Apparel and Fashion Email Strategies – Summer 2010

What are the most common email strategies fashion marketers employ?

How often do they send emails?

When do they send them?

What do they say in their subject lines?

We analyzed 231 emails from 100 fashion marketers from a one week period beginning July 10, 2010 to get some of these answers.

How Often Do Fashion Retailers and Designers Send Emails?

Ok, who sent 14 emails in one week?  Bluefly!  Think carefully before subscribing to their email list!  And how about the two sending eight per week? Ideeli and Juicy Couture.  Here’s the rundown of the most frequent emailers:

What Time of the Week and What Time of Day Do Fashion Marketers Send Emails?

The day of the week numbers contain no surprises and fit the general pattern of email marketing in most industries:

As for time of day, there’s an obvious bump at noon. Presumably marketers are believing that most of these people are reading their emails at work and take a little break at lunch to read personal emails.  If you follow that belief then you might also note that a total of 63 emails are sent before 8:00AM, possibly targeting people when they first open their email in the morning.

All these times are Eastern.  I don’t know of any common capability or practice being followed that captures subscriber time zones, so presumably most of these apparel marketers are taking population distribution into account:  about half the U.S. population lives in the Eastern time zone, with another quarter in the adjacent Central time zone.  Thus you have three quarters of the U.S. living in Eastern or Eastern-1.

What Are Fashion Seller Email Subject Line Strategies?

To start with, we analyzed each of the 231 emails for the basic techniques that were used and divided them into ten different general techniques:

Another way to look at it is what words and phrases were the most commonly used in this sample of fashion emails from early July?

In the email marketing industry there is continual debate about using plain text versus html emails, but does anyone in the fashion business believe in plain text emails?  In the fashion business? Of course not!  Not a single one.

Here is the full list of all the subject lines from the sample emails:

Comments are closed.