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The Fashion Marketing Guide to Effective Email Subject Lines

Aug 20, 2024

If you’re in the apparel industry and your work focuses on fashion marketing, you know that your outlook is quite bright! The global apparel market is projected to reach $703.11 billion this year, eventually growing to $918.71 billion by 2028

Balancing your own creativity with data-backed consumer insights is how you can make the most of this bright future. Backstroke’s email subject line generator does just that, creating effective email subject lines for marketers across several verticals, one of which is the fashion industry. 

Of course, the different verticals within apparel have several key consumer targets. All of these consumers continuously evolve and switch up their shopping habits, especially when facing today’s all-too-normal economic headwinds paired with uber-fast trend cycles. Because of the industry’s fast pace, only real-time audience behavior analyses, and AI-powered models trained on the latest consumer preferences, can truly show fashion marketing professionals what creative email content will resonate with their potential customers.

To illustrate this point, we’ll show examples of Backstroke’s ability to craft the most effective email subject lines across three different demographic focuses for the apparel industry:

  • Gender: Because women make the highest volume of purchasing decisions.
  • Location: Because East Coasters come from the geographical region that spends the most on apparel.
  • Age: Because Millennials are the age group that allocates the largest portion of their budget to clothing 

Below, we'll dive into how to generate great email subject lines for each group. Since many of the email programs within Backstroke’s 10k+ brand dataset are within the apparel industry, our email subject line generator has a granular understanding of exactly what these shoppers want to see arrive in their inboxes.

Great Email Subject Lines for Female Apparel Shoppers

While women make up half of the U.S. population, they control or influence 85% of consumer spending. Their purchasing power is massive and it extends far beyond themselves, too. For instance, households spend 61.9% more on apparel for women and girls than for men and boys, yet still, women influence purchasing by and for men. When it comes to clothing and accessories that are marketed to men, a significant amount of those items are purchased by women. Therefore, it makes sense that this massive group is frequently targeted in fashion marketing messaging.

AI messages generated for women shopping for apparel

Examples of AI messages generated for women shopping for apparel.

Backstroke’s email subject line generator pin-points the most effective email subject lines for any audiences for your fashion marketing campaigns. Here, we’re going to show how to target women as the audience for your campaign. To tailor AI messages for women shopping for clothing and apparel, select the following:

  • Visit the subject line generator 
  • Click into the Add Audience filters 
  • Select Women as your audience’s gender, then click Apply
  • Select Apparel as your industry
  • Then generate the best email subjects that fit your campaign parameters!

Obviously, women aren’t a monolith, and you can get much more specific when generating AI messages for a female audience. Many, many more Audience Filters are available in Backstroke’s email subject line creator, allowing users to customize the copy across Age, Email Checking Frequency, Device, and more. 

For our next example, we’ll apply the Location filter to our Audience settings, targeting women on the Eastern Seaboard. 

Great Email Subject Lines for East Coast Women

Let’s take things one step further and target women within the eastern region of the United States. As discussed in previous blogs, you can customize AI messages to audiences across different U.S. locations: East Coast, West Coast, Midwest and South

Examples of AI messages generated for women on the East Coast who are shopping for apparel.

Examples of AI messages generated for women on the East Coast who are shopping for apparel.

Here, we’re focusing on East Coast women, and for a reason. They tend to spend more on apparel! In fact, Philadelphia households spend the highest percentage (4.2%) of their budget on apparel annually. So with that in mind, here’s how to target them in your fashion marketing emails: 

  • In the Audience filter, select East as your Region, then click Apply.
  • Click over to the Attributes filter and select Short as your Length, before clicking Save.

In our East vs. West Coast Subject Lines blog, we uncovered that East Coasters prefer brevity in their marketing copy. So keep it short and sweet as you generate the best email marketing subject lines for that region. 

Great Email Subject Lines for Millennial Women

Though widely despised for their previous fashion choices, Millennials are a favorite of the fashion industry! This is because Millennials allocate a larger share of their budget to apparel, compared to other generations. They tend to spend 3.2% of their budget on apparel, in fact, which is about 19% more than other generations, on average.

Examples of AI messages generated for Millennial women apparel shoppers on the East Coast.

Examples of AI messages generated for Millennial women apparel shoppers on the East Coast.

Let’s take our AI messages one step further by applying Backstroke’s Age Filter. Select the following settings: 

  • In the Audience Filter, select 30-44 as your Age, then click Apply. 
  • While you’re at it, adjust your Attributes filter to include settings Millennials love!
  • We suggest selecting Yes to Emojis, Slang, and Seasonality.
  • Save your settings, then generate! 

As you can see, Backstroke kept the Gender, Length, and Location settings, then applied new Audience and Tone filters to generate the most effective email subject lines for Millennial women.

Whether you’re in the fashion industry or a totally different vertical, you can generate the most impactful, noticeable, and engaging AI messages for your subscribers. Backstroke’s messaging platform is trained on apparel industry data, meaning that its outputs are more specific and relevant than what other generative AI solutions like ChatGPT could ever create. You can give Backstroke a whirl for free, and generate effective email subject lines for your subscribers, in the Sandbox Toolkit. 

Try it now and craft email marketing content for any audience!

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