3 brand strategies for clinching the sale and making it stick
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Both brands and consumers are watching their spending. This holiday shopping season, consumers are being more thoughtful about the investments they’re making, while brands are adjusting operations to avoid high-cost returns.?
This has been evident over the last couple of weeks, based on discussions with fashion and beauty brand executives. Below are three strategies they’re using to clinch the sale and ensure it sticks.?
1. Offering mini versions of products. As reported by senior Pop reporter Sara Spruch-Feiner earlier this month, Bobbi Brown’s Jones Road beauty brand once again chose to forego discounting over the Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend. Alternatively, the brand offered mini versions of its Miracle Balm hero product in sets of four —?customers could choose the four shades they wanted out of 10 available options. “New customers have told us that they didn’t feel confident investing in a full-size online, so they waited for the mini,” said the brand’s CMO, Cody Plofker . During the weekend, the brand sold 375,000 of the kits, with sales totaling $25.7 million.?
On a related note, as reported in the latest Pop Newsletter, Spate found that Google searches for “mini perfumes” are up 28.3% year over year, averaging 30,00 average monthly searches.
2. Facilitating try-ons via physical retail. While discussing the opening of their second NYC store, on Madison Avenue on Thursday, Still Here co-founder Maurice Mosseri said the brand’s placement in the market —?being a young denim brand — necessitates physical retail.?
“Selling jeans online, when we were a brand people had never heard of, wasn’t easy; we had a 40% return rate [at first],” he said. “We decided that the real dream would be to have a store where people can come in, try on the product and buy the product. That way, the sale will stick and, at the same time, we'll be able to bring them into the world of the brand.”
3. Elevating e-commerce with detailed fit guides and customer reviews. Both former Lululemon executives, Shannon Savage and Laura Low Ah Kee founded swimwear brand Left On Friday in 2018. They’ve since developed an e-commerce experience that eliminates many of the questions that come up when shopping for swimwear online.?
For example, they’ve set up a Compare Styles page that looks like an industry line sheet and works as a fit guide — it takes into account a shopper’s body shape as well as their fit preferences. “This is typically what a designer would hand off to a merchant when building the line,” Savage said, of the page. In addition, upon seeing heightened web traffic and purchases after posting user-generated content featuring the customer’s sizes, the brand now features customer reviews on its site, inclusive of imagery and sizing.?
After using one of these tools, along with one of the brand’s virtual consultants or its chatbot, customers “almost always convert,” Savage said.
However, she added, “Every brand struggles with getting people into products they want to keep versus return.”
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