With both luxury brands and high street retailers looking online to strengthen their brands, a new study offers advice on where companies should focus their digital marketing budgets if they are to seize the available opportunities.
In 2017, online fashion sales in the UK reached GBP16.2bn (US$22.6bn), according to ‘Fast-paced Fashion: The Digital Forecast 2018,‘ a white paper published by digital agency Mediaworks. By 2022, this figure is expected to soar by 79%.
The white paper, however, found that 50% of retailers had experienced a drop in in-store sales, meaning digital appears to offer the greatest area of opportunity for fashion retailers going forward.
Mediaworks has identified six areas for retailers to focus on over the next 12 months if they are to seize the digital opportunity:
Mobile first
Not only can mobile readiness help retailers capture a greater share of online sales, it can also boost in-store performance. 76% of people visit a business after a product search on a smartphone. Nearly a third results in a conversion.
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All fashion retailers should have a mobile-friendly site in place by now – if not, implementing one is imperative. For those that do already, the priority becomes refining and building this mobile presence to deliver a superior user experience. Consider creating an app to diversify your brand, use conversion rate optimisation to improve the user journey and further your mobile presence through social ads.
Journey personalisation
By 2020, customer experience will become the main reason a customer will choose one brand over another, overtaking both cost and product. This can be done through journey personalisation, which essentially helps you deliver an in-store experience online.
Crucial to this will be your adoption of advanced technology, such as VR (Virtual Reality), AR (Augmented Reality) and MR (Mixed Reality), which could lead to everything from virtual changing rooms to product AR scans. Artificial intelligence and understanding customer preferences and habits will also be important.
Voice search
More voice searches are being carried out than ever before, occupying 40% of all searches. This is a result of its falling error rate (8% down from 20%), the growth of mobile devices and the rise of personalisation.
To cater to more conversational search behaviours, content should be optimised around long-tail search phrases. Review your existing content’s style, format and flow. Also consider implementing visual search, something retailers such as John Lewis and Boohoo.com are already experimenting with.
Customer profiling
Successful digital marketing campaigns have always hinged on a brand’s understanding of their customers. In the near future, customers will become more willing to share data, which retailers can use to build a more comprehensive data model. Using purchase history and customer feedback can inform how to encourage additional sales from others within the demographic. Likewise, unify your online and offline efforts through local inventory ads.
Data
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rolls out in May 2018, so data and its use will be important for fashion retailers. A key process will be transitioning from segment-based to signal-based data, which will ultimately help you gain greater visibility of the success your digital marketing strategy is delivering. Prioritise contextual marketing to help you time the promotion of products and services, using data from each of your digital touchpoints to help you do so.
Attribution
Around 90% of advertisers believe attribution is important for marketing success. Fewer than 27% of marketers use multi-touch attribution models, which can help you properly attribute value across devices and channels. Start by reviewing the existing attribution model you have in place: does it successfully give value to all channels and stages of the purchasing funnel?
Click here to access the full white paper.
