How did Abercrombie & Fitch increase their click rate with SMS marketing?

The American fashion company Abercrombie & Fitch, which also heads up the well-known high street brand Hollister, has been using SMS marketing campaigns to increase the click rate on its website.

It has achieved this by creating a strategy unique to SMS marketing: including hyperlinks in its promotional campaigns taking customers to separate pages according to their gender.

Subscribers to Abercrombie & Fitch’s SMS marketing campaign received SMS messages with two links, one for men and one for women. SMS recipients could therefore get a more personalized experience without the brand having to carry out an earlier segmentation from a database.

Different collections

Abercrombie & Fitch increased their click ratio by directing users to two separate pages for their men’s and women’s clothing, instead of sending all customers the same link to the website’s generic homepage.

Directing men and women to separate destination pages within the same website is an interesting initiative. Abercrombie & Fitch achieved a higher click rate using this method because clients knew that they were going to see the items they wanted: women went directly to dresses, jewelry and fragrances, and the men, to shirts, socks and cologne, for example.

For a subscriber that has received an SMS message but is not sure whether to click on a link, being provided the opportunity to skip the generic home page can only be an advantage. The first thing we think of is the time and the type of products which we are going to see. Rapid access to the relevant products is key.

The Abercrombie & Fitch SMS campaign resolves both questions: whether it’s addressed to men or women, the brand provides items of clothing for both groups of customers. The link contained in the SMS sends them to the page where they can find the right products for them so they don’t have to search, click on and get lost in a multitude of items that don’t interest them.

Segmenting the database, before or after?

Segmenting the offer in this way, Abercrombie & Fitch makes looking for products easier – it’s clear why the click rates improve. But what concept did Abercrombie & Fitch apply to their SMS campaign? In this case, we can see that it took the widest category of their subscriber list, gender, and simply created one message, just one promotion, but giving each segment their own link.

In marketing, personalization is possible with a well-segmented database. Company privacy policies can vary and be more or less restrictive when requesting certain data, so thorough segmentation may not be possible. In addition, including too many individual links in the same SMS marketing campaign could create confusion. To make it simpler, they could have just used the most important categories that were common to both men’s and women’s collections. They could have also done tests to evaluate the success of each format. However, Abercrombie & Fitch chose the simplest and most effective option.

In their SMS campaign, Abercrombie & Fitch announced on the last day of sales a 70% discount on all their products. The invitation to click was clear and they had a very high conversion rate, since the offer was limited to the same day that the message was sent making the decision was almost automatic: it’s now or never. Providing customers with the ability to see information about  the offer straight away,meant that the company achieved instant segmentation.