Sit tight and we’ll explore some valuable lessons from Outdoor Voices email marketing strategy and ads.
Outdoor Voices is a Texas-based (acquired by Consortium Brand Partners in June 2024), active-lifestyle fashion brand that creates recreational apparel for specific use cases -- such as fitness, outdoors, and wellness with product collections such as OV Run, OV Outdoors, and others.
It’s a niche fashion eCommerce store with an estimated annual revenue of $49 million per year and recently raised a $64.4 million round in funding.
There’s a lot to learn from “Brand breakdowns” and “Campaign breakdowns”: imagine being able to pick on a brand’s marketing strategy, learning lessons, and implementing it for your own eCommerce business.
So let's go, we'll pick some lessons from the Outdoor Voices Email Marketing Strategy.
It's a clean case study in what works for clothing/apparel/fashion brands.
Here are the key learnings for fashion email marketing: sending often enough to stay top-of-mind, capturing visitors before they leave, and letting automated flows do the follow-up.
Outdoor Voices does all three — an above-average send frequency, a strong 20%-off pop-up that also segments by gender, and 3–4 automated journeys.
That's the template most clothing brands can copy.
Below are the flows, the lead-gen pop-up and the frequency tactics — and how to steal each for your own fashion email marketing.
Send emails more often
Even without backing anything up with research, we can tell you (from insights and experience) that eCommerce brands that send more emails (as compared being less frequent) have better results from their email marketing campaigns -- just as is the case for ads showing up more frequently than being less frequent.
The email marketing frequency of the Outdoor Voices brand is above the average of all eCommerce brands in the fashion industry, for instance.
Note: Know your target audience. For emails, it’s best to test out your email sending frequency -- each business and the target audiences brands try to attract are different.
So, don’t copy Outdoor Voices’ cadence blindly.
Test one extra campaign a week with a randomly selected half of your eligible list, and run the test long enough to cover several sends, then compare total revenue per recipient, unsubscribe rate, and spam complaints.
Keep the higher cadence only if it creates more total value - usually, that's what you will experience!
What We Like:
- Outdoor voices brand follows best practices such as setting the email marketing frequency a bit higher than average.
- The email marketing campaign timing is set according to industry standards.
Things Outdoor Voices Can Do to Improve:
- Testing out other days of the week will greatly help providing more insights and cover lost opportunities (if any).
- What happens if you send email campaigns outside of the industry norm? Outdoor Voices can experiment and test timing of email campaigns as well.
Most fashion brands under-send, so an above-average cadence keeps you top-of-mind when the buying urge hits. Add one extra send a week for a month and watch revenue-per-email, not just open rate.
Get your Email Popup right for Lead Generation
Some eCommerce brands miss out on the super power that pop-ups and other lead generation elements (such as well-timed and relevant exit-intent pop-ups), category-based, collection-based, or even product-specific lead generation campaigns that you can control and use.
Not using lead generation elements on your website -- to capture interested and potential leads on your ecommerce site is a lost opportunity (if you don’t use it).
Outdoor Voices uses a strong lead generation pop-up as shown below -- instantly setting the stage to capture potential leads who might be interested in saving some cash while they are shopping.
What We Like:
- Lead generation (for incoming visitors earned through organic or inorganic marketing efforts) is vital. Outdoor Voices is using it.
- A strong and appealing offer with a 20% discount.
- A way to let visitors categorize themselves (which helps with email marketing segmentation for the brand later). This, in turn, allows them to send targeted and appropriate email campaigns and journeys to particular segments (one campaign for men, and another campaign for women, for instance).
Things Outdoor Voices Can Do to Improve:
- A single pop-up won’t do justice to the sheer amount of effort, timing, and consistency needed for lead generation for eCommerce businesses -- Outdoor voices can test out exit-intent pop-ups (these show up when visitors leave the site), slide-ins (lead generation elements that slide-in from left, right, top, or bottom) after visitors spend some time on the site, and more.
- Product-specific or collection-specific lead generation elements bring in relevance to lead generation.
The 20%-off pop-up captures visitors before they bounce, and the gender self-select quietly builds your segments for later. Add one self-segmentation question to your pop-up so every new subscriber sorts themselves.
Segmentation lets you change a flow or send a campaign based on what you know: customer demographics, purchase history and interests, etc.. That will make your campaigns more target, more useful... and more likely to drive purchases!
Email Marketing Journeys & Segmentation: The Superpower You Could Use
Did you know that segmented email marketing automation campaigns deliver 50% more CTR (Click through rate) than usual broadcast campaigns?
More than 58% of reported eCommerce revenue is generated thanks to segmented campaigns.
Email marketing journeys are tailor-made, custom email marketing automation campaigns that put email subscribers, previous customers, or existing customers (each category, for understandable reasons) so as to make the power of email marketing automation work for your eCommerce business.
Why, you ask? One size won’t fit all.
Each customer is different and your email marketing campaign journeys try to reflect that as much as possible.
Outdoor Voices, as a brand, uses 3-4 specific journeys as a part of its email marketing efforts. Some of these journeys include:
- Welcome Journey (a great way to onboard new customers)
- Lost checkout journey ( a terrific way to prevent lost customers)
- Ecommerce Birthday Sale Journey (to cheer you up on your special day)
- Black Friday Journey (intended to make the best of BFCM -- Black Friday, Cyber Monday rush)
Automated flows follow up at the exact right moment (new signup, birthday, abandoned cart), automatically. Build the four core flows first — welcome, abandoned checkout, birthday, BFCM — before any one-off campaign.
Outdoor Voices - Ecommerce Fashion Email Marketing Birthday Flow
An email marketing journey — or flow — is an automated sequence triggered by a customer's behaviour: signing up, abandoning a checkout, having a birthday, or a seasonal moment like Black Friday. For fashion and apparel brands, a few core flows (welcome, abandoned checkout, birthday, BFCM) do most of the heavy lifting because they hit the right person at the right moment, automatically.
Here’s an example of Outdoor Voices’ Birthday Sale Email Marketing Journey.
They send you an email the day of your birthday "A gift for you" - and then the very same email, one week after, with the subject line "Your birthday might be over..."
Outdoor Voices - Ecommerce Fashion Email Marketing Welcome Flow
What We Like:
- Using email marketing customer journeys is a terrific and powerful way to use email marketing.
- Email marketing journeys imply that brands also use advanced email marketing strategies (such as tags, groups, segments, and more) -- making campaigns more targeted, appropriate, relevant, timely, and effective.
- We love the use of animated graphics with simple, relatable copy.
Things Outdoor Voices Can Do to Improve:
- Add more emails in the journeys.
- Create more customized and segmented email marketing journeys, depending on customer behavior, customer transactions, tags, segments, and so on.
The Power of Free & Art of Making Emails Engaging
For one, you can’t underestimate the power of “free” -- no matter how you choose to use it (various contexts are possible).
Add a bit of engagement and interactivity and your email marketing campaigns perform at another level altogether.
Here’s a specific email campaign example from Outdoor Voices that uses the power of “free” and adds some engagement to the email campaign.
What We Like:
- Animated graphics with different products showing up within the email (minus distractions)
- Using “If you like Free…in the subject line”
- The Free gift offer has an irresistible appeal
- The Ask: Choose a color -- brings in some fun engagement (and more than an incentive to take action.
- The Call-to-action with a brand recall possibility
- Additional cherry-on-the-pie thing with OV rewards.
Things Outdoor Voices Can Do to Improve:
- Test using emojis to see if campaign results can further improve along with some “fun” stance to the branding.
- Run similar email campaigns -- featuring other product categories (targeting men, for instance) -- replicate the success of this email campaign.
"Free" plus a tiny interaction ("choose a color") turns a passive email into a click, and the color choice is a soft data point. Put one interactive ask in a promo email — pick a color, pick a fit — to lift engagement.
On panoramata, you can retrieve the complete list of all the Outdoor Voices Campaigns (also includes ads, email campaign journeys, snapshots, and ad campaigns) that you can learn from.
Interested in creating inspiring lists, gathering quick insights, or to track eCommerce business competition? Sign up with Panoramata for creating email lists in minutes, email marketing campaign calendars, and so much more.
FAQ
What email flows should a fashion brand have?
Start with four: a welcome flow, an abandoned-checkout flow, a birthday flow, and a Black Friday/Cyber Monday flow. Outdoor Voices runs all four.
How often should a clothing brand send marketing emails?
Often enough to stay top-of-mind — most fashion brands under-send. Outdoor Voices sits above the fashion-industry average. Test your own cadence rather than copying a fixed number.
How do you capture more email subscribers on an ecommerce site?
Use a lead-gen pop-up with a real offer (Outdoor Voices uses 20% off) and let visitors self-segment — for example by gender — so your later emails are targeted.
Does email segmentation actually improve results?
Segmented, automated campaigns tend to outperform one-size-fits-all sends on click-through and revenue.
What can I learn from Outdoor Voices' email marketing?
Send a little more often than average, capture and segment leads at the pop-up, run automated flows, and make emails fun (their "choose a color" free-gift email is a great engagement example).
