We recently caught up with Head of Performance at Princess Polly, Kim Zorn, in our exclusive webinar to discuss why Gen Z is such a valuable demographic for brands to engage with. Here, Kim answers all your questions on social media, email marketing, global expansion, and more.
Is email marketing still relevant – is it something that Princess Polly uses a lot?
Email marketing is definitely still relevant for us, but we are also looking at more specific channels like SMS – especially with Gen Z – to have a direct line to our customers, which is something they really value. SMS is working wonders for us, but we are still using email marketing for things like abandoned carts, abandoned checkout and also for marketing emails. Our emails are more targeted – for every customer group, we have a different email marketing strategy.
Where in the world will Princess Polly launch next?
We just rolled out the UK, and the next market we are focusing on is Canada – we already have a big presence there but we don’t really do a lot of marketing activity yet. Another major focus for us this year is Asia. Singapore is really strong for us, as well as Hong Kong, and China, too. We are rolling out new strategies for these markets as well. We have to always think about logistics – we wouldn’t go into a new market without having the right shipping duties and tax for example. We always pride ourselves on our fast shipping so we want to make sure we have this for our global customer base as well.
What does the Princess Polly marketing and social team look like? How big is it?
When I joined Princess Polly in December 2018, the performance team was just myself and our Marketing Director. We have expanded to a team of 13 people since. As well as the performance team, which is my team, we have an in-house PR team that now comprises 15-20 people. We have a shoot team that sits in-house and we also do all our graphics, creative and photography in-house. Overall I think our marketing team is now 40-50 people – including shoot, picture editing, uploading, site merchandising and all of these areas. Our social team is actually growing as well. We will be hiring a TikTok coordinator to create content purely for this platform in due course.
Where would you say the main sources of traffic are coming from to your site?
We have a majority coming from Google, direct traffic, SEO traffic, and paid traffic, but we are working on a strategy at the moment to define quality traffic – so we have awareness traffic, acquisition traffic, retention traffic and retargeting traffic. We have a majority also coming from our affiliate networks and student networks, and that’s mostly customers that have not heard of us before, so we class that as our awareness traffic and acquisition traffic.
How important is influencer marketing to your strategy and how do you use influencers?
Influencer marketing is a big part of our strategy, especially when we go into new markets. It was one of our first strategies used to enter the US market. We also launched our college ambassador program where we promoted our offer with Student Beans. The college ambassador program is great for us as we have ambassadors from many different unis and colleges involved. Influencer marketing is definitely still a big part of our strategy, but it has shifted a little bit, as we’re also now working with micro-influencers – especially now given the nature of TikTok influencer marketing. You never know how viral a video will go; someone with 100 followers could go viral overnight.
The types of influencers we use really depends on our strategy. We had a huge collaboration with Emma Chamberlain in the US, which brought heaps of new customers. But we also focus on micro-influencers as well in some cases – generally, they have a smaller but really engaged audience that really listens to what they’re buying.
Is the US market very different from the AU market?
We went into the US market blind, bringing the same strategy we had for the AU – but these markets really are so different. This relates to obvious things like seasonality – when it is summer in Australia, it is winter in the US, but we didn’t really have winter products to sell. We went into the US market with our western denim jacket which you definitely can’t wear for winter in the US. So, we had to change our products completely, as well as our marketing strategies. We are a household name here in Australia but we are not in the US – though we are slowly getting there. We had to spend a lot more on awareness marketing and on acquisition strategies. Of course, we had to alter the language, too. The US uses different terms for some clothing items, for example. So, while the site is still the same, our navigation menu is slightly different for the US.
Is growing your Instagram channel important? If so, what are some of the key tactics you’ve used to grow it?
Yes definitely, we recently hit the 2 million mark of followers on our Instagram channel, so it is extremely important for us. That’s where people are looking for inspiration and it’s in some ways become the face of the brand, and how we communicate with our customers.
So, tactics to grow it? An interesting one is giveaways, but what is really mind blowing at the moment is reels. Instagram reels can grow your audience quite fast, and I would say we get most of our followers at the moment from our reels and giveaways. There are talks about Instagram pushing more reels, which is great.
Catch the full webinar on-demand now – Princess Polly wears the crown: how to build brand loyalty with a global Gen Z audience.
