The power of personalization

Who are you?

Footasylum is one of the leading retailers of fashion streetwear and sportswear. We have our fingers firmly on the pulse of the streets and sports fashion scene and pride ourselves on our vast range of footwear and apparel.

We were first established back in 2005 and now trade from over 70 high street stores across the UK, stocked with everything from sportswear giants Nike and Adidas to future heavyweights like Gym King.

What was your challenge?

We were looking to provide our customers with a more personalized targeted experience, and in turn, significantly increase the revenue generated from our marketing efforts. Customers now expect high levels of personalization at every single touchpoint. So, with our product offering being so vast, delivering an experience relevant to each user is often extremely challenging. We wanted to be able to leverage our years and years’ worth of past customer data to improve this vital area of our business. To do this, we turned to Peak and its Amazon Web Services (AWS)-powered artificial intelligence offering.

What did Peak do?

Peak accessed and ingested our data into its AI platform. Through unification techniques, Peak was able to drill down into our large customer base and provide us with a predictive view of our customers. Peak stores this within Amazon Redshift, which we have access to via the platform.

We’re now utilizing AI and machine learning-powered algorithms to draw insights based on the past transactional and behavior data of each customer. It leads to a more transparent view of our customers in-store and online. Peak’s Customer Segmentation model, available in the AWS marketplace, creates data-driven segments for Footasylum based on customer value. These bespoke algorithms also train customer intelligence models which include in-market predictions, lifetime value, churn risk, brand and style preferences, and a recommendation engine. They host the models on AWS SageMaker, which can be accessed by the Peak team internally as well as by our team.

What’s the upshot?

Thanks to Peak’s AWS-powered applications, we can now deliver highly-targeted, hyper-personalized marketing communications across our customer base, and also target and acquire new customers. We’re using AI to push relevant product recommendations, entice those who are less-engaged with fantastic offers, and provide customers with more of the products that we know they are interested in.

We’ve already enjoyed some fantastic results, such as a 28% uplift in revenue per email sent. The next stage of our AI journey with Peak was then to implement the technology into our social media advertising campaigns, too. We’ve seen an 8400% return on ad spend (ROAS), roughly 30x higher than the industry standard. To achieve this, Peak related a predicted customer view of those likely to be in-market, with lookalike audiences then targeted with different products based on regionality, persona and much more.

We’re certainly benefitting from utilizing AWS services such as SageMaker and Redshift, and are enjoying being an AI-driven business, with many more exciting opportunities with Peak – including inventory optimization – also on the horizon.