Every industry has had to adopt digital marketing in recent years and even more so after COVID-19. In the post-pandemic world, the internet promises exceptional business continuity along with a cheaper way to reach your audiences.
The fashion industry in particular has a headstart in the eCommerce sphere and is already primed for online marketing. With most clothing brands already generating massive sales from their online stores, it has become much easier to establish trust and gain an online following. But how do you ensure that you maintain a steady stream of prospects or attract new customers? With effective lead generation!
In this article, I cover the most useful tips to help you keep the leads rolling in.
1. Use lead generation forms
Several lead generation software tools will enable you to host opt-in forms on your website. This is a very simple solution to building your email list. All you need to do is place pop-ups or embedded forms on your website asking for email addresses and in exchange, offer an incentive like free coupons, free shipping, exclusive promotions, or regular updates about your stock.
Another strategy for lead generation with opt-in forms is ‘try before you buy’. Free trials allow people to order and try the apparel before deciding to purchase it. If they keep the product, they pay.
To use this tactic, you should make the registration process simpler, reduce the details you ask, and focus on about 20 per cent of the people already interested in your products.
These offers are the best way to build leads and nurture them into a conversion. They also give shoppers a reason to place their trust in a new brand and order from them.
2. Optimize For Mobile Conversions
Mobile experience is an area that needs special attention for effective lead generation. More and more people use their smartphones to search for products and brands, specifically when they are interested in buying. The share of mobile purchases in eCommerce is expected to rise to 72.9% by 2021.
These statistics reveal that people use their mobile when they are about to buy something. This is why it is important that you optimize your website for mobile experience so that visitors can easily find what they are looking for.
3. Convert Your Social Media Followers
Your social media followers are already interested in your brand so it’s easy to convert them into leads. Advertising is the best method to attract social media followers. These platforms offer ads and collect data about the audience. This allows you to use targeted marketing which delivers quality leads with a high conversion ratio.
You can come up with ads to engage with your target audience and demographics. For example, you can have different ads based on gender or age groups to more specifically target your prospects.
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4. Pay Attention to Visitor Behavior
The more you focus on how users behave on your website, the better you can improve your lead generation chances. Track the first few pages that new visitors view or the links that they explore. This information can help you update your site’s design to cater to the interests of your users.
For example, if Google Analytics shows that a particular link on your homepage gets the maximum number of clicks, you can make it more prominent or move it to the first position.
5. Optimize Website Performance
When a website experiences heavy traffic during peak seasons, it has the potential to crash or the mobile site can take longer to load. This poses a risk of losing the lead’s interest and attention. According to a report, up to 80 per cent of people dissatisfied with a site’s performance would not buy from the website again.
Your conversion rate actually depends on how fast the leads can browse the page on their devices. Mobile users find slow-loading pages irritating. You can focus on improving the page load time for your fashion site by compressing the image files and improving the scripts on the page among other methods.
6. Use High-Quality Pictures
While you need to reduce file sizes for faster page load speeds, don’t compromise on the quality of images. As shoppers cannot try or feel the fashion products when they see them online, it becomes important to make your items realistic through good-quality photography and graphic processing.
7. Post Ratings and Reviews
Ratings and reviews play a major role in building social proof and legitimising your services. If new prospects are able to refer to them, they find it easier to trust your products.
Enable comments under product descriptions and invite customers to review your products after they’ve made a purchase. Host genuine reviews as they come across as more authentic and believable. You can also place your best testimonials on your main landing pages to build your credibility.
The conversion rate from shoppers engaging with reviews is up to 400% higher than those who don’t consider online reviews.
8. Use Time-Sensitive Offers
Discounts and offers are a great way to attract leads when it comes to fashion. However, when an offer is about to expire, it becomes appealing.
You can use the urgency and fear of missing out to get new leads. Flash sales are great at evoking emotion and boosting visitor interest. Host a countdown timer on your website or within your ads and your visitors will rush to you.
9. Refine the Search Functionality
People who use the search functionality are more interested in buying. You can improve your site’s search function by offering mobile search capability, and autocomplete suggestions for faster results and spelling error tolerance. You should also embed natural language processing into the search functionality so that visitors get the right results when they use synonyms for products they are looking for.
10. Optimize the Checkout Process
Simplifying and customizing the checkout experience can improve lead generation as well as conversion. You can collect emails when a user abandons the shopping cart and then send follow-up emails with reminders. Also, save their details for future purchases so their checkout process takes only a few seconds.
You can also give the users an option to checkout as a guest if they are not interested in signing up. Add more payment options, show the shipping terms before the process begins, and show checkout progress with a progress bar to optimize the user experience.
11. Allow Customers to Buy from Multiple Platforms
When your business has a presence on multiple channels, you must enable your followers to buy from the platform they use the most. One way to make this possible is through the Facebook sales channel.
Launch your Facebook sales channel and add the right payment gateways so shoppers can complete their purchase right while they’re browsing Facebook.
Instagram offers product tagging to help fashion brands add tags to posts so that the users can tap and view product details and click if they would want to buy the product. This functionality helps boost sales.
12. Run Remarketing Campaigns
An important part of your lead generation campaign is remarketing. You might’ve noticed that after exiting a website, you see its ads on Instagram, Facebook and other social media channels that you use. This is remarketing.
Though these ads don’t always send leads back to your site, it is a great way to increase brand awareness and improve your lead generation chances.
This type of remarketing campaigns help put your brand in front of your potential leads. It helps them remember your brand logo, the site’s theme and feel, the brand name, and several other things associated with your brand. With these social media reminders, your brand becomes top of mind, rekindling a prospect’s interest, and bringing them back to you to initiate a purchase.
Conclusion
This might have sounded like a lot to take in. But given how competitive the eCommerce space has become, every brand needs to pull its socks up!
Focus on the complete customer journey, from when they’re just a new visitor, to when they’re abandoning carts or re-purchasing clothes from you. Adding new prospects to your sales funnel is one of the most important parts of this process. In this pursuit, you’ll need to host opt-in forms to build leads, publish ads to target your prospects, continually optimize your user experience, build social proof with reviews, and monitor visitor behaviour.
By implementing these tips, you’ll be building your email list faster than ever before, boosting sales, and taking your revenue growth to the next level.