Among the thousands of offers available in the world of e-commerce, standing out and effectively reaching your audience is crucial for fashion and lifestyle brands.
Zalando Marketing Services (ZMS) is the solution designed for brands looking to increase visibility, sales performance, and build a direct relationship with over 50 million active customers across Europe.
Zalando Marketing Services is a comprehensive suite of marketing tools and services designed to enhance the presence of brands on the platform. With a data-driven approach and targeted strategies, ZMS enables partners to create engaging campaigns, optimize product performance, and build meaningful relationships with millions of customers across Europe. Let’s explore the details together.
What is Zalando Marketing Services?
Zalando Marketing Services is Zalando’s marketing division, created to support brands in presenting and promoting their products within the Partner Program. Through ZMS, partners can optimize their online presence and maximize sales, benefiting from detailed consumer insights, creative content development, and targeted marketing strategies.
ZMS offers a complete range of services to help partners achieve their branding and growth objectives, including:
- Ad Manager: A tool that allows brands to manage their own advertising campaigns on Zalando, using formats like Sponsored Collections and Sponsored Products to increase visibility and sales.
- Media: Solutions to reach and engage consumers through customized marketing campaigns, both on and off the Zalando platform, including inspirational ad formats and influencer marketing.
- Insights: Access to in-depth data on around 50 million active customers, helping partners better understand consumer behavior and adapt their marketing strategies.
- Creative: Support in creating data-driven, inspirational content to enhance the customer experience and strengthen brand identity.
In addition to ZMS, Zalando’s Partner Program also offers Zalando Fulfillment Solutions (ZFS), a logistics service that allows partners to use Zalando’s infrastructure to manage orders, shipments, and returns. This service helps partners optimize logistics, improve operational efficiency, and ensure a positive shopping experience for customers.
By participating in the Partner Program and using services like ZMS and ZFS, brands can expand their presence in 25 European markets, reaching over 50 million active customers while maintaining control over their assortment, pricing, and brand image.
What is Zalando Partner Program?
The Zalando Partner Program is an exclusive opportunity for brands that wish to expand their online presence by becoming a partner of Zalando. Through this program, brands can reach millions of customers across Europe, leveraging Zalando’s platform and expertise to grow their business in the fashion sector.
The program offers two different options, each designed to specifically meet the needs of each partner:
- Wholesale: Zalando buys products from retailers and sells them through its own channels, managing logistics, payments, and customer service. This is ideal for brands looking to access European markets without dealing with daily sales operations.
- Connected Retail: This option allows physical stores to connect to the Zalando platform and offer their products online. It’s an effective solution for integrating offline sales with online ones, reaching a wider audience.
How Zalando Marketing Services Supports Partners
Zalando Marketing Services supports partners through customer-focused marketing campaigns, guiding consumers along the entire purchasing journey, from initial awareness to consideration and final conversion. This approach ensures that brand messages are relevant and timely, increasing engagement and loyalty.
To promote awareness, consideration, and conversions of brands and products, ZMS uses tools like the Ad Manager, which allows partners to manage their advertising campaigns independently. Through ad formats like Sponsored Collections and Sponsored Products, brands can boost product visibility and stimulate sales.
By providing partners with insights into approximately 50 million active customers, ZMS helps to better understand consumer behaviors and preferences. These insights allow brands to adapt their sales and marketing strategies to meet the specific needs of their audience. Through a combination of data and creativity, ZMS develops stories and content that resonate with the audience, enhancing brand affinity and trust.
Services Offered by Zalando Marketing Services
As previously mentioned, Zalando Marketing Services offers a complete range of tools and services designed to support brands in achieving their marketing and sales objectives. These services focus on optimizing partners’ online presence, increasing customer engagement, and improving sales performance.
- Ad Manager: Zalando Ad Manager is an advanced tool designed to allow partners to manage and optimize their advertising campaigns on the platform. It offers an intuitive interface that enables brands to create, monitor, and refine their marketing strategies without external support.
One of the key features of Ad Manager is the ability to create Sponsored Products campaigns, which promote specific items within Zalando’s catalog. These campaigns aim to increase product visibility and stimulate sales by positioning sponsored items in strategic locations on Zalando’s site and app.
Ad Manager offers two modes for selecting products to promote:
- Dynamic selection: The system automatically identifies the products with the best performance potential, based on factors such as stock availability, campaign budget, and projected clicks and sales.
- Manual selection: Partners can manually choose the products to include in the campaign, ideal for promoting specific collections, bestsellers, or products with high availability.
Another advantage of Ad Manager is that partners can monitor performance through detailed dashboards and make immediate adjustments to optimize results.
To access Ad Manager, partners must be part of Zalando’s Partner Program and meet certain criteria, such as:
- Having at least 20 active items on the platform.
- Ensuring adequate stock availability.
Once these requirements are met, partners can use Ad Manager through the zDirect portal by selecting the “Marketing” section in the navigation bar.
- Media: The Media service offered by Zalando Marketing Services is designed to enhance brand impact through unparalleled media solutions and specialized expertise. ZMS supports partners with comprehensive media strategies and consulting, offering intelligent marketing tools that give brands control over their advertising planning. To reach and engage customers in the fashion and lifestyle sectors across Europe, ZMS adopts a customer-centric media approach, removing assumptions from the marketing strategy with data-driven media formats. This allows for customer inspiration, engagement promotion, and sales maximization.
ZMS offers dedicated formats for each stage of the customer journey:
- Awareness: To increase brand recognition, ZMS uses formats like Sponsored Brands, which help reach, inspire, and excite relevant customers, influencing brand perception.
- Consideration: To deepen the connection with customers, ZMS offers formats that encourage brand consideration, guiding customers toward purchase.
- Conversion: To drive sales, ZMS uses formats that encourage customers to complete their purchases, maximizing conversions.
- Insights: The Insights service offered by Zalando Marketing Services is designed to provide partners with a deep understanding of consumer behavior and preferences, enabling them to optimize marketing strategies and make more informed decisions.
Through the Insights service, partners can compare their performance with competitors, identifying areas for improvement and growth opportunities. This competitive comparison helps to better understand the brand’s position in the market and develop targeted strategies to increase market share.
Additionally, ZMS provides tools that allow partners to set their own KPIs and gain a detailed, personalized view of their store’s performance on Zalando. To further deepen consumer behavior insights, the platform also offers studies and publications that highlight significant trends and developments in the market.
Leverage the Potential of ZMS with BrandOn Group
For companies looking to expand their presence on Zalando by fully utilizing the services offered by the platform, BrandOn Group is the ideal partner: our goal is to revolutionize brands’ access to online marketplaces, which is why we act as Merchant of Record (MoR) for several platforms, including Zalando, Amazon, and Bol. This allows us to directly manage sales operations on behalf of brands, simplifying the process of entering and growing in digital markets.
Contact us to find out how we can collaborate: thanks to our expertise, we will design a plan that will enable you to maximize sales on Zalando, ensuring fast and secure growth for your brand online, and ultimately boosting your revenue.
