Mind the Gap - Retention In a Dynamic Fashion Industry

When the pandemic hit, fashion retailers expected two outcomes. One, consumers holding back on buying goods to save up in these unprecedented times, or two, consumers highly rewarding themselves with endless goodies for being cooped up in their homes. Either way, retailers had to think hard about a never-before-situation and start fresh, positive retention strategies for their customers.

Besides the economy's tug-a-war with a possible recession, few retailers are hell-bent on client acquisition vs. retention as a top marketing strategy. As pandemic continues to be a persistent theme several fashion brands are resorting to desperate measures. The few brands that did succeed in the past either appealed to wealthy consumers or played around with the idea of comfort at home. 

Today, premium brands are struggling to make an impact or even succeed in most cases due to the effects of the pandemic. According to McKinsey Fashion “Global fashion sales will reach 96 to 101 percent of 2019 levels in 2021 and 103 to 108 percent in 2022”. Although news of full recovery seems like good news, McKinsey Fashion also suspects that performance across the globe may vary. 

On a positive note, many brands are acquiring new ways to set up positive customer success stories. Our expert, Harsh Garhwal, Head of Customer Success at DaMENSCH, leaves no opportunity to rest and assures successful customer retention. According to him, understanding the customer is key to success. He believes that customer retention is impacted by many factors and has many rewards.

Here’s his 3 point guide to keep the audience coming back to shop for more styles/ fashion/ apparel. 

• Every touchpoint with the customer is an opportunity in fashion. It takes time but the rewards are high.
• Customers don’t need to understand you - you need to understand the customers. Especially when it comes to their fashion sensibilities.
• Relevance - Being relevant in what you communicate is what drives results. For ex. If the customer has shopped Tees, showing the same collection again may not benefit. While suggesting new styles to pair with the previous purchase can garner higher CTRs and conversion. 
• Just knowing your customers but not being able to churn out content, offerings, and products that are relevant to them is as good as not knowing them. 
• It’s all in the testing!
• Beware of the GAP (read about it below)

Although these rules sound simple, customer retention has to be planned with careful scrutiny of audience segments, because it has a lot of space for rookie mistakes. It also highly depends on the unpredictable market that changes every day. Harsh believes, that the skill one needs to possess is to create hypotheses, and assumptions based on the customer data and eventually test them. Every test is bound to enhance the knowledge about your client and create records of what is relevant to them.

Be it loyal or new customers, they are all looking for reliable products and good service in order to retain as customers. If these are not fulfilled, they look elsewhere. While many successful marketers follow these steps, Harsh mentions the make-it or break-it moment which could result in great customer loss, that is, the ‘gap’. The gap between the 1st purchase and the 2nd purchase of each customer shouldn't be too much because chances are the customer has lost faith and is no longer with the brand. And with a plethora of similar products available on the market today, this can happen in a matter of minutes.

No matter how many spoken strategies everyone adopts, like segmentation, upsell-cross sell, reorder, etc, your success rate will fail if you’re not understanding your target audience. Today, customer retention is constantly changing the face of fashion retailers. It is all up to the brand’s voice, team, and outstanding strategies that together can strive to achieve success in the rails of retention.

DaMENSCH has been awarded the CX Excellence Awards 2022, hosted by Quantic for Best Customer Retention Strategy of the Year Clothing Apparels, and the D2C Awards 2022 presented by Indian Retailers for Best Customer Loyalty Initiative of the Year.