8 types of email campaigns for your clothing brand

Email marketing is an important tool that all clothing brands should use in order to increase revenue and increase customer life time value. 

Email marketing is important because it requires minimal cost to send out a message and you own your audience. If your brand’s Instagram or TikTok shuts down, you lose your reach and followers. This means that the platform owns the followers and brands are just using their platform. Email marketing is different, you own the list and even if your email provider shuts you down you can move your list to a different platform. 

If your brand’s ads shut down, your revenue stream would decrease which can be devastating to the business. If you have a large audience email list, you can send out a lot of campaigns to increase your sales. 

Email campaigns are email marketing messages sent to multiple people at once. Here are 8 types of email marketing campaigns for your clothing brand. These email campaigns can increase your customer life time value and engage your email list so they connect with your brand. 

All 8 of the best types of email marketing campaigns:

1. New collection releases
2. Holiday promotions
3. Newsletter campaign
4. Social media campaign
5. Thank you campaign 
6. Invitation campaign
7. Personalised product recommendations 
8. Social proof campaigns 

1. New Collection Releases

Product release campaigns are a great way to showcase your new products and build attention to new releases. Product release emails basically showcase the brands new product and it’s features before, during, and after launch.

 A great sequence to follow is two to three emails before the clothing release to build hype and get people interested in the new collection. In the emails you can include price details, pictures of the clothing, the release date, release date timers, and much more. 

Email timers are clocks embedded into the email that function as a count down for the clothing release running down by the day, hour, and seconds. This feature can be added using embedded code that can be created using third party tools such as. This timer can cause subscribers to look forward to the drop by knowing exactly how long they have to wait.

Including price details in your email campaigns can be a positive or a negative strategy. It can be positive because you can advise your subscribers on exactly how much the product is going to cost so they have time to save or allocate their money. There is an advantage in not revealing the price too though for hype emails, it builds more curiosity. 

Adding pictures to the hype emails is also very important to show your subscribers the new release and get them excited. By sending three emails before the actual release, subscribers are already excited and aware of the product so a simple release email can generate a lot of sales.

Example email sequence:

• Email 1: provide a sneak peak to the new clothing collection release. Subject line: Our new summer tees are almost here…
• Email 2: Subject line: 2 Days left until our collection releases!
• Email 3: Subject line: 1 Day left! Don’t miss out…
• Email 4: Subject line: 6 hours left until our Moonshine collection!!
• Email 5: Our moonshine collection is finally live…

2. Holiday Promotions

Holiday campaigns are email campaigns that include a promotion in relation to a holiday. Many brands create emails for holidays like Christmas, Halloween, New Years, Saint Patrick’s Day, and Easter. By relating your brand to a major holiday, your looked as more trustworthy and compared to those happy moods of that holiday. This is also the perfect time to make a promotion. 

Quarter four is generally when the most sales happen due to Christmas, New years, and Black Friday. Missing out on email campaigns during this period will cause a huge loss of sales.

It is important to send to two or more emails during this period to get the most attention to the promotion. Sending this many emails in a short period could hurt your email reputation if done for a long period of time but doing it only for a week is safe. 

Sending a last day email explaining to your subscribers that the promotion is about to end will create urgency and scarcity causing even more sales

Here are examples of subject lines for major holiday campaigns:

• Black Friday: Get 30% off now with our Black Friday Sale!
• Christmas: Here’s 20% off with our holiday sale!
• New Years: Happy new year from Luna Clothing!
• Saint Patrick’s: 
• Veterans Day: Happy Veterans Day! Here’s our best deals for today
• Thanksgiving: 
• Labor Day: 
• Valentines: Here’s our best gift ideas for your special someone

A strategy that can be used is sending out emails a week before the actual holiday to not have your email list with all other companies holiday emails. By sending yours early, you beat all the traffic and are able to be seen by your audience.

Another strategy that can be used is resending the campaign with a different subject line to people that haven’t open the email after one to two days. Don’t let your email go to waist just because the subject line didn’t catch their attention. Switch the subject line and receive more opens to your email.

Email sequence example: 

• Email 1: Introducing the holiday promotion. Subject line: 20% off Black Friday Sale starts now!
• Email 2: email sent to people that did not open email 1. Subject line: Black Friday deals just for you!
• Email 3: an email further expanding the promotion and its details. Subject line: Here’s everything you can save on for our Black Friday Sale!!
• Email 4: Subject line: Our Black Friday Sale is almost over!
• Email 5: subject line: Last day for our Black Friday Sale!
• Email 6: subject line: 4 hours left for our Black Friday Sale!!

3. Newsletter Campaign

Newsletter email campaigns are a key component in email marketing. Newsletter emails are emails sent on a set schedule providing value, updates, or information about the brand. Brands can have monthly, weekly, or even daily newsletter campaigns to engage with their subscribers. Industries like stock trading requires daily updates due to the fast changing environment. For clothing brands, providing updates for the brand and engaging emails sent weekly can be a good tactic to maximize your revenue. 

The key metric to know how many emails to send depends on the open rate. If your brands open rates are higher than 45% every campaign, this is an indicator that your should send more campaigns. If your email open rate is less than 30% this indicates you should send less emails to subscribers.

Example of newsletter emails:

• Updates on the brand email subject line example: We have faster shipping! 2 day fast shipping available…

4. Social Media Campaign

Social media campaigns are campaigns with the goal of generating more engagement for your social media. This could be beneficial if you posted a new YouTube video or Instagram post and want the most engagement on it as possible. 

Asking people to engage with your social media can also cause people to build a stronger connection with your brand and trust clicking on your emails. If they have clicked links to your emails before, when you launch a new product, the odds of them clicking on the product page link increases. 

Getting views on YouTube is very challenging, getting your subscribers to watch your video and like the video can increase engagement and allow it to reach more people. The video could also be valuable for your email subscribers so it’s helpful for them as well. 

Email sequence example:

• Email 1: Explain them the value of the social media or why it’s important. Subject line: Learn how we hand make our shirts!
• Email 3: Send a thank you email to your subscribers that clicked on the link. Subject line: Thank you for your support!

5. Thank You Campaign

Sending a thank you email is very important to build a brand connection with your subscribers. The purpose of this email campaign is to say thank you for either a successful business year, on a big milestone for the brand, or a successful drop. 

Sharing this information with your subscribers is important becuase this build brand connection with your audience. When your audience reads your accomplishments they feel they have contributed and will make their bond with the brand stronger. 

Examples of thank you messages:

• Reaching a follower milestone. Subject line: We just reached 100k followers! Thank you!
• After a certain amount of years in business. Subject line: Today marks our 5 year anniversary in business! Thank you!
• After opening up a new location. Subject line: We just opened our 2nd location! Thank you!

6. Invitation Campaign

Invitation emails are email campaigns that focus on in person virtual events relating to your brand. You can notify your customers if you will be having a pop up shop in their area or if you are hosting a virtual event in the metaverse for example. 

You can segment people that are specifically in the area of the physical event and send them a few emails about the details of the events. Link to purchase the tickets or the location of the event. 

Example email sequence:

• Email 1: introduce event and details. Subject line: Luna Clothing pop up in Atlanta!
• Email 2: send email to people that registered to attend. Subject line: See you at the Pop up! 
• Email 3: Send your subscribers a second notification about your event. Subject line: Don’t forget to attend our pop up this weekend!
• Email 4: thank you email for the success of the pop up. Subject line: What a great time we had in Atlanta!

7. Personalised product recommendations

The last recommended email marketing campaign type is a personalised product recommendations email. This emails provides the subscriber with specific products they would be interested in based on their data. This data can either be collected by their behavior or data they submit. 

Based on behavior: you can track which products each specific subscriber views so when creating a campaign you can add a dynamic segment where they can view their most recommended products.

Based on data they submit: subscribers can either submit data when subscribing to the email list or after using forms. During a sign up form, you can add a box where customers can add their sex or age. This data can be very useful to send them clothes based on their preference. The downside to having many boxes on your subscription opt in form is a less opt in rate. Some users will be scared off by the amount of data they have to submit in order to join. 

To solve this downside, you can have minimal boxes during the initial opt in form but offer a discount later on to provide further information. Not everyone will submit their information, but the ones who do, now you have valuable information to send them personal product recommendation campaigns. 

Example email subject lines:

• 5 skirts for this summer we recommend!
• Here’s 3 shirts that match your vibe 
• Start school right with these shirts…

8. Social Proof Campaigns

Social proof campaigns are email marketing campaigns with customer reviews or user generated content that express how other customers like your products. Many customers need more than your opinion about the brand to make a purchase. User generated content is videos or pictures from customers about your product. You can add videos to your email as a gif or having an image that links to the video. 

Focus on reviews that tackle key problems that potential customers worry about. People that purchase from clothing brands usually look for the quality of the clothing, the delivery time, and how it fits. If you can tackle these problems in your social proof campaigns then you will increase your sales. 

Example of email subject lines:

• Here’s what our customers have to say…
• Don’t just take it from us, hear our customers!
• Why we have 4.7 stars on this shirt!

Summary

In summary, there are several ways your clothing brand can utilize email marketing campaigns. From newsletters to personalised product recommendations, your brand can benefit from owning your audience and marketing to them affectivly.

In summary the 8 best email marketing campaigns for clothing brands are: 

1. New collection releases
2. Holiday promotions
3. Newsletter campaigns
4. Social media campaigns
5. Thank you campaigns
6. Invitation campaigns
7. Personalized product recommendations 
8. Social proof campaigns

Work with an expert.

If you want all your email marketing to be taken care of by an expert, explore how you can work with me here.