If you love fashion, you’ve probably spent a little bit of time thinking about running your own fashion business. Perhaps you’ve even begun down that path already and started to investigate your options. The question for any promising startup in the fashion industry is to ask what it is that their customers really want.
Ian Mitchell is a director at Kantar Worldpanel Fashion. It’s his job to find out what it is that customers really value in the industry. He says that customers are mainly interested in things that make their lives easier. Delivering a great experience, therefore, relies on your ability to make your client’s lives easier. So how can you do this?
Engage Shoppers Directly
According to the data, people spend about 0.56 seconds figuring out whether they want to stay on your website or not. This means that people aren’t making decisions based on reasoned calculation. They’re making decisions about whether to give you the benefit of the doubt based on gut instinct. That’s a big deal. It means that to actually engage with people, you have to get inside their heads. It’s not enough to appeal to their rational faculties. You have to go deeper than that, right to the base of the brain and elicit an emotional response.
The first thing to do, according to experts, is to convince your patrons that your store is open, friendly and convenient. Doing this visually will help you to hang onto them for longer. Clear menus, bold writing and bright colors all help. The next step is to make the experience personalized and customized. You want to appeal on a subconscious level that you’re looking out for the best interest of customers.
Be Consistent
It’s also important that your entire company makes sense as a whole and fits together. Half of the battle for getting new customers is making your brand consistent. The other half is making sure that the different arms of your business all talk to each other. Thanks to software, it’s now much easier to bring things like web ordering and product development together. Clothing ERP software regulates each of these individual aspects of your business and brings them together. Customers soon pick up on these signals, recognizing that your business is consistent. This then helps to build trust and imprint your brand. It also gives you more time to focus on high value-added things, like responding to customer reviews or expanding product lines.
Adapt To Customer Needs
As customer demographics change, so too must the businesses that serve them. Take Asos, for instance. Around two years ago, Asos started to change its core business in responses to changes in customer demographics. It noticed that the disposable income of its customers was declining. And so it shifted away from premium brands to more of its own brands. The move wound up being successful. Asos was able to offer less wealthy customers more choice at an affordable price. At any one time, the retailer has more than 6,000 dresses and 800 brands on its site.
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