It’s no secret that we face challenging times. In our ‘23 Benchmark Report, almost three-quarters of consumers expected to change their spending habits in 2023. In 2024, with growing interest rates, global instability, and an uncertain economic outlook (to put it mildly), consumers continue to be cautious about how they spend their money.

27% specifically said they would spend less on apparel this year. 

So, in the hyper-competitive fashion industry, while customer loyalty is declining, customer demands are rising. Leveraging data to increase acquisition and retention is becoming absolutely vital.

Offering Various Delivery Services to Reduce Cart Abandonment

It's never been more important to leverage data at the top of the flywheel in your checkout. The hard work and investment in acquisition marketing can be wasted if your potential customers add something to their cart only to abandon it. 

"Our research identified that 84% of consumers will likely not complete a purchase due to a lack of delivery options at checkout."

This is a huge stat. And it's not just about having delivery options. It's about making sure one communicates them and their benefit as soon as they can in the customer journey. Of course, it can be difficult to communicate certain information before the cart without knowing the order and address (although this is doable). But there are plenty that brands can do before that. Eg, next day delivery is an easy win in a banner and clearly situated on a PDP.

By using real-time data from your warehouse and carrier configuration, alongside your dynamic shipping rules, brands can offer a range of validated delivery services. Integrating with several carriers and carrier services means you can meet evolving customer demands regarding options at checkout, such as Click & Collect and express delivery. 

By implementing a sophisticated carrier management solution, fashion merchants can use the same data (plus live transit times) to calculate an accurate delivery promise, adding certainty to convenience and choice at checkout. This reduces cart abandonment and creates the baseline against which to manage your customer experience.

“Additional delivery options have driven our website sales by 37.9%” - New Look

Retain Your Customers with Tracking Data

The hard work doesn’t stop once a customer has completed a purchase. We found delivery experience is the 3rd highest customer loyalty driver, behind affordable prices and product quality. 

Tracking is a crucial element of the delivery experience, with 23% of consumers switching brands if the company does not send tracking updates. 

Providing a positive delivery experience depends entirely on obtaining complete, informative, and timely data. Acquiring that data can enable you to take ownership of your delivery experience, empowering you to send the most accurate tracking updates, regardless of the carrier selected.

Implementing a suite of tracking products can serve up enriched and consistent tracking data so you can manage your consumers' expectations against the delivery promise. The same data can empower your customer service teams or partners' solutions, like DigitalGenius, to resolve tracking queries and send out proactive communications if delivery slips.

Using trended data to measure and improve delivery performance

Lastly, trended data is essential to make more structural decisions about your performance versus delivery promise and customer expectations.

Fashion brands should ensure that they have access to industry-wide data which give insights into carrier performance and allows for benchmarking to enable proactive management of customer expectations.

These headlines only scratch the surface of how data can be used to optimise various stages of your ecommerce experience!