“Less than three weeks after deploying the Aampe personalization system into its notification pipeline, the ecommerce platform Zalora increased the rate that targeted users were adding items to their wishlist and starting a checkout in its app by an average of 21% on a daily basis. The result was significant additional revenue generated in just the first week after the initial 2 week model training period.”
“Adaptation” and “consumer experience” are the name of the game for mobile commerce CRM and Marketing teams in 2021 and 2022. Mobile consumers demand engaging and value-adding retail experiences.
The COVID19 pandemic has changed the way people shop, compounding earlier changes brought by mobile and social commerce, streaming shopping, pervasive data and machine learning, and other key developments in tech. Leading commerce businesses are moving away from heavy reliance on invasive advertising powered by third-party and social platform data. Trends like Discovery Commerce show the power of letting products find the right customers rather than forcing customers into exhausting search experiences.
Businesses that can’t adapt to this changing landscape will suffer the fate of Nieman Marcus, J.C. Penney and the other 135 businesses that have declared bankruptcy since 2015, in what has been called the Retail Apocalypse.
Ecommerce and retail businesses that have demonstrated adaptability have soared successfully through the rampant disruption. Zalora, Southeast Asia’s leading fashion and lifestyle ecommerce platform, achieved a 27.2 per cent year-on-year revenue growth in Q1 of 2021. Seeing the changes that COVID19 brought, Zalora quickly expanded its categories and added lifestyle offerings including essential goods and pre-loved items, and launched new app features like its in-app livestream shopping platform Z-Live adapting to the growing demand to bridge the gap between offline and online shopping through interactive content.
Aampe is delighted to be part of Zalora’s dynamic and ambitious approach to ecommerce in southeast Asia by powering discovery commerce in Zalora consumer messaging. In October of 2021 Zalora deployed Aampe to personalize its product recommendation push notifications across its country markets. Aampe began sending notifications to selected Zalora app users, personalizing messaging over 35 unique time slots per week for millions of users, resulting in an average of nearly 3,000 individualized messaging decisions being made every minute. The scale of decisions illustrates why it’s so critical for personalization models to be continually updated. For example, Aampe’s system observed that Zalora consumers’ timing preference for notifications stayed the same across consecutive days less than 30% of the time.
“We want to deliver the right message, to the right customer, at the right time. Aampe was a strong partner in ensuring that we served our customers the best, and sought to measure meaningful uplift rather than vanity metrics." - Li Zhiliang, Head of CRM at ZALORA Group
After 2 weeks of generating high-quality training data for its individual user timing models, Zalora increased the rate that targeted users were adding items to their wishlist and starting a checkout in the app by an average of 21% on a daily basis. Significant new revenue was attributed to this increase and the improved performance of its notification recommendations. Rather than requiring a months-long integration project or expensive in-house development, the Aampe deployment took less than two weeks to set up two API connections with Zalora’s standard CRM pipeline. Aampe’s team agility was demonstrated through quick adaptation to the Zalora workflow and existing data architecture.
Li Zhiliang, Zalora’s Head of CRM, led the deployment of Aampe’s system within Zalora and spoke to Aampe’s value proposition for Zalora: “We want to deliver the right message, to the right customer, at the right time. Aampe was a strong partner in ensuring that we served our customers the best, and sought to measure meaningful uplift rather than vanity metrics."
Aampe’s Co-Founder Paul Meinshausen attributed much of the success of the partnership to the Zalora CRM team: “Working with Zhiliang has been deeply rewarding. He has consistently demonstrated a long-term strategic view and the ambition to seek outsized returns on the technology they use at Zalora. Perhaps even more importantly he combines strategic vision with the persistent tactical skill and attention to detail required to introduce new technology at a business as large, complex, and successful as Zalora. We’ve learned a lot from Zhiliang and the CRM team and have incorporated that learning into the Aampe product. We’re confident and thrilled that working with Zalora will ultimately benefit so many of the other current and future mobile commerce apps that use Aampe to generate greater revenue through personalized messaging.”
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