Personalisation is all about creating relevant experiences for your customers. And fashion is arguably the industry where relevance is paramount.

We all have our style preferences. And now it’s easy than ever for fashion conscious shoppers to hone their own unique style, cherry picking from looks they have seen on Instagram, fashion blogs, or in their newsfeed.

For brands and retailers, relevance is vital to success given the abundance of choice available to fashion consumers.

Keeping up with consumers

Fashion moves faster than ever.

Trends can rise in the time it takes you to watch an Instagram Story.

A bold new look can make waves on the catwalk on Monday and be translated into affordable high street items by the weekend.

You can transform your entire wardrobe overnight thanks to next day delivery.

To keep up with today’s fashion shoppers, brands and retailers need to make sure their customer experience is not just relevant, but is memorable, creates delight, and is hyper-personalised.
 

In this blog post, we explore why fashion brands and retailers need to be prioritising personalisation.

Consumers expect retailers to personalise their experience

Consumers enjoy it when their customer experience is highly personalised. It makes shopping easier and recreates the personal service they would receive in-store.

As more businesses wake up to the benefits of personalisation, consumers are now coming to expect it. These expectations affect which brands they choose to shop with.

According to Swirl Networks, an impressive 88 percent of consumers say they’re more likely to shop with retailers that deliver personalised and connected cross-channel experiences.

Overcoming the complexity of the customer journey

Personalisation is a powerful way to ensure consistency throughout complex customer journeys.

In fashion, customer journeys are rarely linear. The path to purchase could take place across multiple devices and channels, over days, weeks or even months.

Then there’s the collision of online and offline. People seeing an item in-store and buying online later. Or vice versa.

Trying to design customer journeys to appease modern shoppers is nigh on impossible without personalisation technology.

Personalisation allows fashion retailers to make sense of the complexity of the modern customer journey. It delivers consistent personalised experience for each individual customer as they jump between channels and devices.

Understanding each customer’s style preferences

Personalisation turns your website from a one-size-fits-all experience into a personal stylist for each customer.

Personalisation technology taps into purchase and browse history to build a picture of each customer’s style preferences and recommends products accordingly.

This means recommendations are highly personal to each customer’s individual look. Much like those made by an attentive personal stylist.

Reacting to and shaping behaviours

Personalisation technology allows you to segment your audience into behaviour-based personas, according to how they act online. You can personalise the messaging each behaviour-based persona sees.

Examples of behaviour-based personas you may create include:

• repeat purchases
• hesitant buyers
• impulse buyers

Each persona will respond to slightly different messages. Understanding these behavioural differences allows you to devise different tactics to drive each persona to conversion.

To learn more, read our post about how to drive nine different eCommerce buyer personas to conversion.

Turning browsers into buyers

Personalisation can help your brand turn browsers into buyers.

Browse and basket abandonment may mean you’re losing out on sales. Nearly 70% of online baskets are abandoned. This costs UK retailers around £18 billion in lost revenue every single year.

Personalisation technology allows you to set up browse and cart abandonment campaigns to entice shoppers back to buy.

And it works. Our own customers recover 12% of revenue lost to abandoned baskets by implementing our recovery technology.
 

Creating a sense of urgency is another great way to get browsers over the line. Personalisation tactics that do this include:

• adding real-time low stock alerts to flag scarcity
• including countdown timers for sale and delivery deadlines
• using social proof to show how many of a limited product have already been purchased

Beyond basic product recommendations

Powered by machine learning, personalisation allows you to get clever about product recommendations.

Intelligent personalisation technology allows you to use multiple data sources to create nuanced recommendations. Data sources you can draw on include:

• previously browsed
• people like you buy
• recent purchases
• purchase history

Using multiple data sources increases the relevance of recommendations. This means they are more likely to result in a purchase.

Connecting bricks and clicks

Smart personalisation allows you to join up bricks and clicks.

By bringing in-store transactions into the mix, you can ensure your online customer experience is consistent with what happens offline.

Without in-store data, you risk a disjointed experience. For example, a customer may be targeted with a dress online that they just bought in-store.

Using real-time weather data to create a dynamic experience

Weather can have a real impact on a shopper’s mood and buying intentions when it comes to fashion. Intelligent personalisation allows you to use this to your advantage.

Using real-time weather data allows you to personalise offers and calls to action according to the weather.

Personalised homepage when it’s sunny

Personalised homepage when it’s raining

Increasing customer lifetime value

One of the most valuable qualities of personalisation is its ability to drive up customer lifetime value. This is possible through:

• cross-selling and upselling with relevant product recommendations
• driving repeat purchases with personalised emails that enhance the post-purchase journey
• delivering timely marketing campaigns triggered by key behaviours throughout the customer lifecycle

Personalisation allows you to optimise each stage of the customer journey, driving more conversions at every available opportunity.

These tactics ensure each customer is worth more to your business than ever before.

Takeaway

Personalisation in the fashion industry allows brands to offer an experience that reflects each shopper’s individual style.

It enables you to create a seamless journey and turn browsers into buyers through relevant offers, a sense of urgency, and a dynamic customer experience.

The combined effect of these benefits is simple:

• increased conversions
• increased customer lifetime value
• more revenue

To start benefitting from fashion personalisation, you’ll need the right personalisation technology in place. To see ours in action, book a demo via the button below.