Email marketing in luxury: dos and don’ts

Now that Fashion & Luxury brands know by name ca 80% of their client base, the real issue is what to say in order to engage digitally connected customers for increasing revenues and brand loyalty.

For the first time we ranked our 30 Luxury Goods Brands in the Contactlab – Exane BNP Paribas Panel according to their capabilities in exploiting customer engagement via a well conceived Email contact plan.

The resulting Email Competitive Map shows that Cartier and Burberry lead both the Email Strategy (eg including variables such as number of languages, branding vs commercial content mix, customer and prospects segmentation, cross-channel prompt, …) and Email Proficiency (eg newsletter registration process, email technical structure, personalization, editorial plan, services referencing, …) axes.

We find that brands that score highly in terms of Email performance are also at the top of our overall digital reports scores (eg Digital Competitive Map, Online Offer and Pricing Landscape, Online Purchasing Ranking, …), with some notable exceptions like Michael Kors, Ferragamo, Fendi and Armani being positive outliers, while Givenchy, Loro Piana and Brunello Cucinelli are negative outliers.



Hermès, Saint Laurent, and to some extent Luis Vuitton, show the best balanced Branding/Commerce/Store content mix, whilst most brands in the panel includes either too much Commerce or Branding content. Only eight brands send Store-focused Emails.



Segmentation in contact plan content is still quite limited: Ferragamo and Cartier are positive examples differentiating content between clients and newsletter recipients; only ten brands differentiate content by gender, none by geo distance of client residence from the nearest store.

Apart from the Store Locator, Cross-Channel online/offline services are rarely linked on Emails… a real missed business opportunity given the increased importance of mobile marketing. Burberry does it for the “Collect in Store” service, while Cartier for “Book an Appointment” in store.