times more content served to 10 times the Instagram followers over and above email subscribers.
However this isn’t about ditching Instagram in favour of an all-email strategy. No, it’s about these two powerful tools working together, with Instagram being the platform to connect with new folk and invite them to join your community of email subscribers.
Make no mistake, your email, done right, should be one of your biggest sources of revenue.
I don’t have time for email marketing
What does ‘email done right’ look like?
Two words: email flows.
Email flows are pre-written ‘set and forget’ emails that are triggered by someone doing something. For instance, when someone signs up for a discount code, this will trigger an email with the code to be automatically sent to their inbox.
You spend time upfront setting up each email flow and it continues to work away in the background without you having to do anything more (It’s best practice to try different versions of your flows to see what converts best, but once you find the one, you can let it run until it needs to be updated).
Let’s go back again to my 265 email list client’s Klaviyo. Here’s their Shopify revenue for the month. Look how much of it has come from their Klayvio emails.
There’s the $848 from the four campaigns we talked about earlier, and there’s an additional $408 from their set and forget email flows - in this case, their welcome flow and their abandoned cart flow - bringing in over $1250 in sales over four weeks. Cha-ching!
That $408 happened because they set up their email flows. Do the sums and think about how much those automated email flows could generate over a year.
More sales for doing nothing? Yes please!
No one reads emails anyway, do they?
Don’t judge other people’s email inbox habits based on your own. You may find brands dropping emails in your inbox annoying and hit the delete button, but not everyone does.
The right customer opens, clicks and buys.
You don’t need near as many email subscribers as you do social media followers to get good results.
According to Klaviyo, ‘Conversion rates are at least three times higher on email than on social media.
However, it’s those set and forget automated email flows such as your welcome flow, abandoned cart email and thank you emails that really do the heavy lifting to increase your sales.
Klaviyo reports that ‘Automated emails have the power to outperform campaign emails across the board—with 1,558 percent higher conversion rates and 1,361 percent higher RPR on average’
You can read more about Klaviyo’s stats for fashion ecommerce email marketing here
Email marketing is a long game
Small acts of implementation and optimisation in your email eco system, done regularly over time, will allow you to grow your email list, create a deeper relationship with your community, develop trust and loyalty, have them excitedly telling their friends about you and of course, increase sales.
For my 265 email list client this is just the beginning of their email marketing journey. We’re creating new email flows and testing out different tactics (with success!) to see what inspires their community to want to join their email gang, grow their list with the right people and send the kind of emails that make them want to open, click and purchase.
If you’ve been neglecting your email list but want to make it a key part of your marketing, start as slow or fast as your time allows, but do start. There are people waiting to hear, any buy, from you.
Need some help with your email marketing for your fashion ecom store?
Book a monthly Custom Made Coaching package with me to plan your email marketing strategy and get my guidance for four weeks as you implement each part of it. Take a look at what you get with the Custom Made Coaching packages here.
This story was originally written for my Good Fashion Files email subscribers who get exclusive long form content like on all things marketing for responsible fashion ecommerce like this into their inbox long before it gets published online. If you want to get on the list too, drop your details in here.