5 killer CX strategies to acquire (and retain!) more beauty and cosmetics shoppers

To stand out in an increasingly crowded market, beauty and cosmetics marketers need to offer a truly personalized customer experience.

This blog will explore how beauty marketers can bring traditional, personalized in-store beauty experiences online with five actionable strategies, covering everything from product discovery to customer retention. We’ll also reveal how world-leading beauty retailer, Clarins, achieved 30X ROI with Insider’s personalized marketing solution.

Let’s get started. 

For more insights, inspiration, and strategies to fuel your beauty brand’s digital growth, download our ebook: The ultimate digital growth guide for beauty and cosmetics marketers.

The power of personalized customer experiences in beauty marketing

In beauty marketing, giving customers a personal touch is a must. Whether they talk to a beauty expert in a store or match colors online, everyone wants a tailored experience.

The challenge is, how do you bring the feel of an in-store visit to the online world? How do you make customers feel special when they’re not in the store? The answer lies in turning your online experience into a digital salesperson, helping customers find the right products just like beauty experts would in the store.

Doing this right is about more than just selling products online. It’s about making the digital journey feel as personal and expert-guided as possible. It’s about turning online shopping into an experience, not just a transaction.

The online world shouldn’t lose the personal touch that makes beauty shopping special—it should make it even better. And when marketers power their customer experiences with data to build personalized journeys, ‘better’ is easy to achieve.

Leveraging omnichannel marketing to boost acquisition 

Personalized experiences can significantly boost a beauty brand’s revenue, but only if the customer journey feels natural and engaging to the user. 

The figures are there to prove personalized marketing works. 60% of customers say they want companies to help them find products that suit them, while 72% are willing to pay more for a personalized experience. 

This is where Insider comes in. Our omnichannel marketing platform empowers beauty brands with data-driven personalization and AI-powered segmentation to create engaging, conversion-driving customer journeys tailored to each beauty customer.

Let’s dive into three of the most powerful beauty marketing strategies brands can leverage to set their brand apart, drive growth, and engage and convert anonymous browsers into avid buyers. 

And remember, if you want to learn more about personalized omnichannel marketing, then download our ebook: The ultimate digital growth guide for beauty and cosmetics marketers.

Strategy 1: Increase product discovery

Gen-Z are used to TikTok, Reels, and Instagram Stories—and InStory is Insider’s answer to all three. Our thumbnail-to-fullscreen experiences help you get more eyes on your products from your homepage in a familiar, bitesize format that resembles social media content. 

Leading beauty brands, including MAC Cosmetics, already use InStory to highlight best-selling and trending products based on visitors’ locations and use AI-powered recommendations for returning customers.

InStory captures users’ attention and enhances product discovery, incentivizing new customers to make a purchase and encouraging existing customers to try new products.

Strategy 2: Build trust with social proof

Social proof is a defining feature of the beauty industry. You only have to see the incredible rise of online beauty influencers on social media to prove it. Beauty customers want advice, and they listen to those they trust. This makes word of mouth and social media marketing crucial in this market.

What’s more, beauty products are all about making customers feel good. Showing your prospects how good your products make others feel is a great way to get your brand noticed. 

This is where Insider’s social proof tools are invaluable, with our beauty customers using them to:

• Show real-time catalog information and stock availability to create FOMO
• Highlight best-sellers and trending products
• Display customer reviews and ratings

Don’t just take our word for it. Leading beauty retailer, Avon, increased AOV by 11% with Insider’s social proof solutions when displaying user reviews and ratings alongside AI-driven product recommendations.

Strategy 3: Personalize customer emails

Static, unengaging emails are out, especially in an industry as creative as beauty. 

Insider’s AMP for Email tool enables brands to provide dynamic, engaging content to collect customer feedback, answer surveys, and encourage prospects to share their beauty concerns and preferences—all from within their email inbox without redirects. 

You can include interactive elements to learn more about their preferences, encourage them to explore different product options, and even encourage purchases directly from the email. Even better, as we progress into a world without third-party cookies, the data gathered through dynamic emails is a great way to maintain personalization for your customers without compromising their security. 

“With Insider, we can present relevant experiences to our visitors based on their needs and guide them through the sales funnel. We no longer need to theorize what would work best as we can now test the impact of personalization and act on critical decisions in real-time.”

— ECommerce and Digital Manager at Yves Rocher

Download The ultimate digital growth guide for beauty and cosmetics marketers to find out more.

The importance of customer retention

Once you’ve acquired new customers, it’s more important than ever to retain them, especially given their potential to become lifelong advocates and help build your brand even further via word of mouth. 

Not only is acquiring new customers 5X more expensive than retaining old ones, but studies have shown that increasing customer loyalty by just 5% can lead to an increase in profits of over 25%. 

Here are two powerful strategies Insider’s beauty customers use to create meaningful connections and enhance loyalty with existing customers, boosting Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV). 

Strategy 4: Increase AOV with personalized search experiences

Personalized product recommendations that resonate with customers’ unique preferences are a powerful weapon in the beauty marketer’s arsenal. Customized product recommendations cut product discovery times, accelerating customers’ path to purchase and increasing the chances they’ll convert and the amount they’ll spend. 

Eureka is Insider’s search engine solution, offering personalized product recommendations when users use a website’s search functionality. The solution proactively recommends products based on customers’ browsing history, preferences, and market trends. It enables beauty brands to reorder search listings instantly to show visitors only the most relevant products. 

Eureka is about showing customers you know them better than anyone, providing irresistible recommendations that perfectly match their wants and needs. Use Insider’s Eureka solution to encourage your customers to return to your site more often and to spend more with you when they do.

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ 

“We love the feature of predicting search terms and displaying search results unique to each user based on their affinity. It is one of the coolest features we have on our website, which really helps us stand apart from our competition.”

– Ecommerce Executive at online beauty retailer

Read more reviews from happy customers on G2

Strategy 5: Increase profitability with personalized offers and gamification

Beauty shoppers are inundated with blanket discounts and offers. But these don’t build relationships. Constant markdowns can reduce profit margins and undermine the perceived value of products—or even an entire brand. 

To build brand loyalty, discounts must be targeted and personalized. You can send relevant, contextual discount codes by segmenting users based on past behaviors, discount affinity, and predicted behavior. 

Incorporating gamification strategies such as Scratch to Win and Spin the Wheel also encourages customers to share first-party data in exchange for the opportunity to win a discount. 

You can then use this data to personalize offers even further. This helps to protect profit margins by limiting promotions to your most loyal customers, which builds long-term trust and CLTV.

Discover more powerful customer engagement strategies in our ebook: The ultimate digital growth guide for beauty and cosmetics marketers.

Clarins achieves 30X ROI in 12 weeks and a 4% increase in conversions with Insider

Clarins’ rapid ecommerce growth outpaced its tech stack. Data sat in silos across multiple platforms, preventing the team from using it to power marketing campaigns and build data-driven strategies.

Insider’s CDP enabled the team to integrate data across its solutions into one unified 360-degree view. With powerful customer journey analytics, the team was able to better understand the behaviors, motivations, and needs of each customer. As a result, Clarins optimized its customer journeys, increasing conversions by 4% and contributing to a huge 30X ROI in just 12 weeks.

I would recommend Insider, they are a great partner to work with. We work in a very agile environment, and the team is super responsive, always next to us with anything we need, especially in peak times when we need quick solutions.

— Ecommerce Trading Manager at Clarins

Are you ready to leverage the power of omnichannel marketing for your beauty brand?

Bring the tailored in-store beauty expert experience online across all your digital channels with Insider’s powerful omnichannel personalization platform. Our experts work with the world’s best-loved beauty brands and thousands of other leading global players to create personalized customer journeys that hit the mark every single time. 

The result? Stronger brand loyalty, increased CLTV, and way more revenue. 

Download the ebook to find out more

Discover more strategies to increase acquisition and retention, drive conversions, and even boost productivity through AI, by downloading our ebook: The ultimate digital growth guide for beauty and cosmetics marketers.