- Reduced campaign construction time from seven days to one hour
- Email deliverability rate average of 99%
- Increased customer account reactivation rates and improved retention
About ASOS
ASOS (www.asos.com) is a UK’s leading online fashion store with an extensive range of own-brand women’s and men’s fashion, designer labels, accessories and cult beauty brands. Attracting over 2.5 million unique visitors per month, ASOS is the second most visited online clothing store in the UK.
Overview
As an online retailer, ASOS uses email as its primary marketing channel. As a market leader it needed technology that supported best practice marketing techniques. The company’s marketing team adopted smartFOCUS as a new approach to drive sales and reactivate dormant accounts.
With smartFOCUS Intelligent Marketing software, ASOS marketers regained control and access to customer data, and were able to construct finely targeted marketing campaigns quickly and increase account reactivation. smartFOCUS also improved visibility for ASOS’ customer service and drove ideas for new customer services.
The Challenges
Originally, ASOS conducted all its marketing manually. “Marketers were forced to request the data they needed and wait for the IT department to retrieve it. Involving another department caused an unavoidable delay and too time and workforce intensive,” says Mhairi Wood, CRM Manager for ASOS.
Without a single customer view, ASOS risked duplicate or incomplete customer information and could not perform meaningful analysis. “One of our overall objectives was to reconnect with inactive customers,” says Wood. “Our inability to analyse or easily view customer data made this difficult.”
The company then outsourced its email marketing, but this system was inefficient. To set up a campaign, ASOS would have to wait for the third party to send them the information, adding a significant delay to campaigns. “We were quite eager to bring our digital marketing back in-house so we could exercise greater control over it,” says Wood.
The Solution
With smartFOCUS in place, ASOS could cleanse, verify and de-duplicate its entire customer database. Cleaned data was segmented to determine customer profiles and behaviour, such as the frequency and recency of activity.
“smartFOCUS allowed us to identify which customers were active and which had fallen dormant,” says Wood. “With the power of smartFOCUS we could target dormant customers with compelling personalised emails, appropriate to their profile and interests to drive account reactivation.” This approach proved effective with a dramatic upturn in account reactivations and website traffic.
Using smartFOCUS, the ASOS marketing team now easily manages and maintains all customer databases and constructs and executes campaigns rapidly.
“Now all the information is instantly available to us,” says Wood. “It used to take up to seven days to plan and launch a campaign. Now it takes an hour.”
ASOS can also perform invaluable analysis, allowing campaigns to be modified to increase effectiveness. “Our email campaigns are effective with deliverability rates of 99% and strong response rates.”
smartFOCUS has helped ASOS improve beyond its sales and marketing. “The intelligence about our customer’s preferences and buying habits are fed to other parts of the business, such as the retail teams, and this helps them provide a better service to our customers. It has given us the visibility to launch new services, such as free returns and nominated day deliverability,” concludes Woods.
The Results
With smartFOCUS, ASOS has seen the efficiency and effectiveness of its marketing improve exponentially by:
- Reducing campaign construction time from one week to one hour
- Achieving marketing deliverability of 99%
- Consolidating customer information into a single customer view
- Increasing dormant customer reactivation rates significantly
- Encouraging customer retention and fostering relationships with customers
- Eliminating the need for marketers to rely on third parties or other departments to construct campaigns, giving marketers complete control