Email Marketing Strategies For Your Sustainable Fashion Brand
In a world seemingly overwhelmed by the influence of social media, is email marketing even necessary? It is! As a sustainable fashion brand owner, having a solid email marketing strategy can help set you apart from your competitors and better connect you with your ideal customer.
Why Is Email Marketing Important?
This is an important question with an even more important answer. Here’s the thing, when it comes to email marketing, you OWN the data that you collect. Think of it like primary research and every time you gain a new subscriber because you’ve asked them to sign up to stay connected with your brand, you can save the data that’s collected.
The other thing is that while it’s great to connect with your ideal customer over social media and build a lasting connection with them through your DMs, those platforms should all be considered a form of “borrowed real estate.” Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, etc. could all really help your brand or they could decide to decrease organic reach, leaving your business struggling to make sales through your previous marketing tactics. So it’s super risky to rely solely on social media marketing when building your sustainable fashion brand.
With that in mind, you also want to remember that email marketing allows you to have a lot more control and autonomy over the content that you’re putting out there to represent your brand. At the end of the day, even if you put out the best social media content, it’s so much easier for someone to make an instant judgment as they scroll past your post, not knowing what your brand is all about. However, with email marketing, the people that are on the receiving end, genuinely want to engage with your content and hear what you have to say.
How Do You Build An Email List?
So how do you go about building your email list and get people wanting to know what you’re sending out? With so many people being quite protective over their emails these days, not just signing up for every newsletter insight, your best chance is by offering something of value. Think of it as an exchange - for the consumer to provide their email, you also have to give something in return.
As a sustainable fashion brand founder, we know you have SO much information to share, so why not try creating a free ebook on fashion sustainability? You could also try setting up a quiz and then sharing results via email, or you could do something else entirely! However, we strongly caution you from providing a discount on your products (i.e. don’t offer “10% off your next purchase when you sign up today!”) This is going to diminish your brand equity and make it difficult for you to establish your sustainable fashion brand as one with premium quality.
What’s The Best Email Marketing Strategy?
That’s a hard question to answer because ultimately it’s going to come down to you and your sustainable fashion brand. You need to take a step back, look at your brand overall to consider your core values and mission, and then determine how you want to represent your brand through the email platform. So, in terms of the best email marketing strategy… It aligns with your brand and your current content strategy.
For example, if you create content around living a conscious lifestyle and promote slow fashion as a way to do that, then try to center your emails around that! You could send out tips and tricks as to how consumers can start their slow fashion journey, highlight some of the best brands you know in the sustainable fashion space, or share your personal story on why you wanted to start a sustainable fashion brand.
If you’re still unsure about where to even start with an email marketing strategy, here are some tips:
Make sure to be consistent with your emails. Pick a schedule and stick to it, that way the customers on your mailing list begin to anticipate when they might be getting something from you in their inbox (and they begin to look forward to it!).
Try to aim for sending out emails on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. You don’t want to overwhelm people by always being in their inboxes, but you also want to make sure that your sustainable fashion brand is on their minds the next time they go shopping for new clothes.
Focus on building trust and credibility between your brand and your customers. Make sure that the content you’re sharing is not only valuable, but it’s authentic and something that you have learned as a result of your experience in the industry.
What Is An Automation Sequence?
To break it down, it’s essentially an automated sequence of emails that are sent to your customers’ inboxes automatically after they do something to trigger it. An automation sequence is there to help you as the brand owner be able to better connect with your customers by pre-determining what you want to communicate in certain situations.
For example, you might want to set up an automation sequence for when people sign up to receive your emails and have a welcome series that is sent when they “opt-in.” You could also try a cart abandonment series that gets sent out to customers who put the product in their cart but then did not complete the purchase. Both of these are good examples of how you can build trust and credibility with your customers because it’s going to show them that you want their experience with your sustainable fashion brand to be as seamless as possible.
Ready For More?
We’ve only skimmed the surface here on all the possibilities for your sustainable fashion brand to enter the world of email marketing! If this is something that you want more help with, make sure you check out our Business Consulting Services.
