Asos sales growth: Down to good social engagement?

This week, online clothes retailer Asos announced a significant increase in sales and revenue, and the retailer attributed a large part of the growth to strategic social engagement.

This week, online clothes retailer Asos announced a significant increase in sales and revenue, and the retailer attributed a large part of the growth to strategic social engagement.

The stats

Asos unveiled revenues of £1.15bn in the year to August 31: up 18% from the same time last year. Similarly, retail sales of £1.2bn were 17% ahead, while pre-tax profits of £47.5m were 1% ahead.

A key player in the results appears to be Asos’ mobile platforms. In the last year, the brand has been running mobile-only promotions, and optimising its checkout for mobile, and the benefits are pretty visible. A whopping 60% of traffic came from mobile devices over the last year, while 44% of transactions were placed on mobile platforms.

“We are attracting more customers with a continued expansion of our delivery proposition and mobile offerings,” said Nick Beighton, reporting his first results as chief executive, “Customer engagement has been exceptionally strong, with increases in average order frequency, basket size and value. We now have 9.9m active customers, up 13%.”

Asos’ social developments: Why are they effective?

Asos believe that mobile and social helped fuel “exceptionally strong” customer engagement.

Generally, Asos is really good at tailoring its content according to specific social channel. Each platform adopts a different tone according to purpose, and performs different tasks. But what exactly is the retailer doing across these platforms, and why is it effective? Let’s take a look:

Facebook page

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Asos’ Facebook page is all about personality. Asos mirrors the humour of its demographic of users in order to engage them. Examples include posting regular memes, and adopting the internetspeak of its consumers. The brand has over 3 million followers from adopting this approach.

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A post like this is indistinguishable from what’s already appearing on Asos fans’ newsfeeds. Aside from posts of celebrity memes, competitions and other statuses that encourage their fans to get involved themselves also receive a significant response.

It’s also interesting to consider that Asos uses Facebook mostly to post it’s own content, rather than just promotions, encouraging a higher level of engagement.

Which bring us to….

The Asos blog (content)

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Asos publishes more than 2,000 pieces of fashion and lifestyle content a month, and it’s really shareable. Most of these pieces, such as the above, adopt a sharp, witty, and ironic tone similar to that of Vice, and have the accessibility and shareability of buzzfeed articles.

Twitter

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ASOS is really active on Twitter, holding multiple accounts to cater for different markets. @ASOS is the primary global fashion page (with 902k followes – compare that to @NetAPorter’s 760k), and pages also operate for ASOS Australia/US/France/ES/DE/Italia, ASOS menswear, ASOS careers, ASOS Fashion Finder and ASOS Marketplace.

There is also a dedicated customer care Twitter account, which is important for brand image.

All of the accounts are active, engaging, and attentive with responses to fan comments and enquiries, but the key use for Twitter is to publish links to their content on the blog. Trending topics, pictures, and GIFs are also frequently shared, and have been carefully chosen to cater to their clientele.

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Updates that Asos fans can relate to themselves generally do well.

Instagram

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Asos has 3 million followers on Instagram, and there are several reasons why the account is so successful. On this channel, it’s also more about building a relationship with fans, than constantly marketing their products.

Firstly, it’s way more personal that Facebook and Twitter. Fans get quite a bit of behind the scenes insight into the ASOS team. Examples include pictures of staff’s breakfasts of coffee, or sneak peeks into what stylists are up to.

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Instagram is the perfect platform to debut ASOS clothes, but could risk appearing too overly promotional. Asos presents opportunities to buy their clothes in a fun, digestible and non-promotional way. Take the ‘outfit of the day’, picked up an Asos stylist. Posts like these, involving real people, provide inspiration to shop on the website.

Is Asos’ social strategy geo-aware?

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Asos are a global brand, both in service and social. Social channels have multiple different accounts for different countries, and the content is tailored specifically to that audience.

In addition, the brand recently released localised apps in overseas territories including China and Russia, and French and German YouTube and Instagram accounts have been launched in the last six months.

What does this mean? Asos are taking over the world (on social, anyway).

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