AI-enabled marketing drives sales increase for BrandAlley

Discount designer e-tailer BrandAlley has achieved over 40 per cent year-on-year order growth after choosing the Emarsys Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled platform to support its marketing strategy. Using the Emarsys platform to leverage existing data more effectively from its CRM systems, BrandAlley has improved personalisation through more effective omnichannel campaigns and reshaped its entire acquisition and retention advertising strategy over social media.

Other significant results and benefits that the Emarsys platform has enabled for BrandAlley include reducing its abandoned basket conversion rates and cost per acquisition (CPA) by 50%, as well as increasing its customer reach eight-fold and Facebook registrations by 230%.

BrandAlley is a UK members-only flash sales website. It provides each of its 2.5 million members with several daily fashion, beauty, and homeware sales, lasting for up to a week at a time. BrandAlley works with over 200 premium brands, such as Hackett, Joseph, Radley, Seafolly, J Brand, Agent Provocateur, Thomas Sabo, Jaeger, French Connection and Diesel. Launching new sales every day, it sends daily offers through email, as well as engaging via social media channels and its website.

The machine learning capabilities of Emarsys’ platform provide BrandAlley with recommended campaign formats and activities, based on specific customer segments. With a large volume of email communication, BrandAlley needs to ensure each customer communication is relevant to the recipient, while also matching the aesthetic appeal of the designer companies it partners with. To ensure that a synchronised omnichannel approach is achieved, its acquisition and retention advertising strategy over social media, and website engagement are also executed through the Emarsys platform. To achieve all this, BrandAlley uses Emarsys Smart Insight ^AI, Predict ^AI (web and email), CRM Ads, Automation, Web Extend and Smart Content solutions.

Rob Feldmann, CEO, BrandAlley said, “The revenue benefits of working directly with fabulous fashion brands and Emarsys are clear, and we see AI marketing playing a significant role in driving our bottom line as our business moves forward. Equally important for our business, which deals solely with premium brands, is that polish and personalisation across all customer-facing channels is possible, helping us relay our ‘best quality for best price’ message. Emarsys helps us achieve this simply, and the time saved in setting up these campaigns gives our marketing team the freedom to be creative in other areas of our marketing activity.”

The personalisation capabilities of Emarsys’ platform provide BrandAlley with recommended campaign formats and activities, based on specific customer segments. The impact of the Emarsys platform has significantly benefited BrandAlley’s loyal, ‘VIP’ customers, who are now automatically identified and served the best sales offers for products they’re most likely to be interested in, before they’re made available to the wider customer database. Furthermore, using the Emarsys platform enables BrandAlley’s marketing team to create and execute on new campaigns in hours – rather than days – reaching the audience in a timely fashion and freeing up team resource to focus on the actual content and design of emails, rather than distribution.

In a recent campaign coinciding with the launch of a Jaeger sale, BrandAlley undertook a VIP email outreach programme to more than 26,000 customers using Emarsys’ platform. This resulted in a click-through rate (CTR) of 36.5 per cent (up from the usual 14 per cent) and a ten per cent purchase rate amongst those who engaged.