Appier AI salesman helps Chow Sang Sang Jewelry boost online sales

This case was named the Silver Winner in the Best Use of Smart Data Analytics category at The Loyalty & Engagement Awards 2021 presented by Asia's leading advertising, marketing and news media "Marketing Interactive". The awards seek to recognize the most creative, innovative and deserving consumer-centric programs and schemes across North Asia. Based on the joint efforts of Appier and Mindshare, Chow Sang Sang Jewelry won this award recognition for the first time, and successfully boosted its online sales through a "virtual AI salesperson", providing customers with a seamless shopping experience.

In this campaign, Chow Sang Sang successfully reduced the cost per action (CPA) by 52% and increased the conversion rate of its website by 49% by adopting Appier's CrossX and AiDeal solutions. While Christmas is a competitive season for the e-commerce industry, the number of transactions of Chow Sang Sang's website had still increased 1.8x even amidst rising ad costs, and the jewelry brand was able to provide a seamless online shopping experience with the power of AI for its customers to find suitable items for themselves or their loved ones.

With the rise of online e-commerce platforms and the outbreak of the pandemic, customer behavior for purchasing jewelry has significantly changed. In response to potential business opportunities and trends of young generation consumers shopping online, Chow Sang Sang launched its online e-commerce platform in 2014, with the goal of reaching more potential customers, increasing brand awareness, and lowering the barrier for the young generation to enter jewelry stores. Through a collaboration with Appier and Mindshare, Chow Sang Sang was able to combine dynamic ads and hesitant customer prediction to deliver the right incentive at the best time to each hesitant shopper and increase the conversion rate of the website.

According to Appier's observation, customers' hesitation behavior patterns are constantly changing, which is why we need to use AI to make real-time determination according to their current behavior in order to be more accurate. Based on the top performers of Chow Sang Sang for a period of two consecutive months, the best conversion rates in the former month were users who "abandoned shopping cart," "viewed less than 2 category pages," or "visited the website from 11 pm to 5 am on weekdays." However, the top performers in the latter month were users who "did NOT abandon shopping carts", "organic traffic," or "new visitors."

"E-commerce is a self-help platform with no staff or human intelligence to observe customers' emotions and interest. AI acts like a virtual salesman to speed up the checkout process by finding the right audience and engaging them at the right moment. AI is comprehensive enough to cover all our product categories (over 2,000+) while in-depth enough to study every user's preferences to recommend products that truly cater to their potential needs," said Fai Leung, Associate Director of Chow Sang Sang.

Below please find a more detailed description of Chow Sang Sang's digital marketing challenges and how Appier's AI solutions helped Chow Sang Sang solve its business pain points.

Two Challenges in Digital Marketing

• Matching its large jewelry offerings with the right customers: With an ever-growing customer base and an even more impressive jewelry offering (2,000+ jewelry styles), Chow Sang Sang faced the challenge of recommending the right product to each online shopper. Traditional rule-based conditional settings proved ineffective in pushing products, not only because it is limited in the number of scenarios it can create, but also because it is more time-consuming and labor-intensive. This problem lets certain business opportunities fall through the cracks.
• Strategy of promoting high-priced items to hesitant shoppers: Chow Sang Sang's e-commerce store did not have a mechanism in place to retain hesitant shoppers and nudge them to complete their purchase. This problem is particularly alarming for luxury goods because customers generally require more time to shop when looking at high-end products with an expensive price tag. Without anything to give them a final push, many hesitant shoppers end up abandoning their carts and do not return. Based on the above considerations, Chow Sang Sang Jewelry decided to use high-quality silk scarf as an accessory incentive for online promotions, and extended the discount timeframe to 60 minutes to increase overall conversion of hesitant customers.

Solution and Marketing Scenario Design

Based on a keen understanding of the journey taken by the brand's customers, Appier and Mindshare used effective solutions to design marketing scenarios that helped Chow Sang Sang overcome the challenges above.

• Predict customer interests in order to deliver dynamic ads to potential audiences: Chow Sang Sang first used Appier's AI solution to automatically predict potential consumers' interests based on existing customers and deliver related ads to potential consumers who recently visited the website. Chow Sang Sang found that the main interests of the potential audience of the brand are reality programs, female celebrities, news, and technology. When the user sees the ad next time, the system will automatically present the items displayed on the ad according to the user's browsing history or deliver the promotion ad of "10% off for 2 selected jewelry" to attract users to visit the official website again to make purchases.
• Define the main segments and personas to boost sales: Chow Sang Sang divided the items on the website into three segments: "wedding jewelry," "gifts," and "daily wear" according to its past sales record. By defining the main products and comparing the keywords and user interests, Chow Sang Sang found that the four most prominent personas who click on ads are regular travelers (54%), those interested in promotions (36%), working women (24%), and parents of young children (23%); these are the audience segments most likely to be attracted by ads. There may be bigger opportunities to boost sales by remarketing to the main segments and targeting the personas.
• Virtual AI salesperson to assist with final conversion: Contrary to the in-store advantage, brands that maintain an online store lack a salesperson to help guide customers to the products they want and prompt them to purchase. Appier's AiDeal served as the client's eyes online, collecting 400+ types of on-site behavior data, including mouse movement and scroll distance, to identify hesitant customers. Once identified, AiDeal will present customers with an additional incentive in the form of a pop-up that says, "if the checkout amount exceeds USD250 in 60 minutes, you can get a limited silk scarf (worth USD45)," to assist with the last-mile conversion to monetize the traffic.

For more success stories, please visit Appier's Success Stories.

About Chow Sang Sang Jewelry

Established in 1934, Chow Sang Sang is recognized as a premier jewelry retainer in Greater China. In 2014, Chow Sang Sang launched its e-commerce platform for customers to shop directly with seamless online services. Chow Sang Sang is keen on reaching more customers and better catering to their unique needs with this online presence. Visit www.chowsangsang.com/en for more information.

About Appier

Appier is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to power business decision-making. Founded in 2012 with a vision of democratizing AI, Appier now has 17 offices across APAC, Europe and U.S., and is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (Ticker number: 4180). Visit www.appier.com for more information.

#Appier