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Appendix 2 – Delivery service
The company continuously upgrades the delivery service to please consumers. It masters the consumption psychology of its target groups and offers free shipping and returns to 241 countries (Asosplc.com, 2013) to lessen their hesitations of purchasing. In the UK, the free standard delivery is within 4 working days with the charged options of Next day, Saturday and evening deliveries. Orders can be shipped and returned via collect + service anywhere in the country. For international users, there are standard and express delivery options and the time measured according to the distance. All orders can be tracked. In 2012, Asos introduced a new third party managing returns hub in Sydney to fasten the operational process. Also the shipping time speeded up to 2 days in USA (Asos official site). Appendix 3- Place and promotion factors in the Marketing Mix A3.1 Promotion A3.11 Sales Promotion
At Asos there is an independent outlets section providing past seasoned goods at attractive discounted prices that are marked down to 70 per cent. And students get 10 per cent discount all year round among UK and some international sites. For other types of regular sales, Asos measures the effectiveness by revising the performance and then uses sales promotion as a tool to motivate certain potential customers. It hired SmartFocus to work on Customer Relationship Management (CRM), tracking consumer profiles to study their buying behaviours demographically, so that the company would be able to promote highly relevant products to specific groups at the right time/season. A3.12 Communication A key communication strategy as well as an important competitive advantage is the emotional relationship Asos set with its customers. It archived the best search result in regarding to Youtube, Tweets, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and Internet users’ mention volume. Secondly, the company is highly interactive with customers through technological innovations on its website, apps, and other communication platforms. It is the second top ranking of womenswear search volume of both organic click and paid click over UK online stores (Moth, 2012). The growth is greatly driven by the strategy of multi channel marketing. The fashion finder, market places, magazines, blog, mobile apps, and other interactive promotion activities form an easy and interesting way of shopping. For example, 500,000 E-mails are sent to female customers twice a week and 100,000 E-mails are sent to males once a week (Taheera, 2010). It is reported that Asos is the most visible and interactive brand in the UK and it is rewarded as the social marketing leader (Moth, 2012). It also promote its goods via fashion edit. It offers celebrity inspired outfits in the fashion event segments on the site or linked from its fashion blog. Additionally, viral marketing activities such as refer-a-friend, and loyalty programmes were placed to engage customers.
The smartFOCUS platform will help ASOS to maintain customer data and realise the value of customer information by profiling customers accurately. By building sophisticated segmentation models, ASOS will be able to apply precision marketing techniques and offer each group highly relevant and timely marketing messages, helping ASOS to reinforce and enhance the existing relationship it has with its customers (EFYTimes News, 2008).