Fast fashion retailer, ASOS, will extend its AI-powered personalisation with Simon Data, a Customer Data Platform (CDP), and Customer Engagement Platform, Braze. The new AI use cases will centre around weather-based and micro-trend led campaigns, designed to scale personalisation and enhance customer engagement across locales and channels.

Speaking at the Braze City x City London event, which took place in Tobacco Dock on 20 May, ASOS’ CRM Lead, Shaghig Babikian, outlined how the fast fashion retailer is plugging AI-powered data and marketing automation into its customer engagement programmes.

“Our goal is to be the number one fashion destination for our customers, and to inspire them by showing the right products, at the right time, through the right channel.

Shaghig Babikian, CRM Lead, ASOS

“Personalisation matters because customers expect it,” Babikian said. “We see the highest engagement and revenue from [campaigns] that are product-led, highly targeted and aligned with where the customer is in their journey.”

Building smart speed and precision for personalisation

ASOS currently uses Simon Data’s CPD for targeting, bringing together a 360 customer view across behaviours, transactional information – such as purchase history, frequency and recency – and demographic data. It then creates simple but complex segments, from high value shoppers to churned customers, to build tailored journeys.

“With 20million customers, ASOS needs to be able to handle the complexities of managing each one of those [shoppers] across 850 brands and thousands upon thousands of products,” Jason Davis, Co-Founder and CEO of Simon Data, said.

Braze then helps the retailer activate customer targeting, using data from the likes of Simon Data and other third-party data sources, such as its Cloud Data Warehouse, to bring speed and precision to it cross-channel campaigns.

Building ASOS’ first AI-generated segment

ASOS will partner with Simon Data to build its first AI-generated segment, Babikian revealed, which will be weather-based. The model will look at the seven-day rolling forecast and detect any extreme or notable weather changes.

Automatically creating smart segments based on shoppers’ geo-location and weather data, ASOS will then trigger targeted customer engagement. Pre-made weather-related campaigns in Braze will direct customers to a Product Landing Page (PLP) with relevant items available for sale.

By using automation, ASOS will be able to scale the use case across its markets – something it wouldn’t have been able to have resourced or achieved through manual campaign roll-out previously.

Uncovering AI micro-trends for maximum impact

ASOS will also begin to developing more complex use cases leveraging AI, including micro-trends.

“Fashion moves fast, our customer move even faster,” Babikian explained. “This [use case] will look, firstly, at fashion trends and match customers with the trends they’re more likely to respond to. We also want to build in cultural moments, such as festivals, concerts and sporting events, and to have these segments automatically created for those engagement opportunities,” she added.

The key for Babikian will be unlocking localisation at scale through AI, as ASOS looks to “move towards a more geo-localised model” meaning it is “hyper-relevant to each market,” she concluded.