CRM Strategy

Is ASOS CRM Strategy Unlike Any Other?

We break down and grade ASOS’s CRM strategy. Check how they rank against brands we graded so far!

Adebisi Adewusi

December 16, 2021

ASOS is an online retailer for fashion loving 20-somethings around the world. But you know that already.

Still, can you guess how the brand scores when it comes to CRM?

Let’s dive right in.

1. Be Transparent 10/10

ASOS publicly discloses information about its operations. We found news stories about a new ASOS Tech Hub and fulfillment center.

Scrolling to the bottom of the brand’s homepage, we found a link to ASOS’s corporate responsibility page which led us to reports on gender pay, sustainability and supply chain transparency.

Additionally, ASOS shows customers the faces behind the brand on Linkedin with its Life@ASOS series. Fantastic, textbook stuff.

Transparency remains key to building a lasting relationship with customers. We love how ASOS gives customers access to learn about its internal operations. ASOS gets an ‘A’ for being open about its internal activities.

2. Perks and Incentives 10/10

ASOS dishes out bargain-style staples that are certain to give customers a wardrobe update on a budget. Here’s what we got on the brand’s website as first-time visitors:

15% OFF everything

50% OFF winter threads
70% OFF last min party looks orders

20% off for referring a friend

10% student discount

We like how ASOS communicates offers clearly throughout the customer journey, while making relevant promotions. The good mix of offers should improve the chances to get customers back.

3. Be Relevant 10/10

ASOS’s website gives off holiday and party vibes with its copy and content.

ASOS has sustainability at the heart of its operations. The brand offers customers Responsible edit, a collection of sustainably-minded fashion and beauty products.

To deliver a frictionless checkout experience, ASOS offers customers 19 different payment methods and instalment payments options. The brand also offers flexible delivery options such as next-day delivery, click and collect and express delivery.

This is beyond perfect when it comes to delivering relevant and seamless shopping experiences.

4. Be Helpful 10/10

Consumers continue to demand brands to contribute to making real and sustained change in the communities they operate in. Let’s see how ASOS’s doing when it comes to philanthropy.

ASOS Foundation partners with many charities across the world to provide infrastructure, training and support to enable disadvantaged young adults.

From where we stand, ASOS is purpose-driven and guided by strong values. Customers appreciate these things, and vote with their wallets.

5. Realtime personalization 6/10

Logging into the ASOS website, we choose to shop in the women category. This preference was remembered in subsequent visits.

To test ASOS’s realtime capabilities, we place a pair of boots in our cart. Returning to the HP, we didn’t see any change in the content or messaging to reflect what was in our cart, our previous onsite search or browsing behavior.

Apart from showing us other boots we might like, no other cross-selling or up-selling techniques were implemented. Leveraging our data, ASOS could have presented us with some personalized recommendations on how to style the boots in our carts.

Finally, after leaving the ASOS website, we were retargeted with sponsored ads on social media but the ads weren’t relevant. A missed opportunity. A timed offer code or discount for the boots in our cart as we were about to leave the website could have nudged us to make a purchase.

6. Master UX 7/10

Navigating the ASOS website was an easy and smooth experience. The homepage user interface and overall experience are decent and categories and subcategories are divided into manageable chunks. Filtering criteria were specific, which made finding products easy.

The product page was functional with descriptions, user reviews and ratings.

ASOS has a well-executed FAQ page. The FAQ page covered a broad range of issues, is informative, uniform and easy to scan.

ASOS website has a size recommendation tool/Fit Assistant that helps customers find the perfect size.

Overall, the ASOS website is decent. But we ducked some points because there’s nothing about it that is memorable or a reason to come back.

7. Leverage Social Media 8/10

ASOS has 12 million followers on Instagram, 1 million followers on Twitter and 7.2 million likes on Facebook. Very large numbers. But, what do you do with them is even more important.

ASOS posts in high frequency on Instagram and makes good use of the platform’s features to deliver engaging experiences to its audience. The brand’s Instagram feed is made up of promotional posts, user-generated content, events, and inspirational posts.

ASOS’s Instagram feed is perfectly curated, projecting an extremely fun and fashion-forward image.

ASOS does not post frequently on Twitter. The last post we found was for September 9th, 2021. 🙁

They do post frequently on Facebook, though. And there, too, the content is a great mix of inspiration, product promotion, styling tips and tricks and witty posts.

In all, ASOS’s social media strategy is platform-specific and the content is relevant to its target audience. The brand does a great job of leveraging trends, influencers and popular events to catch its audience’s attention.

Not having an active Twitter presence drops the brand’s score. ASOS should consider posting regularly on Twitter to hit a 10. It’s a fantastic platform for engaging customers.

Overall, On is getting a fanstastic 61/70 here, which comes out 87% score – enough for a strong joint 4^th place out of the 61 brands we analyzed so far. The brand’s CRM strategy falls short on personalization, and its social media strategy needs a little fix.

Our Advice to ASOS – customers want to be treated like royalty. So, cookie cutter personalization won’t cut it.

We recommend ASOS adopts realtime personalization by using customer data to automatically deliver a more fitted customer experience across its website. Read more about personalized recommendations here.

This will help ASOS deliver more personalized shopping experiences to its customers and take its CRM results to a star level.

Here’s the full rankings so far: