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:

Which types of apparel retailers can have some confidence in sales outlook for the remainder of 2010?

A survey of 8,200 adults conducted in April 2010 provides some interesting information.  Of particular interest to fashion retailers is that one segment of consumers has set apparel as the most likely consumer goods category for increased spending in the coming months.

The survey, conducted by BIGresearch in April 2010, and released by Acxiom divides apparel consumers into categories of generation (age) and fashion outlook.

One thing that is striking is the clear decline with age in the numbers of consumers identifying themselves as fashion forward.

All Categories of Consumers Intend to Increase Apparel Spending

As shown in this chart virtually all categories of consumers intend to spend more on apparel in the next 90 days (as of April 2010.)

Where Consumers Like to Shop

While department stores and discount store are most preferred for shopping among the total population of consumers, specialty apparel stores are favored by the most prized segment, fashion forward, high income female consumers – those who actually spend the most money on apparel.

As the following charts show, while fashion forward women are the smallest segment of consumers, they actually comprise an equivalent share of total purchases.

What Consumers Look for in Their Shopping Experience

There are a number of interesting facts to be pulled from the following chart:

• Fashion forward consumers are most interested in stores providing fashion ideas, new styles and fabrics as well as the store experience of design and layout.  They are also the segment most motivated by loyalty programs.
• Conservative/traditional consumers are most motivated by knowledgeable sales people and customer service, and somewhat by loyalty programs or store credit cards.
• Value driven consumers are most motivated by price, of course, but also heavily by location.  Surprisingly they are much less motivated by loyalty programs.

Amazon has long provided a web store feature where third parties can sell merchandise.  They have now begun rolling out a new version of the Amazon webstore with features that should be particularly valuable to online apparel  marketers.

For larger sellers one notable feature of Amazon is their massive scalability.  You will not outgrow their system.  Amazon is making their technological prowess widely available and easily accessible and affordable as a means to develop other aspects of their business.

Virtually every significant aspect of current practices in online marketing seems to have been taken into consideration.

The site is optimized for SEO to give you optimal ranking in search results on Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.  XML sitemaps are automatically provided.  Product url’s are automatically formatted for optimum SEO.

As might be expected from the world’s leading online retailer, websites are optimized for conversion of visitors into customers.  Product ratings, reviews and shipping information are all easily included.  The obviously well-proven Amazon checkout process is included and automatically incorporates existing Amazon customer accounts. (nice feature!)

Features that increase average order value through promotions and automated up-sell, cross-sell and recommendations are also easily included.  Inclusion of category-related products from Amazon can blend in seamlessly with your merchandising mix.  Availability of other features such as recently viewed items also helps drive up average order value.

A nice combo of features for up-selling are the contextual up-selling and best-selling recommendations.

Important to apparel sellers are visual features for handling multiple views, zooming, multiple colors, sizing and video. Amazon provides a full and clear UI for these features.

Along with the automatic inclusion of existing Amazon customers, another feature is the lack of a requirement of having your own merchant account.  Amazon includes this with the package deal.

Other features worth mentioning are integration with call-center operations, CRM, personalization and the fact that Amazon hosting can be totally behind the scenes and invisible to visitors.

Along with front end features, Amazon provides a full featured backend for administration of inventory, orders, store design and other settings.

In terms of pricing, base costs are minimal at $10-25 per month.  The main costs involved are the percentage of sales paid to Amazon, which is in the range of 3-4.5%, depending on volume.

Amazon has developed and is making available a truly world class web store.  Developing such a site would surely cost in excess of a million dollars and require years of development and debugging.

Release of the web store is currently in a phase where it is being rolled out to larger customers.  Over time the site will become available to smaller customers.

Early users of Amazon’s new webstore include Martha Stewart, Timex and Samsonite.  An example of a current apparel merchant on Amazon is Bebe.

Contact Holijoli if you would like to explore how to deploy your online sales with Amazon.

How many times have doubts stopped your customers from making an online purchase from you?

What can you do to lessen those doubts?

Establishing credibility is a key element to successful conversion of window shoppers into customers.  In the book Persuasive Technology by B.J. Fogg, the author analyzes what goes into online credibility.

Credibility comes in four types, from least effective to most effective:

• Presumed – based on general assumptions in the mind of the user
• Surface – based on simple observations
• Reputed – based on 3^rd party endorsements of referrals
• Earned – based on firsthand experience

Online apparel stores can take steps to increase their credibility in each of these areas through different measures.  Specific recommendations will be the subject of a later post.

Some interesting findings about online credibility were obtained from studies conducted at Stanford that attempted to discern on-website factors that affect credibility.  Here is a summary of those factors, ranked from the most enhancing of credibility to most damaging of credibility.

• (these first factors enhance credibility – the most, first)
• The site represents an organization you already respect (earned credibility)
• Physical and telephone contact information is easily obtained
• Quick response is given to customer service questions
• Confirmation emails are sent for orders or customer support contacts
• The site looks professionally designed
• The site links to, and is linked to, by other reputable sites
• The site is updated frequently
• A friend recommended the site
• The site has personalized content based on your prior visit
• The site displays known or seemingly legitimate awards or credibility badges
• User reviews and ratings are present
• Well known customers or affiliates are shown
• There are photographs of owners, executives and employees
• (the following items have an increasingly negative impact on credibility)
• The site is small
• The site contains content that seems unrelated to its expected purpose
• The site is slow to load in the browser
• The site is sometimes unexpectedly unavailable
• Popup windows display for purposes the user is not interested in
• The domain name does not match the company name
• Typographical errors are visible
• Broken links are found
• The site is rarely updated
• There are links to sites that do not seem credible
• It is hard to distinguish ads from content

Most of these factors pertain to surface credibility – how credible the site seems to a new visitor.

Since the time this study was conducted a few years ago, I think we would have to add in user expectations about available technology.  Users who frequent Facebook or Twitter may expect buttons to be available for adding the site to their connections.  The lack of such buttons may indicate lack of attention or sophistication on the part of the website owner.

For apparel companies it is also becoming more expected that clothing is:

• Displayed on models
• All colors are displayed on models
• Multiple views are available, again, with each color
• A zoom function of some sort is available
• The photographs are large and very high resolution

Now doubt expected in the reasonably near future will be technology to view clothing sets, or outfits – possibly from different vendors, as a number of aggregating websites now make available.

More on this in a future post where we will survey the technology used by a sampling of larger online apparel companies (with deep pockets!)

Which of these blogs are useful for fashion marketers? And when are they useful? And what are they worth?

These are key questions that we set out to answer.

The data shown below in this post is a first installment of this analysis. We located 1,000 fashion blogs, more or less randomly, and ranked them according to an established internet ranking tool.

We have more analysis underway and entertain a fantasy of locating all fashion blogs (it won’t happen). But the purpose is to provide something useful to marketers and we are getting close.

Some caveats:

• Again, this should be taken as a random list of 1,000 blogs; it is not the “top 1,000″, it’s the “random 1,000″.  We estimate there are 5-10,000 fashion blogs out there and we are after all of them.
• There are occasional sites here that are part of a larger website that contains a section that is a fashion blog; from a marketing perspective these may require different handling
• The ranking numbers are generally pretty reliable, however, there are occasional results that seem to have an error; we are in communication with the analytics vendor about this

We are also working on collecting data so that targeted keywords can be used to filter the list.  The purpose being to locate the blogs that are oriented to particular market segments.

Explanation of the data:

• Domain Authority – Relative value, i.e., popularity, of the domain name, eg., style.com.  This is a logarithmic scale so 90 is much higher than 80.  Note that blogs that are hosted by large blog hosts, such as blogspot.com, carry a domain authority of the  blog host which is a poor indicator of that particular blog’s value.  It is better to refer to the Page Authority for such blogs.
• Page Authority – Relative value, i.e., popularity, of the particular page – typically the home page in this list.   This is also a logarithmic scale. This is typically the best single measure of a blog’s value.
• External Links – The number of other pages on the web outside of the blog’s domain that link to this particular page.

Domain and Page Authority are primarily determined by how many other websites link to the website in question, and how “authoritative” those other websites are.  This measurement attempts to mimic the calculations that the major search engines such as Google use when determining which websites to show first when users search.

If you are a blogger and are not on this list, feel free to contact us and we will include you in the next edition.

To all you fashion marketers, if there is other data you think would be useful here, please let us know and we will try to include it.

Analytics powered by

Research powered by Joe Rowan

The focus for online spending this year is clearly social media, with 73% of respondents stating that they will give it more priority than last year.

In the survey, performed and made public by Isite Design, online marketing objectives for businesses were most commonly such statements as:

“Increase sales”

“More leads”

“Stay afloat”

“Global roll out of social media”

“Roll out a new CMS”

“Overall site redesign”

“Social media, social media, social media”

The following table from Isite’s report captures the overall sentiment:

Most of the social media talk obviously revolves around Facebook, with Twitter being an important, but distant second.  To some extent you could even just say that 2010 online marketing belongs to Facebook.

Indeed some very smart people, such as Steve Rubel and the people at Hitwise, predict that Facebook will eventually take over the web.  That makes some sense, though on the surface it is a little reminiscent of the sort of zany and hysterical predictions that often come about by drawing straight lines of trends into the future.

But here in the future past we call 2010, no one wants to be left behind, and it does take time to build a fan base.

While there is much that is still immature about Facebook as a marketing platform, given the money at stake, this may be the shortest adolescence in history.

But in the meantime, before the future gets here, build the fan base!

(If you are familiar with SEO concepts or just want to skip to the conclusions you can click here to go right to the summary and conclusions.)

I searched both Google and Bing for “designer dresses”, and shown here are the top five for Google as well as their rank in Bing (these are for non-paid results, not advertisements).

Why Google and Bing differ so much is a question for another post.

Right now we’re analyzing how those top five got there in Google, which represents about 70% of internet searches.

By the way, in January there were 502,000 Google searches for “designer dress/dresses”.  Those are all excellent prospects since the searcher was fairly specific about what she was looking for – not just “dresses”, but “designer dresses”.

Search Engine Optimization work is generally divided into two categories: onsite work and offsite work.  Onsite meaning the content and coding particulars of how the website is setup.  And offsite meaning how the rest of the web sees and connects to the website.

Onsite SEO Factors for the Top 5

Shown below are some onsite factors commonly viewed as affecting Google page rank, and how each website fares with them.

Page Title – does the page title contain the phrase being searched, i.e., “designer dresses”?

H1 tags – Is there an H1 tag (or other tag) that contains the search term, in this case “designer dresses”?  The Heading tags indicate that the text is important and Google will give weight to that in its evaluation.

Count of relevant pages on website – Most weight is given to the particular page being referred to, but some weight is given to the size and relevance of the overall website.  Presumably most pages on these websites are relevant to apparel and therefore dresses.  The figures shown here are the numbers of pages that Google has found, or “indexed”.

Related to the number of indexed pages is whether the website has a sitemap – this helps the search engines crawl through the website and find everything.

That’s an incredible number of pages that Bluefly has!  One can only wonder if Lenj has more pages but that Google can’t find them due to the lack of a sitemap.

Targeted words and phrases – A key factor the search engines analyze is the text content of the page.  Besides looking at the basic written text, other text is considered as well, such as what text is in headings, what is in bold, what is used as alternate text for images and so on.  The frequency and prominence of the words are considered.  Here are the most meaningfully important words on the home page of each website, as single, double and triple word phrases.

Offsite SEO Factors for the Top 5

Offsite factors mostly relate to how many other sites link to the website and who those other sites are.

Broadly speaking, the more external sites that link to a website the more important it is judged to be by the search engines.

Also important is how much weight to give an external site that links to a website.  Links that are from sites where you pay for the link have little or no weight, and may even have negative weight.  Links from highly authoritative sites in the subject area, such as WWD for example, carry much more weight.

Also important is what the linked text looks like on the external site.  In this example, if the link on the external site was on text saying “designer dresses” the link would be given more weight.  If it simply said “click here” it would have less weight.

The following table simply shows how many external links there are to the home page of each of these companies.  These are links from websites other than their own. The additional columns are explained below the table.

Yahoo - indicates whether the website is in the Yahoo directory – this used to be more important, but is still thought to carry some weight.

Del.icio.us – indicates how many times the page has been tagged in Delicious.  Delicious is a website where people can store browser bookmarks, share with other people and see what other people have bookmarked.

Alexa Rank – This is one ranking of how many people visit the site. There are a number of such statistics available and the search engines make use of some them to establish the ranking of the search results.  The numbers shown are interpreted as Jovani is in the top 0.25% of the most visited websites on the internet.  It is important to realize that there are millions and millions of virtually dormant websites that figure into these statistics.

Summary Table

Conclusions

This analysis seems to show that there is no single route to the top of the Google search results for “designer dresses”.  Each of these sites has something that stands out that gives it some clout.  While this is not a definitive study, my initial conclusions about how each of these sites made it into the top five  are:

Jovani - largest number of inbound links, well targeted word content, high Alexa rank

eDressMe - high Alexa rank, well targeted word content, large number of pages

Bluefly - huge number of relevant pages, high number of inbound links, high Alexa rank

Lenj - high number of inbound links, well targeted word content

Chickdowntown - doesn’t stand out in any one category, but does pretty well in all of them

Final conclusion:  inbound links, well targeted content, high volume of content prevail.

A more in-depth study, for another day, would compare websites that do not make it near the top five and probably also take a closer look at overall website content and what all those inbound links look like.

How To Use This Information

One of the best values in internet marketing is getting traffic from search engine referrals.  Positioning yourself high in the rankings can show a very high return on investment.

Most SEO professionals, including myself, advise that the single best thing a company can do to achieve a high ranking is to provide valuable content and services to its customers and prospects.  Doing so, combined with following sensible SEO practices will provide a solid foundation for generating traffic to your website.

This post gives an overview of SEO, but keep in mind that some SEO experts believe that Google looks at as many as 200 different factors – and it is a constantly moving target.  Additionally, be aware that statistics on many internet measurements are inexact and volatile.

The companies discussed in this post have obviously invested a great deal of time and money in getting people to visit their site.

The next question is, once a visitor arrives at your site, how do you get them to buy?

For further information and internet marketing consulting.

Thinking about fashion Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) I did a quick study of online advertising keywords, choosing the five most popular women’s apparel companies from Yahoo’s widely used directory.

So right off the bat, here’s something interesting – how many different phrases do you think the top five are using to snag clicks in their online search ads?  Check it out:

Just to clarify, these are counts of how many different keyword phrases each company is targeting in the ads they have placed in Google, Bing, etc.  Those are some astounding numbers and they clearly point to some people working on this fulltime for these companies.

To what degree do they target the same search phases?

Here are some quick stats on that:

To clarify that:

There is one phrase that is used as a search keyword by all of the top 5 Yahoo apparel sites.  What is that? “designer dresses”.

There are 11 phrases that are used by four of the top five:

anna sui dress
bandeau bikini set
bebe clothing line
cap sleeve shirt
cap sleeve top
cap sleeve tops
cocktail dress
cocktail dress long
red pencil skirt
sequined tank tops
stylish dress

What’s interesting here is that a number of these have very low Google volume.  But, as online marketers know, these are highly targeted phrases – someone searching for these knows exactly what they’re looking for and they are an excellent prospect.  It’s interesting that all of the top five have identified some of the same long-tail opportunities.

Breaking apart those phrases and looking at individual words, here are the number of times a given word appears in the search terms of any of the ads for any of the top five:

And to clarify those numbers, these are the top ten words that appear in the search terms of all online ads for the top five women’s apparel sites in the Yahoo directory.  The word “dress” appears in 1,792 search phrases these websites have used to target their advertisements.

Speaking of which, that word dress happens to be kind of interesting. As just noted, “dress” appears 1,792 times.

How many times does “dresses” appear?  Would you believe 22?

What makes that more amazing is that if you look at how many times people search for each of those words on Google last month you get a big disparity:

In other words, people searched Google for “dresses” versus “dress” at about a 40-60 ratio.  But these top five websites only target “dresses” versus “dress” at about a 10-90 ratio.

How You Can Use This Information

This analysis is essentially one leg of a three legged stool: the competitive analysis.  The other legs are what consumers are looking for and what you want to sell.

There are a couple things to take away from this:

1. Top online marketers spend a great deal of time developing the keyword phrases they use to target their search engine advertisements.

2. In the world of online marketing there’s always room for improvement – and it’s a moving target.  In these cases the websites have not fully aligned their keywords with actual Google statistics.  Which means(!): there are always opportunities that smaller companies can take advantage of  – this is one example of a kind of long-tail marketing opportunity.  The costs of such words should be lower than the results you can achieve – an opportunity for online marketing arbitrage.

If you would like a free copy of the full analysis let me know and I will send it to you.

My aim is to help companies in the fashion business, in particular small and medium sized companies, develop more business by taking advantage of the whole new world of internet marketing that has taken over the media in the last ten years.

As an engineer, my excitement of learning new things has been overwhelmed by the flood of new technologies related to marketing on the internet.  There’s SEO, search engine optimization, which if any aspect of software could be called the “dismal science” (like economics), it’s SEO, with its constant chase of the mysterious, veiled force called Google (how do they decide page rank results anyway?).  And then, even more intriguing, there’s social media which has magically exploded – exactly as predicted by social network theory once you get above a certain connection threshold.

As a fashion industry “extra” for many years, both with my own clothing business and as an IT consultant to many apparel companies, the continuous flow of change in the world of style and buzz provides never ending excitement and opportunities to witness true inspiration and beauty.  And to those who try to say that fashion is trivial and unimportant, I can refer you to thousands of years of history of people untiringly adorning themselves with their last dollars (or shekels or whatever).  If you have not looked beyond the surface of this subject then it is you who are superficial.

And finally as a marketer, bringing together the rapid changes in marketing technology with the continuously changing fashion world is compounded excitement.  My long-time interest in marketing revolves around “the message”.  How do you get into customers’ minds and hearts?  What are they open to hearing?  How do you reach them?  Why should they buy from you?

I hope to help those of you trying to make a living in this business, and especially, I hope to play a part in spreading a little beauty and pleasure through the world.

And just this one time, I will explain the name, Holijoli.  It’s “joli”, as in French for “pretty”, and “holi” as in holy cow that’s beautiful!

I think you know the feeling…