Apparel Marketing: 10 Strategies & Examples

This post will help you with apparel marketing by giving you 10 practical tips, most of which you can implement even today.

So, if you’d like to get better results with promoting clothing items, accessories, and grow conversions on your fashion brand's store, you’ll get plenty of inspiration here. Examples of apparel marketing used by fashion stores from the US and France are also included.

Table of contents:

• What is apparel marketing?

• Trends in apparel marketing

• Onsite playbook for fashion stores

• Apparel marketing strategies

What is apparel marketing?

Apparel marketing is the usage of marketing techniques to promote clothing and accessories to create a strong brand image and increase sales. This branch of marketing includes marketing on websites (onsite marketing), using social media ads, printed magazine ads, runway shows, and television ads, as well as influencer content and promotional emails.

If executed properly, fashion marketing tells the story behind apparel products (could be on the collection and individual item level), the goal and the intent of the designer, and the values and the mission of the brand.

Trends shaping apparel marketing

The effectiveness of marketing campaigns as well as profits in the apparel industry with marketing will heavily depend on these four factors:

Data sources: Mckinsey & Business of Fashion

Onsite playbook for fashion stores

This playbook breaks down the highest-performing upsell campaigns we see fashion brands using today. Click them to see how they work.

Apparel marketing strategies

These strategies will help you with marketing clothes and accessories on your online store: 

1. Announce items and collections with onsite feed

2. Recommend products based on browsing history

3. Generate more leads with surveys

4. Show targeted offers during browsing

5. Try a product giveaway

6. Drive traffic to popular or new products

7. Use B2GO offers

8. Add similar product and style options

9. Promote your values and mission

10. Grab emails before visitors leave

1. Announce new items and collections with onsite feed

There’s an efficient way to market new arrivals, highlight specific products, or announce new collections in an elegant way for fashion stores:

Onsite feed.

It’s a small, non-intrusive feed with notifications that you can add to a website's header and share marketing messages.

Here’s how Pierre Hardy, one of the most successful French fashion designers, uses the feed to promote new products)—

The desktop:

And mobile:

For Pierre Hardy, keeping the website clean is very important. 

But they also need to promote products and collections at the same time.

That’s why adding onsite feed to the header of their store was a perfect way to inform visitors about new offers while not having to sacrifice any homepage space.

You can do that, too (onsite feed works on all websites) and make product announcements much easier and more efficient. They’ll be extremely helpful if you have a lot of new products coming in regularly.

Also, you can market your apparel products with product recommendations in the same feed:

Onsite feed has:

• native Shopify display rules

• goal and revenue tracking

• Product recommendations

See stories of apparel brands using onsite feed to promote products and collections:

2. Recommend products based on browsing history

With AI-powered product suggestions, you can deliver personalized shopping experiences that feel natural and helpful. This way, you can make the experience of every visitor at your store feel more relevant.

Here are some examples of how you can use this apparel marketing idea:

• Show AI-recommended items based on browsing history to reconnect visitors with styles they showed interest in

• Display personalized accessory suggestions on product pages to increase average order value

• Present category-specific recommendations to visitors who viewed multiple items in one collection

• Create targeted campaigns suggesting complementary products to users who've added items to their cart

Examples:

Sud Express reminds visitors about the items they visited with an interactive notification:

Pierre Hardy shows related products in messages embedded in the cart addition confirmation window.

This helps to improve product discovery and increase average order value:

3. Get more leads with product surveys

Asphalte's business model is pre-order, meaning they manufacture only the products that customers chose and placed orders to get them:

The brand’s founders chose this business model because they wanted to eliminate overproduction, which is something that Asphalte stands for.

While doing some marketing experiments, Asphalte’s head of growth, Ben, found something interesting:

So, he made a smart decision to use product surveys—the surveys that Asphalte uses to collect ideas about which products to manufacture—to generate leads. 

The visitors would participate in a quick survey and then provide their emails at the end to get updates if their styles were chosen to be made

To drive traffic to the survey page, Ben used full-screen popups like this one:

Here's what it says:

The result of this apparel marketing strategy exceeded expectations, as the surveys generated a lot of awareness of Asphalte’s mission and values. 

Besides that, the projects consistently brings about 4,000 quality leads on average every month:

We won’t go too deep into this apparel marketing strategy, but you can get all the details in the case study: Asphalte strategy analysis.

4. Show targeted offers based on browsing history

Creating a feeling of personalized shopping experience is not easy… But totally possible for you to try today easily.

The apparel marketing idea is to show marketing messages to visitors based on:

• How they found your store (paid ads, Google search, a recommendation from someone, etc.)

• What pages they visited (a few products from the same category, for example)

• Shopping behavior (adding an item to the shopping cart, for example)

To show these messages, you use the onsite tools you have: website popups, embedded blocks, live chat, etc.).

Let’s see some examples:

TOMS Shoes shows this message to returning visitors (a discount is given to those who left without buying and now returned), note the copy:

Next—

Black Ember shows an onsite notification with a free shipping promo to those who added a product to the cart but have not reached the threshold.

This campaign’s goal is, of course, to increase the average order value (here's the case study if you want to know how this one performs):

This way, you can make the experience of every visitor at your fashion store feel more relevant and positive.

Here are some more examples of how you can use this apparel marketing idea:

• Display a free shipping only to visitors from a certain city, area, or country

• Show a popup with a discount only for buying dresses to a visitor who viewed two or three products from that category

• Show a popup that says that a visitor can get a free item after adding a product to the cart to motivate them to get one more item

Creating such targeted campaigns is actually not complicated at all.

For instance, let’s assume you want to try the second example (with the dresses). Your apparel store has them in a separate category with “dresses” in the URL like that:

In terms of targeting, all you have to do is add this word to the campaign display in your popup platform.

To do that in Wisepops, for example, you’d need to choose Display rules > Select URLs > URL contains > and type in “dresses:”

Just like that, you can make a contextual ecommerce popup campaign that’s relevant to the visitor experience.

By naming the campaign in a specific way and connecting Wisepops to your email marketing app, say, Klaviyo, you can create a special segment of leads interested in a specific product category. Doing so allows you to create more personalized email campaigns for further lead nurturing.

5. Try a product giveaway

Here’s why a product giveaway is a good apparel marketing idea:

For apparel brands, giveaways are a great way to attract new customers, and reward the loyal ones. It creates goodwill and strengthens customer relationships, and can be a great way to introduce your products to new customers. 

Take inspiration from this example:

Faguo gave away a pair of their best-selling sneakers. To maximize participation, they used a spin-to-win popup on their website:

This apparel marketing idea was so successful that Faguo now runs product giveaways on a monthly basis.

Here’s how many emails they generated (see the Emails column) in a few months:

The key to a successful giveaway for a clothing brand is a relevant prize, simple rules for entering, and a prominent position on the website.

A prize could be:

• An expensive clothing item

• A pair of shoes

• An accessory

• A gift card

• Store credit

If you’re interested in trying this apparel marketing idea, here are 10 giveaway ideas with examples to help you get started the right way.

6. Drive traffic to pages with sales or special offers

This apparel marketing idea is simple:

Add onsite campaigns to the homepage to make visitors discover more of your products, collections, and marketing messages.

Let’s see a couple of examples.

Dolce & Gabbana places such small and gorgeous popups in the right bottom corner to let visitors know about new arrivals (in this case, it was the Kim Dolce & Gabbana T-Shirt):

Next up—

Net-a-porter, another popular luxury fashion brand. Their store often drives traffic to pages with sales with campaigns like this one:

Indeed, that’s a good apparel marketing strategy if you’d like to increase engagement with new arrivals or special sales.

And it’s also something you can replicate on your apparel store easily.

For example, I was able to create an exact copy of Net-a-porter’s popup in about two minutes:

7. Use B2GO (buy 2, get one for free)

B2GO offers are a savvy way to move inventory quicker and increase ecommerce sales.

By encouraging customers to buy more to get a free item, you're increasing the perceived value of their purchase and encouraging them to spend more. So, it could be a good apparel and accessories marketing idea (to add a free accessory to clothing, for example).

Ekster, for example, rewards customers with a free cash clip for buying two items. To maximize the awareness of this special offer, the brand uses this message:

8. Add similar product and styles to product pages

Help your customers find the right color and shade easier with recommendations on product pages. Fashionnova knows what their customers might want to buy, so they show similar styles and related products like that:

You can use customer browsing data to provide relevant suggestions like these. It will transform the shopping experience, and increase average order value and overall sales. 

The more tags you give products and the deeper you dive into your data, the easier it will be to recommend your customers products that they simply can't say no to. 

The best tools for tracking customer activity on ecommerce websites are Google Analytics and Hotjar.

9. Promote your values and mission

People are no longer just buying products. They are increasingly choosing environmentally-friendly and ethical brands because they know that the fashion industry is one of the biggest contributors to climate change.

That means that fashion brands need to:

• Share their manufacturing practices and policies

• Get involved with environmental organizations or volunteering

• Run marketing campaigns in an ethical way

Let’s see some examples.

Allbirds shares their entire sustainability strategy on a special page:

Gymshark, another successful Shopify fitness apparel store, also shares a ton of resources about sustainability and community projects:

Visit those pages—and maybe your competitors', too—to get some inspiration (this could be especially useful if you're just starting a clothing brand). Today, sustainability is a must for a successful business in the apparel industry, so you’ll find plenty of examples to get you started.

If you’d like some help with sustainability reporting, this guide from Harvard Business Review will definitely help.

10. Grab emails before visitors leave

Not every visitor is going to buy, we know that. We need to convert them, manage the emails, and get sales.

That’s why having a email capture campaign collecting emails (email popups) is a good idea. If you’re not a fan of popups, that’s all right—there are many ways in which you can implement them in a tasteful way that doesn’t affect the browsing experience in a major way.

Let’s see how fashion stores do this:

All these fashion stores would not be using website popups if they were not bringing them leads, agree?

In fact, as a company specializing in popups, we know that email popups like the ones you’ve just seen convert up to 8% of visitors on average.

Apparel marketing: the bottom line

Hope you got some practical tips to promote your fashion products online.

Feel free to try different strategies and see how they perform!