Shoppers are quick to respond to texts from a brand. According to Listrak’s “2025 Beauty & Fashion Benchmark Report,” beauty shoppers are twice as likely to convert after receiving an SMS “cart abandonment message” and 2.6 times more likely to convert after receiving a price drop alert through SMS.
To help beauty and fashion brands understand today’s consumer sentiments around SMS, loyalty and how to overcome e-commerce window shopping, Listrak, the retail person-first marketing platform which powers digital connections for partners including Peter Thomas Roth, Coola, Oscar de la Renta and 7 For All Mankind, among many others, combined its AI-powered insights with industry-specific expert analysis. The benchmark report includes data from 125 billion emails and SMS/MMS messages sent by over 1,000 e-commerce clients between Jan. 1, 2024, and Dec. 31, 2024.
“Listrak is more than a platform — it’s a partner,” said Jamie Elden, Listrak’s chief revenue officer, who also leads Listrak’s beauty and fashion division. “With Listrak’s expertise and predictive intelligence, we help fashion and beauty brands anticipate trends, optimize strategies, and make faster, smarter marketing decisions, driving real-time results.”
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Key findings in the benchmark report included consumers’ increasing favorability for SMS. The report showed consumers embracing SMS in the fashion vertical with every SMS campaign analyzed experiencing a year-over-year conversion rate increase. Experts said that these findings are an indication of “fashion shoppers becoming more comfortable purchasing directly from their phones.”
Clickthrough rates for SMS messages sent by fashion brands were 8.2-10.7 percent for browse abandonment, 7.9-13.7 percent for shopping cart abandonment, 9.9-13 percent for back-in-stock alerts, 9.4-12.1 percent for low inventory alerts, 13.1-18.5 percent for price drop alerts and 3.6-6.2 percent for post-purchase messages.
In comparison, clickthrough rates for SMS messages sent by beauty brands were 4.8-7.1 percent for browse abandonment, 6.8-9.2 percent for shopping cart abandonment, 9.3 percent for back-in-stock alerts, 4.9 percent for low inventory alerts, 10.5-11.9 percent for price drop alerts and 1.4-3.6 percent for post-purchase messages.
Moreover, the report found that loyalty programs are gaining power. Listrak beauty brands overhauled their loyalty strategies, leading to a 60 times increase in loyalty sends and campaigns seeing two times higher clickthrough rates than the company’s overall benchmark for higher engagement. Fashion brands also increased loyalty sends by 167 percent year-over-year with the report’s authors citing more brands launching or revamping their programs.
A callout in the report is an increase in browsing or “window shopping” in the past year. Browsing abandonment messages increased by 51 percent and cart abandonment increased by 42 percent.
“Many beauty shoppers didn’t convert immediately — either leaving without purchasing or researching online before buying in-store,” said the authors of the report. “To overcome window shopping in the fashion sector, fashion brands relied more on urgency-driven messaging in 2024, with low inventory, price drop, and replenishment campaigns seeing a major uptick in sends.”
While Listrak’s authors acknowledged rising acquisition costs for brands, the report called out that fashion brands were focused heavily on reactivating dormant shoppers in 2024 at nearly double the rate year-over-year.
Listrak’s data found that urgency and discounts are leading conversions, with more fashion brands relying on urgency-driven messaging in 2024. Low inventory, price drop and replenishment messages saw a major uptick, increasing clickthrough rates year-over-year and driving site traffic.
The authors of Listrak’s benchmark report advised marketers to use the data for guidance to optimize campaigns, including AI-powered strategies. These strategies include AI-driven product recommendations within broadcast emails, channel affinity to determine engagement and product recommendations for recurring automated campaigns.
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