- Website: www.ASOS.com
- Facebook Fans: 865,929
- Turnover: £324m
- Marketing Budget £14.3m
- Website: 13m unique hits per month
- Goal: £1bn sales by 2015
- USP: Free delivery & returns
ASOS gained 216,000 fans on Facebook last month without a significant media budget or change in strategy, more than doubling the growth of their biggest rival TopShop. ASOS are also the fastest growing UK retailer online, with this years profits by 41% this year to £28.6m, so whatever it is that they are doing – they are doing it right. To see what they do differently, I dug a little deeper to see if I could find any clues to their success. This is what I found out…
“In a business school, it probably doesn’t make sense to [do these things]. But in a customer school, why wouldn’t we?” Nick Robertson, ASOS founder and CEO
ASOS can check to see what is trending at 9am each morning and have their homepage changed by 11am to reflect what is most being talked about online.- Every touch point of the brand directs people towards their Facebook page to gain a ‘like’ and capture an opportunity to engage with that fan.
- Their social media ‘community management’ team is seen as part of the e-commerce team, not the marketing department.
- Customer are encouraged to sign up to their Facebook page from the main homepage, by offering ‘secret sale extras’ such as previews and exclusive offers.
- ASOS increased their IT budget by 72% and their marketing budget by 54% in order to grow their Facebook page and build a mobile site – preparing for expansion into Italy, Spain and Australia.
- TV sponsorship and ATL advertising has been cut in order to grow the brand internationally using digital media, due to lower costs and more accurate ways to measure ROI.
- ASOS Lifestyle magazine is given away for free and builds the brand, whilst also generating £3m in revenue from advertising (distribution 456,000)
- The ASOS marketplace has a series of on-line ‘boutiques’ rather than one big Top Shop style web shop.
- Delivery costs have been re-classified as ‘operating costs’ so that all delivery and returns are free.
- Recommendation tools share more potential purchases with their customers – even if the items that most match their tastes are on someone else’s website
- To stay ‘aspirational’ sale offers are showcased with cat walk clips and customer video diaries such as “Confessions of a queue jumper”.
- ASOS care about the customer journey by obsessively asking customers, “What do you like about the site and what don’t you like?”
- A ‘Fashion Finder” will soon allow you to enter your measurements and virtually ‘try on’ clothes to see if they suit you.
- In order to grow, they refuse to expand into other markets such as children. Since only 3% of the worlds online traffic comes is in UK – they see 97% of their growth coming from the same customers in international markets – not a wider demographic in the UK. (CEO Nick Robertson thinks the world needs more UK based global brands).
- Customers clothes can be ‘recycled’ through the ASOS market-place to provide a more emotional way to engage with their consumers.
