9 July 2008

Internet fashion giant Asos has chosen customer relationship management tools from smartFocus to support the company’s strategic growth plans.

Launched in 2000, Asos is the second most visited online fashion store in the UK. With 1.7 million registered users, the Web site attracts over 2.6 million shoppers a month and has won multiple industry awards. Asos will use the smartFocus software as a marketing platform to put the customer at the centre of its business and attain its goal of becoming the top online retailer on Hitwise.

The partnership with smartFocus is part of an integrated sales and marketing strategy, centred on customer communications, including advertising campaigns, press events and customer magazines. Asos’s goal is to manage its aggressive marketing plan to increase customer numbers and to encourage existing customers to spend more. Asos believes the key to achieving this is through engaging marketing communications that are easy to manage.

Asos can use the information it holds on customer behaviour and spend patterns to personalise its offering. The CRM and strategic marketing programme will focus on the UK market in the first half of the year, followed by a global deployment. Planned campaigns include refer-a-friend viral activity, a reactivation strategy to re-engage former customers and loyalty programmes to reward Asos’s best customers.

The smartFocus platform, which is based on Microsoft .NET archiecture, will help Asos to maintain customer data and realise the value of customer information by profiling customers accurately. By building sophisticated segmentation models, Asos will be able to apply precision marketing techniques and offer each group highly relevant and timely marketing messages, helping Asos to reinforce and enhance the existing relationship it has with its customers.

Automated and scheduled campaign management delivering personalised messages will also improve customer interaction and campaign productivity. In turn, enhanced reporting will provide the essential feedback loop to both the marketing team and the business as a whole.

Mhairi Brown, CRM manager for Asos, commented: “The implementation of the smartFocus software will provide Asos with a robust and easy to manage solution to facilitate our ambitious marketing strategy and plans and continue to achieve our goal of a truly customer-centric business. By allowing us to understand our customer preferences, we can improve customer interaction and enhance the whole Asos experience from beginning to end.”

Chris Underhill, CEO at smartFocus, said: “Data analysis is extremely important to online businesses, and with the right tools, online pure-plays have a real opportunity to provide their customers with highly personalised communications. For taste-driven businesses, such as Asos, it is even more important that the company can understand and anticipate customer preferences. Asos has recognised the importance of the customer segmentation and profiling strategy to its continued success and we look forward to the partnership delivering exciting results.”

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