Alavi’s personalization features are a game changer. We can now use history and affinity dynamically to identify products a user will most likely buy. It’s already increased our campaign returns significantly.”
Ryan Chioh – Managing Director

• Due to increased competition and broader targeting (in an attempt to grow its customer base), FarEastFlora.com were not getting the returns they wanted on their online ad spends.

• To combat this, Alavi’s artificial intelligence (AI) engine identified products to market and audiences to target, which the company used to boost revenues without sacrificing its bottom line.

Recognising the Internet’s Potential

Starting life as a small nursery in 1965, Far East Flora Holdings is today, one of Southeast Asia’s leading florists. While the company has established a network of brick and mortar stores in Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia, it was quick to recognise the potential of the internet as a retail channel and launched FarEastFlora.com (FEF) as early as 2000. Today, the e-commerce site, led by its Managing Director, Ryan Chioh, offers over 1,000 flower and gift options and delivers to more than 140 countries.

Profitable Growth Now

In recent years, to market its innovative products online, FEF has relied on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising through platforms like Google and Facebook. Though year-on-year traffic growth has been good, conversions and revenue have not met the company’s expectations. This recently became an especially serious issue because FEF was forced to raise its ad spends to counter increased competition as well as target broader audiences (who generally have a lower intent to buy) to grow its customer base. The company knew the situation was unsustainable and improvements had to be made.

What FEF urgently needed was to boost its return on ad spend so it could achieve profitable growth. MD Ryan firmly believed the key to this was data. While he knew his web analytics platform collected vast amounts of information on customers’ purchase journeys, he didn’t have a cost-effective way to analyse all of it. Overcoming this issue was imperative to identifying potentially profitable audiences and extracting insights that would make FEF’s digital marketing more competitive, effective and efficient.

The solution Ryan found was Alavi.ai (Alavi), an online application that uses artificial intelligence and data science to analyse marketing data. He was keen to give Alavi a go because of its proven record of helping small and medium businesses grow profitably by greatly improving their PPC advertising.

Quick Setup. Quick Results.

For FEF’s Marketing Communications Manager, Chris Kok, linking Alavi to the company’s ad platforms and customer relationship management (CRM) data (which Alavi encrypted) was straightforward and took very little time. Once connected, Alavi’s automated AI engine quickly kicked into gear and identified products that were most likely to sell in the coming weeks, as well as cohorts to target for immediate returns and profitable growth. By providing a marketing workflow along with cohort attributes that were compatible with Google and Facebook, FEF was able to immediately launch campaigns on its preferred ad platforms.

In just 3 weeks, with Alavi’s AI, FEF improved its online marketing considerably. Return on ad spend (RoAS) was increased by 21.75%, while average order value (AOV) shot up by 20.33%.

Future Success

When it comes to flowers and gifts, trends and tastes are constantly changing. To help FEF keep on top of what’s new, Alavi constantly tracks user behaviour, so the company has the insights it needs to keep innovating and keep marketing the right products to the right people. Alavi’s ability to perpetually identify new opportunities from the top to the bottom of the customer funnel will ensure FEF continues to accelerate its growth profitably well into the future.

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