With its lower, accessible price points, sale season is the perfect opportunity to showcase product quality and customer service to a wider audience. And, if the 2024 BFCM results are anything to go by, sale events have no intention of slowing down with high demand from discount-hungry shoppers. From here on out, however, the task for retail teams is to convert those one-time sale shoppers into loyal brand fans.
Strategic assortments, performance marketing, and brand perception are all part of the process to supercharge retention and drive conversion throughout 2025. Here are five easy-to-implement strategies to help you hit your targets.
1. Focus on newness
Out with the old. While many industries tap into the ‘New Year, new me’ consumer mentality, for fashion retailers, offering your customers a fresh perspective and a reason to buy is as simple as transitioning your key real estate from discount products to a full price assortment.
- Leverage insights about historical shopping behaviours, current trends, cultural influences, and even the weather to help you merchandise the ideal assortment of new products to turn your sale customers into repeat shoppers.
- Strategically clear your sale stock while spotlighting newness through merchandising, marketing messages and ad campaigns to ensure your customers are met with fresh, appealing products that fit your brand story.
- Gradually phase out sale items by moving them to clearance sections to allow full-priced products to dominate prime retail space, in store or on your website.
- Review your intake and stock phasing to ensure you have new styles dropping throughout the month for consistent sales.
- Keep an eye on your full price (FP) vs markdown (MD) sales mix. You want to eventually shift the weight of the mix back to FP to increase your margin and gross profit. Keep in mind, the industry benchmark sell-through rate for a fashion retailer is around 70-75%. You ideally want to sell 70-75% of the inventory you bought in any one season. This will leave you with 25-30% to sell on markdown going into the following season.
In Style Arcade you can view your mix in our Rollups feature to report on it in weekly trade until you are back to a healthy FP vs MD mix %.
2. Tailor visual merchandising to re-engage
Keeping customers engaged in an increasingly saturated marketplace will rely on creating effective product displays that hit the right emotions. Most importantly, your store’s visual merchandising, whether in-store or online, should logically and seamlessly direct attention to your most profitable products.
- Firstly, analyze your product performance data points, starting with the sales numbers of the comparative seasons and mixes across categories. What did your customers buy, when, and why?
- Consider the stocking points across your retail network and review the visual merchandising against customer feedback. It's important to understand how your customers shop to tell the full story of a range.
- Position full-price new arrivals in high-visibility areas and communicate with badges or decals their USPs: e.g. New in, Exclusive, Limited Edition or their unique fabric quality.
- Track unit economics to help reveal opportunities for inventory optimization, and react in-season to maximize profits for strong sellers or increase demand for slow movers.
- Keep refining and reviewing your visual merchandising strategies to maintain optimal inventory levels, retain as much revenue as possible and lower your cost per unit for higher profits.
Don’t forget to ensure the whole team is across your end-game. Style Arcade’s Range Plan allows you to share the up-to-date product range visually with space planners, visual merchandisers and store managers.
3. Update shopping feeds to supercharge your assortment
No customer wants to see low-stock, marked down, old season inventory hanging around in your Meta and Google campaigns after a long sale period. Your January and February ad campaigns are the perfect time to update, review and cleanse your shopping feeds to hit the ground running.
Start by identifying your high-margin hero and core products that you’d like Google, Meta or your email platform to prioritize. Curate marketing edits for added value and to highlight brand stories, and add key metrics to your products that help to impact the performance of products in your campaigns.
You can automate your shopping feeds with Style Arcade’s dynamic product tagging. The feature was intentionally built for brands to tap into year-round profitability on the products that secure the most return on ad budgets.
- Prioritize products with high size availability and stock cover for better conversions.
- Automatically exclude high-return or low-profitability items from campaigns.
- Align your Google Shopping, Meta DPAs, and email feeds with what customers actually want.
4. Focus on value to enhance brand perception
Repeat customers comes down to top-tier experiences, so your market can see the value of your brand beyond sales.
However, you need to understand your customer sentiment and the perceived value of your product. Developing a deeper understanding of your current customer perception through data, touchpoint and feedback analysis across your store network, will help you respond accordingly, and create a cross-funnel strategy to form a cohesive brand story.
Today’s brands will need to focus on balancing automation with human touch to turn customers into VICs. According to the Vogue Business Index, there is an increasing emphasis on human connection and the value of securing direct relationships with shoppers:
- The share of brands offering different customer service options has increased, with 70% of top brands now offering in-store appointments
- 58% of brands providing direct access to store staff via WhatsApp or call-back
- The share of brands using instant services like AI chatbots, has decreased by 3% to 60%.
5. Communicate with customers where they are
Customers are becoming more and more comfortable with shopping on their phones, with Salesforce reported mobile shopping accounted for 57% of all sales, working out to 7.6 billion dollars in spend for BFCM 2024. It’s clear that brands and retailers that can blend e-commerce, marketing and mobile experiences seamlessly are the ones that will cut through the competition this year.
And, according to YOTPO’s Email and SMS Strategies for 2025, SMS has become the canvas where marketing meets personal conversation. Their key trends for using SMS to convert customers in 2025 include:
- Use friendly language and strategically deployed visual elements to create a conversational experience
- Less is more: Dial it back to focus on fewer, high-impact messages. It’s about being smart with your resources, understanding your audience deeply, and knowing when to hit send – and more importantly, when not to.
- Smart brands are zeroing in on their most engaged subscribers and specific buyer segments that are most likely to convert.
- Success in SMS marketing isn’t just about what you say – it’s about knowing exactly who you’re saying it to. That means collecting zero-party data directly from customers, tracking their behaviors, and understanding how they engage with your brand. This insight helps create the kind of targeted segments that really make a difference.
Retailers can transform one-time sale shoppers into loyal customers by focusing on strategic approaches throughout the year. From introducing fresh full-priced assortments, tailoring visual merchandising to highlight high-margin products, updating shopping feeds to prioritize profitability, and enhancing brand perception through personalized experiences, 2025 can be your best year yet.
