2012: ASOS, Mobile Marketing - Case Study - Highly commended

Asos, Mobile Marketing
Asos - discover fashion online - logo

Executive summary
ASOS Savvy Sunday was our flagship campaign for the Christmas period, building momentum and excitement within our busiest retail season. Each Sunday ASOS ran a category specific promotion in a Timed Sale e.g. 50% off shoes from 8am until the following 8am. The campaign was supported with a signification media spend, creating cut through in a swamped market.

2011 was a big year for mobile within ASOS, with the launch of our iPhone application and the continual growth of our mobile site it was important to make sure that mobile drove the ASOS Savvy Sunday promotion week on week. Every user journey must be seamless and each promotion must make sense for a mobile user.

ASOS Savvy Sunday wasn’t about directly replicating the desktop experience into mobile, it was about creating an environment that was tailored to mobile behaviour. Every element of the campaign kept mobile in mind – the times of day that people search and shop from their phones, the way they browse, the handsets they use...

The fully integrated campaign drove ASOS’ highest ever period for mobile traffic and sales, without letting conversion slip. ASOS Savvy Sunday gave the company its biggest ever day in sales through mobile and truly positioned ASOS as the leading fashion retailer in mobile.
 

Submission 
Mobile is a crucial part of the ASOS business, currently delivering up to 20% of the overall visits to the site. Our approach to mobile is very much focussed on user experience, ensuring that we not only deliver the same functionality as the .com site, but use the key technologies available to us through mobile to deliver an even better experience. Launched in October 2010, the mobile site works across every handset, in any country. This was crucial to our approach in mobile – with a young audience base, it would be a strategic error to rely solely on iPhone. Android and Blackberry make up a huge proportion of our base, so it was vital to capture this audience too.

In October 2011 ASOS kicked off the ASOS Savvy Sunday campaign, their flagship promotion in the run up to the busy Christmas period. Cut through in this retail season is notoriously tough, maintaining a consistent brand value whilst competitors offer endless discounts is a real challenge. ASOS Savvy Sunday offered customers a weekly promotion for a specific category – coats, shoes, dresses etc. It gave customers a reason to return each week, and kept ownership of a specific day. We also knew that Sundays are a key day for audience to be at home, dual screening while the shops are shut and there’s little to do – they’re using their mobiles and tablets whilst watching TV for combined entertainment. Research told us that customers were looking for a deal during this period, particularly 16 - 34 year olds.

(‘84% of 16 – 34 year olds are looking for a discount when shopping online’. Source: ASOS International Customer MOT, quant research).

The mechanic:

• Time sensitive deals were scheduled on Sundays on major categories such as dresses and footwear, in addition to specific brands such as Uggs and GHD. The discount level was high, the quality of stock was really strong and there was lots of product depth – a combination designed to totally over deliver on the audiences expectations. The campaign was well branded and executed in a tone of voice that resonated with our audience and cut through all of the other promotional activity.
• Retail and Marketing worked closely to ensure the product mix was strong (rather than stuff we needed to shift) and there was the necessary depth to satisfy demand.
• The promotion would run until 8am on Monday, and would then switch to a smaller promotion within the same category to run for the week. e.g. 50% off shoes would become 30% off shoes. (image reference: 1)
• The sale would be mirrored in mobile, across our mobile site, iPhone app and iPad app.

Mobile was crucial to this campaign, especially because of the time sensitive nature – it was important that customers could shop those early bargains wherever they were.

First on the list of challenges was functionality – ensuring that across all our mobile platforms – mobile site, iPhone app and iPad app, that ASOS Savvy Sunday would exist in optimum mobile experience. Mobile versions of product pages were created, all promotions and creative in the run up would be replicated for mobile and all user journeys in and out of social media would work in mobile.

It was crucial that the mobile experience was global – our mobile customers are now 50:50 in terms of UK to international, so ASOS Savvy Sunday would have to work for everyone, no matter their handset.

Social played a huge part in our mobile offering, each product page allowed customers the chance to share to Facebook, Twitter or email, making the browsing experience even more fun. The mobile site also offered a Wishlist function that allowed customers to share entire product lists with friends. We also ensured that every social experience from Facebook or Twitter to mobile would be optimised.

The second biggest challenge for ASOS Savvy Sunday in mobile was to support the campaign in paid media. This was ASOS’ first foray into mobile paid media, so it was important that this campaign spend worked in terms of efficiency and creativity.

Working in partnership with Carat, mobile media spend ran for the entire duration of the ASOS Savvy Sunday campaign. Using AdMob and Strike Ad, media ran across iPhone, Android and iPad, with a strict focus on targeting and optimisation. Results were scrutinised week on week, with optimisation throughout. We tailored the split each week to best performing handsets, tracking conversion throughout. Android is notorious in its user experience from handset to handset, so optimisation was crucial. Those underperforming handsets, usually low end small-screen handsets, were replaced in favour of the more high end handsets where we saw higher conversion as a result of the better user experience.

ASOS runs an always-on paid search campaign, and ASOS Savvy Sunday was the best time to introduce mobile into this offering. Working with SEO agency NEO, we were able to see new trends in mobile search compared to desktop search. The research brought back shifts not only in products and keywords being searched for, but also massive shifts in the time of day that people would search. First thing in the morning we’d see a remarkably direct shopper – knowing what they were after and buying quickly; in early evening we’d see our browsing customers, happy to spend much more time on their mobile or tablet choosing what to buy.

Results
ASOS Savvy Sunday outperformed all expectations within mobile, delivering our biggest mobile results to date – both in terms of traffic and conversion.

ASOS is ruthless when it comes to measurement – fluffy metrics such as social reach, or brand mentions just won’t do. Everything we do is trackable, all the way across the user journey. Mobile was no exception to this; we ensured that the ASOS Savvy Sunday campaign was measurable down to every click. Within our own mobile properties we can track every user and session right through to conversion; within paid media we could track through purchase, splitting customers by demographic, handset, location and specific media creative.

ASOS Savvy Sunday delivered the biggest ever day for mobile sales on November 20th, doubling the previous record for a day’s sale. The driver behind the success was the UGGs timed sale that Sunday. (image reference: 4 )We always knew it was going to be a big one for mobile, and prepared ourselves accordingly. UGGs are product consistently in high demand, so when they hit discount there’s always a scramble to get your hands on a pair. Combine this with the Timed Sale effect and mobile was the perfect channel to shop UGGs from ASOS. If our customer was still in bed, if they were at work or on the move they didn’t have to get to a desktop computer – they could ensure that they grabbed that bargain the minute the clock hit 8am!

Mobile device visits as a proportion of total visits averaged at 12.7% across the whole period reaching a high of 18.8% on Christmas day.

During the campaign period mobile delivered our strongest ever sales period and driven heavily through the Sunday activity. This was supported by 8 million visitors to our mobile platforms internationally.

Paid media over-delivered for ASOS Savvy Sunday in mobile, showing our highest click through rates across any other media and our lowest cost per click across the board. With a spend of £80,000 Carat delivered 109,500,000 impressions and 500,000 click throughs. We saw click through rates up to 0.84% for male iPhone users, delivering up to 6 times the click through rate of our targeted Facebook advertising.

The paid search campaign for mobile was truly impressive, a spend of £21,000 delivered £672,000 across mobile and tablets during the period.
 
Overall, ASOS Savvy Sunday delivered:
  • Biggest year on year (yoy) traffic growth day (+63% visits in the UK) on Sunday 11th December
  • Biggest day to date in terms of absolute visits (UK +57% yoy) on Sunday 20th Nov. This was also the biggest day for International visits.
  • We averaged 1.1 million global visitors per day to ASOS across November and December
  • We averaged 18.5 million unique visitors per month across the period
  • We achieved the highest number of visits every recorded to ASOS in one day (2 million visits) on Sunday 11th December
  • Traffic driving success can also be seen via our Hitwise performance, we achieved number one position on three ASOS Savvy Sunday’s with a share of 6.79%, 6.19% and 7.13% respectively. (Source: Hitwise)
  • We added 180,000 new fans to Facebook across the campaign period (23rd Oct – 11th December)
All of which had a hugely positive impact on sales:
  • YOY Sales were + 21% for November and + 16% for December (which is even more impressive when compared to The IMRG e-Retail Index which revealed lower-than-expected UK growth during November (+11%) and December (+16%)
  • We achieved +10% sales growth versus +1% the previous quarter. This positive recovery directly correlated with the biggest increase in our share price since 2004.
Learnings and the evolution of mobile within ASOS
Our mobile offering already put ASOS’ at the front of the platform race within fashion and is set to leap further and further ahead in the next year. Aware of the fact that mobile is simply not a tick on a list, but a platform that requires constant development – the mobile site will be going from strength to strength in 2012.
 
ASOS Savvy Sunday proved the importance of two marketing principles: a perfect user experience and a well developed media mix. Throughout 2012 will concentrate on ensuring promotions and campaigns work across our comprehensive mobile offering, making the user journey as simple as possible for our customers. We will also be placing more and more importance on mobile within the media mix, based on the outstanding results from ASOS Savvy Sunday.

To book your table for this year's awards or to find out how to enter the Awards for Excellence 2014 visit: http://www.marketingsocietyawards.com/how-to-enter
 

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