It can be difficult for any ecommerce store to grab a customer’s attention in this fast-paced, blink-and-you-miss-it kind of world. Apparel stores face an even higher level of competition, with staggering growth in the industry potentially reaching $1.79 trillion in revenue in 2024.
In 2023, 18.3% of all ecommerce retail sales in the USA were in the Apparel & Accessories category, and it is only expected to grow. While some of the largest apparel brands, like Nike, didn’t reach a $31 billion brand value overnight, many apparel brands that started direct to consumer (DTC) have managed to make a name for themselves by utilizing the most current tools and tactics to reach a high level of success.
As an apparel brand in 2024, it’s essential to be proactive to obtain your slice of the pie, and one way to do that is to add SMS/Email Marketing tactics to your arsenal.
In this article, we’ll discuss why SMS/Email campaigns are essential for scaling Apparel brands, examples of the types of messages/campaigns that drive sales, and how a Yotpo x Triple Whale integration can empower you with a bird’s eye view of your data, to make better decisions.
While a lot of ecommerce sales in 2023 were from apparel brands, this also means brands spent a lot of money on advertising. In our retrospective analysis of how Triple Whale brands advertised in 2023 (see: The Dive 2023™), we took a look at blended ad spend across Meta, Google, and TikTok and broke it down by industry and by metric. It’s clear that apparel and fashion brands pulling over $1M in sales are spending a lot of money to acquire new customers.
In fact, new customer orders accounted for 53.53% of orders in the Clothing category and 62.33% of all orders in Fashion Accessories.
With CPM on the rise ($7.55), CTR coming through around 1.29%, and CPA coming in hot ($15.82 for Clothing, $24.63 for Fashion Accessories), it seems like it’s more expensive than ever to try to land a customer.
But, we’re not going to be negative about those numbers. What we see is opportunity.
Because all of the new customers apparel brands spend tons of dollars to acquire are the perfect candidates for SMS/Email marketing campaigns that are personalized, meaningful, and send the right message to the right customer.
In case you haven’t noticed, nearly everyone has a smartphone, and the chances are very high your target audience is looking at their device every 10 minutes. In the United States alone, there were over 307 million smartphone users in 2022, with 85% of American adults carrying them around like a lifeline. With 47% of web traffic in the USA originating from mobile devices, it’s very clear that people are comfortable browsing online versus on a desktop or laptop computer.
For several years now, DTC brands have made considerable effort to optimize their websites for mobile browsing. With the volume of sales on mobile devices expected to hit $620.97 billion by 2024, this is with good reason. A poor site design could mean the difference between a sale and an abandoned cart. As the amount of customers checking out on mobile devices continues to climb, the marketing efforts should target those customers in effective ways to meet them where they already are: staring at their phones.
One of the best ways to set yourself apart from the (huge amount) of competition for apparel brands is by communicating well with potential and existing customers. Yotpo is a leader in the SMS & Email marketing space, helping brands craft unbeatable SMS and email experiences for the ever-growing number of mobile shoppers.
By creating personalized SMS campaigns and flows, Yotpo uses meaningful mobile messaging to keep customers coming back. With the ability to track every SMS and email engagement, the real-time analytics can help DTC brand owners optimize their marketing efforts for maximum results.
Some of the ways brands can utilize Yotpo messaging flows to communicate with customers are:
While Yotpo can help apparel brands craft the right message, Triple Whale can help brands segment customers to ensure messages are hitting the right target. The Triple Whale Smart Customer Data Platform is fantastic for categorizing segments of customers into Big Spenders, Engaged Customers, or Newbies that brands can target appropriately in SMS messages. As Yotpo knows, you can “wipe away that customer frown with the right message” (ie: don’t send dog promotions to cat people).
By integrating SMS & Email metrics directly into Triple Whale, brand owners can have a comprehensive view of how their SMS and Email campaigns fit into their marketing strategy as a whole. Besides streamlining SMS & Email metrics, Triple Whale has a number of features that can help apparel brands follow in Gymshark’s footsteps:
The Affluencer Hub is designed to track ROI for every Influencer and Affiliate (all together now: Affluencers). The Triple Whale way to track an influencer’s impact combines exclusive discount codes, dedicated UTM tracking, and post-purchase surveys. Within the Hub, a brand can better understand the ROI of deals with said influencers, to have real data that shows their true impact.
There’s a journey to every purchase, and understanding how customers flow through the customer journey is essential for apparel brands to drive revenue. Triple Whale’s Customer Journeys tool allows brands to see up to 10 touchpoints that lead to purchase, so brands can identify the most effective marketing channels and campaigns.
Triple Whale has a robust array of real-time KPIs for every product, right down to the variant level. This is especially helpful for apparel brands, since some products might perform exceptionally well at certain size or color variants, but not others. The Product Analytics tool helps apparel brands identify the most profitable (hero) products, so the brand can promote the most profitable products to new and existing customers.
Apparel brands have a lot of moving parts, and there are very likely multiple integrations at play. Luckily, Triple Whale allows a brand to integrate seamlessly to all marketing channels like Facebook, Google Ads, TikTok, Snapchat, Pinterest, and more, so all of the important data is available in one dashboard. The Summary Page aggregates all of the important data in one place, with blended metrics across all advertising that provide a better picture for how the business is performing.
Third-party data can’t be trusted any longer - first-party data is essential for apparel brands to have a clear picture of how customers are interacting with the website. The Pixel builds a unique, anonymous identity for each visitor and tracks their events during each session on the site, in addition to the ad the customer clicked on to bring them to the online store. This data is loaded into our proprietary attribution modeling software, where a choice of seven attribution models make it easy to understand the total impact of a brand’s marketing efforts.
Convinced, yet?
At a glance, the Yotpo x Triple Whale integration empowers apparel brands to:
If an apparel brand wants to be the next Gymshark, Lululemon, or Fashion Nova - it must utilize SMS & Email campaigns in a smart and efficient way. With the excessive number of hours humans spend on their smartphones, it’s more common (and easier) than ever to shop directly from a smartphone. SMS & Email campaigns have the power to drive sales for apparel brands, and Yotpo SMS & Email makes it easy to reach customers on their devices with personalized, thoughtful, and conversational messaging that lands. By integrating Yotpo with Triple Whale, an apparel brand will be armed with all of the knowledge necessary to scale their revenue to the next level.
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