20 Online Store Engagement Tips & Ideas from Top Fashion Brands

Is a good range of top branded fashion products enough to drive sales on an eCommerce store? The simple answer is no. Today, it’s easy to find a wide range of brands on several online shopping stores with only a few exclusive products. Entrepreneurs in the fashion industry need to think beyond brands and product quality to attract visitors to their eCommerce sites. This is exactly where visitor engagement comes in. Good engagement strategies not only help you retain visitors, but also increase traffic by focusing on marketing and promotion. 

From renowned fashion stores to small lifestyle startups, everyone is busy evolving unique ways to hook visitors. If you can implement the most innovative user engagement ideas that are best suited to your audience and platform, the chances are you may witness a rapid surge in your revenue

Below are some engagement strategies that popular online fashion brands use to connect with their audiences.

1) Renttherunway – Guest Creatives And Interactions

People who truly follow fashion, love to read and learn about influencers, creatives, designers, and opinion makers. Besides clothes and accessories, they also want to know the idea behind unique creations. Famous online brands cater to such fashionistas by hosting guest artists on their platforms. Rent The Runway is a brand that has mastered this engagement method.

To go a step ahead, your guests can host Twitter AMA campaigns to add more personal appeal to the whole idea. This is something that can be followed long term.

2) Drop Dead – Model And Celebrity Interviews

Designers, fashion critics, and bloggers have a niche audience but celebrity models from the glamour world have mass appeal. Featuring personal interviews and life stories of popular models, style icons and emerging film celebs can help you capture their followers and engage them. Drop Dead is a brand that caters to a young-artistic audience and uses interviews to increase user engagement.

The brand isn’t currently using this marketing strategy but various other brands are.

3) Find Rent Wear: First Order Discounts And Cashback

First-order discounts and cashback are a smart way to encourage new visitors to place an order. They are also an opportunity to show them that you are a well-established brand that can afford first time discounts for all its customers.

For example, Find Rent Wear is an online rental marketplace powered by Yo!Rent that has utilized the first time order discounts very well. It utilizes first time discounts very well and is able to attract consumers from its competitors. This marketing strategy is a smart approach for SMBs and startups.

Along with first time discounts, you can also engage users with first time and regular cashbacks. Sephora, a skincare brand is wisely handling such cashback offers. Under its trademarked credit card, it provides visitors with one more reason to shop their skin care products from its store by providing several cashbacks.

4) Asos: Stylist Pages

Internet has empowered everyone to put their thoughts and ideas in front of the world. While doing the same, some manage to create an impressive following. There are eCommerce brands out there that have partnered with such influencers and given them a bigger platform to share their insights and lend advice. ASOS is doing a great job at this.

Brief introduction, stylists’ social feeds, and interaction related features play a key role in making Stylist pages successful.

5) Crew Clothing Company: Offline Catalogue

Offline catalogues in eCommerce sound illogical but they are also an important engagement tactic. A few fashion stores are delivering seasonal, occasional, and festive catalogues to its users. ‘Problem-of-plenty’ is a harsh reality in online shopping and by adding this feature, brands are able to help their visitors reduce their indecisiveness. Have a look at how Crew Clothing Company is using offline catalogues.

The best thing about this tactic is that it doesn’t require heavy programming to set up. A small form to collect shipping addresses and names is enough.

6) TOPSHOP: Blog/Magazine

In the fashion industry, blogging is more specific to uploading blog posts that are catchy, insightful and mesmerizing. Also there is so much more you can do with blogging. You can write how-to posts, style-guides, beauty tips and fashion news in the form of a weekly or monthly magazine. If you need a reference, we highly recommend TopShop.

7) Revolve: Social Tagging

Who doesn’t love to flaunt their new fashion acquisitions on social media? Revolve Clothing incentivizes its shoppers  by giving them a chance to get featured on their fashion gallery simply by including a hashtag in their social media posts. This further helps the company gain branding and engagement benefits.

Twitter and Instagram are the obvious channels to use this strategy. It is another engagement upgrade that does not cost much.

8) Noor Zafir: Curated Collections

Fashion influencers are good at what they do but they can never replace industry specialists. Therefore, it makes sense to come up with curated collections by joining hands with reputed stylists or employing a dedicated team for the task. Almost every major lifestyle brand has curated collections. Take the example of Noor and Zafir’s (an eCommerce store developed by using Yo!Kart) women’s special occasion picks.

Curated collections will help you introduce new styles and catalogue additions.

9) Go Ethnyk: Instant Messaging

We have talked about using chat functionality to assist shoppers with product discovery and queries in our blog. eCommerce brands are integrating them very well to provide chat support. Applications like Crisp & WeChat are being used by several fashion brands to share offers and deals with followers.

Go Ethnyk, Yo!Kart powered marketplace provides real-time chat support on its website to assist customers with their various queries.

10) Looks Clothing: Shopping A Look

This is a popular craze in the online lifestyle business presently. Look shopping is a simple concept that involves:

• Models images/videos displaying a complete look
• Purchase buttons on every item
• Button to get the complete look

Different looks such as chic, retro, formal and casual can be created to appeal to different sets of audience. There is a good scope of upselling through this feature. Again, this is an engagement feature that you can integrate easily on your website without much fuss.

11) Asos: Look Sharing

Integration functionality to create and share new looks on your website itself will help you in raising the bar of eCommerce website engagement. Asos has aced this engagement feature.

You can use direct image uploads, social media, and tagging to create an impressive look-sharing feature. This will also open another window to display products and generate sales.

12) Pendazi: Just-in Pages

Do your customers love the latest fashion trends and new products? If yes, then there can be nothing better than just-in pages to introduce your catalogue additions to shoppers. Brands across the world use this feature to engage their audience and also push sales of newly added products.

Just-in pages are easy to set up and make your customer experience more comfortable.  They are a quick way to browse through all your latest product additions. Pendazi, an online eCommerce store that is powered by Yo!Kart has a ‘new stuff’ page that comes with search filters to help visitors browse through the newly added products.

13) Asos: Social Connections

Social media sites have high levels of engagement because they help people connect with each other and explore the things they love. What if something similar can be managed with your fashion store? There are brands that provide their consumers the power to connect with each other  by integrating the core features of social media sites. By core features, we mean, followed, following, likes, and profile image. Once again, Asos aced in providing these features.

14) Zappos: Shopping assistance

Online stores are walking the extra mile to help shoppers find similar products they come across both in the online and offline world. Zappos is a brand that has mastered this engagement tactic.

Now this is something only large eCommerce stores have implemented as it consumes too much time and manual work. That said, benefits can be humongous in terms of visitor engagement.

15) Bandier: Giveaways

It is difficult for lifestyle fashion stores dealing in physical products to give away expensive clothing for free. But all they need to do is think creatively. Bandier, popular sportswear brand, creates Spotify Playlists for its audience to keep them grooving while they work out.

Similarly, sending small gifts or just an ecard on festive occasions can make your customers feel valued and increase brand credibility. So think what your brand is about and plan giveaways accordingly.

16) Kenneth Cole: Competitions and rewards

When it comes to engaging your audience for long duration, very few engagement activities can generate benefits similar to the combo of competitions and rewards. Run interesting campaigns and link them to social media to get wider coverage.Kenneth Cole did something similar last year with its social media driven campaign.

The campaign was conducted on Instagram and generated much hype for the brand. Link your campaign to the sharing aspect and you will get much more brand mileage.

17) Jane: Notify Me

Products run out of stock all the time. On some occasions, the problem is unavailability of a particular color or size. For such instances, the fashion brand Jane has integrated a ‘Notify Me’ button on its product pages. This will help you increase your database of customer information and also update the customers about whenever the product is back in stock. Something very simple but very beneficial.

Notify Me feature can also come in handy to inform shoppers about upcoming collections and designer partnerships.

18) Paris Fashion Shops: Flash Sales

Sales are so often hosted nowadays that they no longer qualify as an engagement factor. However, flash sales are something that can generate short term engagement and result in quick sales boost as well. Paris Fashion Shops is a European eCommerce store that uses flash sales to increase engagement. Furthermore, these sales are also quite good at customer retention as well.

Hosting a big shopping extravaganza has its share of benefits as well but it requires more groundwork. Flash sales can be hosted frequently for smaller durations with limited collection of products.

19) Lulus: Time Based Offers

Clubs and bars across the world use the concept of Happy Hours to generate footfalls during slow periods of the day. Now, online stores have also started experimenting with Happy Hours to generate more traffic and engagement. The American clothing store Lulus is a perfect example of this.

Time based offers are a perfect engagement method for brands that generate low sales at specific hours of the day.

20) Forever 21: Offsite Engagement

Offsite engagement is as essential as onsite engagement to develop trust and loyalty. To increase offsite engagement, brands use different social media channels to attract users to their websites. You can use social media platforms to:

• Share new collections
• Inform about upcoming sales and offers
• Publish style guides and helpful content
• Run marketing campaigns

Similarly, newsletter can also be utilized to keep the shoppers informed. Take a cue from Forever 21.

Launching a fashion store without thinking about the engagement part is like stepping into the rain with a matchstick. Traffic will come, sales may happen but your online store will never reach its true potential.

Want to know why your eCommerce store is not generating sales and traffic? Get in touch with our UX experts and website analysts to unearth website improvements and enhancements that guarantee better search engine ranking, site performance, and sales.