9 performance tools fashion startups need to invest in.
To operate a successful business you should be heavily focused on its weekly performance.
Performance can be measured in numerous ways, it depends on exactly what you’re looking for. For example, are you trying to:
- Measure the success of your latest marketing campaign?
- Monitor your team productivity?
- Check the open rate by country of your EDM welcome sequence?
- Monitor the performance of your newly designed website?
All of these performance measures are something that you as a fashion startup should be monitoring weekly, as by doing this you will continue to learn, improve and grow your fashion brands sales.
Tool 1 - Project management
Managing people is an essential part of project management.
As a fashion startup, you’ll be juggling communication with manufacturers, logistics and internal staff to ensure your collections run on time and that your operation doesn’t ground to a halt. (And this is just one example)
It’s your job to delegate tasks and ensure that your team do their job.
So how are you going to do this?
By investing in these tools:
Tool 2 - Financial tracking
A huge tip when starting out in business is to separate your business finances from your personal finances and keep track of EVERYTHING from day 1.
How you can do this, is by investing in an online software that tracks all outgoings and incoming in one place.
Xero – An online accounting system designed for small and growing businesses.
To run a profitable business, you need to know the true cash flow of your brand, so this tool is a needs must.
Tool 3 - Website performance
Running an online store comes with its disadvantages to a physical store as you’re not able to ask your customers for direct feedback about; your store’s layout or your brand’s pricing or why they didn’t make a purchase today?
So how else do you monitor your store’s performance, more specifically the pages of your website?
You use a tool like Hotjar.
Hotjar – Website heatmaps & behaviour analytics tools.
This is tool is simple – simply save the URL/s you want to track into the tool and it will tell you where on the page you lose your traffic along with other performance tracking stats.
"To run a profitable business, you need to know the true cash flow of your brand, so this tool is a needs must."
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Tool 4 - Customer Relationship Manager (CRM)
Your customers are everything so treat them to the best software in town to nurture and upsell your product to their every move and emotion! …
Active Campaign – #1 customer experience automation platform
Active Campaign like Mailchimp or Klaviyo, is an EDM tool that you need in your fashion brand to send:
- Welcome emails
- Abandoned cart sequences
- Content emails etc
Also by investing in a tool like Active Campaign, it will enable you to learn more about your customers. For example; what content excites them therefore what emails they click on, through to their demographics and shopping patterns etc
Tool 5 - Social media manager
As a fashion startup, you’re going to rely very heavily on social media to create leads and build a following, therefore you never want to miss a beat and not post.
Relying on you, your memory and your schedule is not a smart move. Get ahead and plan your campaigns by using a scheduling tool like:
Later – World’s favourite Instagram marketing platform
Hootsuite – Social media marketing & management dashboard
Another amazing reason why you need these social media tools is to access their analytics. These tools will monitor each post’s performance, suggesting ways you can improve and convert more customers.
Tool 6 - Keyword / trend tracker
This is one of my favourite tools that I cover heavily in our hero course.
Why? Because if your fashion brand tracks trends in the market and is an early adopter of these trends, then you’ll be onto a profitable business model.
Tools I recommend are:
Ubersuggests – Free keyword tool, generate more suggestions
Semrush – Online visibility management platform
Google Trends – Discover new keyword ideas
These tools will help you to find new product opportunities, discover what fashion trends are trending and help you to understand more about current customers desires and pain points in your market.
Tool 8 - Marketing must have's!
Aside from leveraging influencers on social media, you’re next best marketing friend will be FB and Google ads.
Facebook business– See the performance of your ads and gain reports on their performance
Google Ads – Get more customers with easy online advertising
There are benefits to using both Facebook and Google, but as a fashion startup, I would encourage you to focus on FB ads first to centralise all your social media efforts in one channel.
To learn more about marketing tactics for fashion startups, watch this amazing interview with Ooze Studios: Marketing strategies for fashion startups. An interview with Jesse Mullins.
Tool 9 - Ad performance
This final performance tool fashion startups need, is probably one of the most valuable.
You need to understand everything about your sites performance and your users to run and grow a successful fashion brand.
Google Analytics – Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google
With Google Analytics, you will get a deeper understanding of your customers as it gives you the free tools you need to analyse data for your business in one place. For example
- Monitor the performance of ads
- Understand how people use your website
- You can filter the data to report on different metrics like conversion
Start monitoring the success of your fashion startup today by investing in all 9 performance management tools.
If your proactive and make data-driven decisions and improvements to your fashion startup, then you should see your sales grow.
