Delivering Advanced Personalization in Marketing Communications with Peak and Footasylum

Peak implements AWS-powered solutions that enable Footasylum to deliver advanced personalization in marketing communications via customer segmentation, achieve an 8,400 percent return on ad spend (ROAS), and increase revenue via email marketing by 28 percent. Peak is an APN Advanced Consulting Partner and a provider of AI and ML solutions for business. The Peak AI System provides Footasylum with predictions and prescriptions to target groups of customers in a particular way to achieve higher revenues. It also powers a recommendation engine that generates product suggestions using AI. 

Peak is a pioneering artificial intelligence (AI) company that helps businesses grow and become more profitable using data, AI, and machine learning (ML). Founded in 2014, Peak itself has grown rapidly and has secured over $7 million in funding to date to support its ongoing investment in AI technologies and accelerate sales growth. GP Bullhound recognizes Peak as one of the fastest-growing tech companies in the UK. The company, which runs its solutions on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, is an Advanced Consulting Partner and Machine Learning Competency Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN). “We have run our business on AWS since we started,” says Mylo Portas, head of retail at Peak. “We chose AWS because of the broad depth of services and support.” As an APN Partner, Peak benefits from early access to new AWS technologies. “We share a go-to-market strategy with AWS for reaching retail customers with AI and ML solutions,” Portas says. “We also get to test pre-release AWS ML services and embed them into our technology as soon as possible.”

Using AWS ML technologies such as Amazon SageMaker, Peak developed the Peak AI System, which helps businesses leverage their data quickly and efficiently. It connects siloed data and workflows and drives tangible outcomes across the entire value chain. Recently, leading fashion footwear retailer Footasylum approached Peak because it sought to enable more personalization from both its online and store data. “The bifurcation of online and high-street retail means that stores and websites in our industry are moving further away from each other,” says Tom Summerfield, the head of commerce at Footasylum. “We wanted to see how we could unify them to deliver a personalized, connected retail experience to our customers. We knew we needed to do something with our data to accomplish this, and it was clear we needed AI and ML technologies to deliver it at scale. We also sought to increase the revenue generated from our marketing campaigns.”

Peak worked with Footasylum to implement the Peak AI System and its built-in Customer AI solution, enabling Footasylum to consolidate customer data from multiple data sources on different platforms. Ingesting data of any size or structure from across the business, Footasylum uses the Customer AI solution to take advantage of customer purchasing information. This data is stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets and processed using Apache Spark running on Amazon EMR. The Peak AI system runs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C5 instances, powered by Intel processors. Peak uses the C5 instances to train its ML models and run predictions based on the models. “Intel gives us the ability to scale, so we can give our AI solutions the computational power they need,” Portas says. “This is critical for our business, so we can deliver maximum value to our customers.” Peak takes the unified data and applies ML algorithms on top of Amazon SageMaker to deliver predictive analysis for Footasylum. “By using Amazon SageMaker, we can deploy our machine learning algorithms quickly,” says Portas. This helps Footasylum offer personalized communication to its customers, acquire previously unreachable customers, and improve onsite conversions via the Peak recommendation engine. 

Working with Peak, Footasylum has been able to unify its online and retail store data to generate highly valuable predictive insights. These are put into action via integrations with Footasylum’s Email Service Provider (ESP) and social automation platforms, resulting in always-on, hyper-personalized campaigns. The AI-driven campaigns help determine which customers are most likely to be engaged with and ultimately purchase footwear from Footasylum. The company uses this data to better target audiences through social media to acquire new customers and improve the lifetime value of existing customers. “Using the Peak AI System on AWS, we can find out how to show the right product to the right customer at the right time through personalization,” says Summerfield. 

Footasylum has used the Peak AI System to reach an 8,400 percent return on advertising spend (ROAS), which is 30 times more than the industry average and 10 times higher than the company’s standard marketing ROAS. “This is significant for us, as the industry upper benchmark is around 200 percent, and with Peak, we’re now performing 3 times higher than before we used AI,” says Summerfield. Footasylum has also seen a 28 percent boost in revenue per email by using the Peak AI System. “Using Peak’s ML, we’ve been able to generate $84 for every $1 spent. This means we are super-powering our investment in this form of advertising while ensuring that our consumers are seeing the most hyper-personal, relevant, engaging content for them,” says Summerfield. The company also saw a 75 percent reduction in cost per social click during a recent online campaign. Peak and Footasylum are continuing to collaborate to incorporate AWS AI and ML technologies into social media advertising campaigns. Summerfield says, “We are looking forward to expanding our use of the Peak AI System on AWS to see how AI can benefit other areas of our business.” 

Intel is the world’s leading designer and manufacturer of high-performance processors for servers, PCs, IoT devices, and mobile devices. AWS and Intel engineers have worked together for more than 10 years, building custom hardware to ensure AWS services run on a platform optimized for customer workloads, for the best value. Intel Xeon processors power Amazon EC2 instances to help enterprises drive performance for their compute-intensive workloads.