There are so many entrepreneurs who have the greatest desire to build a business that enables them to live a lifestyle of their dreams. So much of your dreams are limited by your imagination.
The potential to grow a business like that is always there, and to build the business, you have to decide to start putting in the time and effort it requires to scale it up.
Today, we are spending a big chunk of our day and our lives, in turn, staring at your computer and phone screens, soaking in and more content than probably our brain can process.
The impact of this changing pattern in content discovery and generation is colossal, especially in the fashion and lifestyle industries. What we share is what we are, and we build our individualistic on the internet that way.
There are some things that you need to take care of in the fashion retail industry. You have to set the foundation of your company or brand in such a way that your customers get used to a certain standard of the following things in the list.
This list is also the list that gives you important pointers on the secrets that you must apply to your business to make it incredibly successful in the fashion and lifestyle industry.
1. Amping up the perceived value
The perceived value of a product or service is what the customer believes the merchandise is worth or what they agree to pay upfront in exchange for the product or service. Compared to the real or the actual value of the product, the perceived value is more difficult to measure directly.
Even then, it has a far greater and wide impact on the apprehensions of the customer concerning your product. The perceived value of products offered by a brand is also directly measured by the level of positive associations and collaborations, brand loyalty and awareness which the brand has made on the market.
You have to keep the perceived value of your goods high so that the customer feels comfortable paying a price that you’ve attributed to the product.
You can do this by hiring a team of professionals who will work together to ramp up your brand value by creating online and digital marketing campaigns to spread awareness about your brand.
In larger corporations, managers have different departments that range from photoshoot operations and stills studios to model casting and copy-writing.
2. Being good at visual communication
Product display is usually a huge part of your customers’ showroom experience. You have to invest heavily on product displays at exclusive stores all around the city, country, or the world so that the product looks larger than life.
With the emergence of social commerce, when information sharing and generation is getting more and more visual with the involvement of more and more media pieces like pictures and videos, you need to streamline the content generation.
With product photos that you post on your website and social media channels, you have to communicate as much visual information as possible to convince customers that they are looking at something genuine. It should depict the feel of the fabric; the stitch, seam and lining; the material of the fabric; the brand tag; and any emblems that are present on the product.
3. Be careful with the packaging
To increase the perceived value of your products, you have to show attractive product packaging to visitors to increase the perceived value of their products.
The effort that is put here compensates for the experience lag that the customers experience as compared to if they were in a physical showroom.
The packaging on the product gives the customer a glimpse into the product’s delivery experience even before they consider placing an order.
Everything, starting from the hand finishing to the fabric accessory ranges is important to give that sophisticated and rich vibe to your customers
4. Product descriptions
With the increase in social media marketing and other sales that happen in social media, new age retailers no longer have to write spammy meta tags and product descriptions to communicate the value of the product accurately.
Now, you can focus on writing short and crisp meta descriptions for your products so that it gives a sense of character to the product that you want customers to buy.
5. Inflation of perceived value
Do not overdo the raising of the perceived value of the product. You must make sure that the value of the product is not oversold and not undersold either.
The perfect perceived value-enhancing image of the brand is done when you know how to strike the perfect balance between the two.
You also sometimes have to take surveys that specifically have columns that give customers the option to rate different aspects of the product like packaging, quality, quantity separately.
Online fashion retail industries focus and thrive on repeated orders and more than average orders to flourish. If the customers are dissatisfied on the first go, they won’t order again.
6. Do not sell products on your homepage.
Focusing on the experience of exploring and venturing into the website and looking for exactly what you want is part of the customer experience.
You do not want to take that away. You can do this by keeping the selling and buying a part for the landing pages that you’ve created on the homepage and not the homepage itself.
7. Know your customers
You have to keep searching for new ways to collect information about your customers and use it to your advantage, providing them with a specialized and personalized shopping experience.
Collecting a customer’s shopping preferences in the form of several quizzes or surveys before or after exposing them or giving them personalized content is a great way to do that.
Make sure that you’re not overwhelming them with your surveys; otherwise, it might have a negative effect.
8. Use cookies for a personalized experience
Cookies are text strings that are sent by your website to the customer’s browsers. These cookies act as identifiers for your customers and provide information about them when they revisit the page.
The data sent by the server uses the information to maintain shopping carts, wish lists and generally enhance the overall experience of the customer on your website.
9. Make your customers part of a community
Whenever we talk about fashion-related applications or websites, or if you are a regular shopper, you might have noticed that they mostly use a term called ‘membership’, where they plan to make you part of the inherent identity of the website or company that they run.
When a user is invited to buy into or be part of memberships like these, it usually gives them a sense of belonging with you and your products.
This, in a way, inherently compels them to come back to you in case they need some other stuff again.
Making them part of an established community will help you engage them better and give them a more personalized experience.
10. Stay real
Social media has played a huge role in democratizing fashion and luxury.
A community has been built on real products, featuring real-life photos that are not always perfect.
Any picture of a product that’s taken from an iPhone is just as important as a picture or video captured by your photography or production team.
Hence, the pictures that are shared by your customers on your website or shared to you by the medium of social media may not be as good as the ones you usually are habituated to look at.
Still, it will have a much far-reaching social attraction. It will also bring a lot of positive sales to your products and brands because you’ve made them more authentic.
Conclusion
There are hundreds of other things that you can do to make a fashion or lifestyle blog or company or brand successful in this digital world.
Showing your customers behind the scenes of your blogs, sharing interesting conversations between your employees and customers, reaching out to other bloggers and basically becoming more open with the people who are supporting you by buying your products is the key here.
You can also run contests, drive traffic from news trends on celebrity dressing, and tell them popular issues that they might face during shopping.
All this is part of a drive that you can undertake to make your brand more famous and popular among the masses.
