5 Holiday Tips for Beauty Brands

Beauty brand purchases are on the rise. According to McKinsey, eCommerce sales will make up approximately 25% of the beauty market in 2022 and are only expected to rise from there. 

A few other data points should make beauty brands very interested: about 65% of consumers have bought beauty products online, and beauty brand customers are more likely to try new products and brands compared to other buyers. 

With the holiday season here, beauty brands must capture the opportunities to reach more customers, drive engagement, and boost revenue. Here are some tips for moving forward during the holiday season. 

Combine email and SMS marketing

One of the best ways to reach more customers during the holiday season is to go all in on email and SMS marketing. These two tools make for a perfect opportunity to meet your customers where they are. Data shows customers are far more responsive to SMS marketing right now, opening texts within just a few minutes of receiving them. 

Using both email and SMS also helps provide your customers with unified personalized messaging at scale. For example, send customers promotional or holiday sale emails, product recommendations, and stock updates via email — but don’t stop there. Also, incorporate personalized SMS messaging to give your customers more opportunities to learn about your brand and shop with you.

Use Smart Banners™ to inform and drive action

One of the great benefits of incorporating Smart Banners™ in your email marketing strategy is they offer a way to maximize personalization, which helps drive engagement and action.

Here are a few examples we love:

Thrive Causemetics used Smart Banners™ during last year’s Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales to make sure holiday shipping cut-off dates were communicated to readers.

If you’re running an SMS campaign this holiday season, use a Smart Banner™ to encourage people to sign up for that list. Now, you’ve increased your chances of reaching people throughout the holiday season and beyond.

The same concept works for increasing your loyalty program engagement too. Use a Smart Banner™ to highlight attractive incentives that help get people shopping.

Lastly, you don’t want to forget some of your best revenue-driving actions: cart and browse abandonment campaigns. Add Smart Banners™ that alert customers when they’ve left something behind to drive conversions.

Focus on product recommendations

Another holiday season strategy for beauty brands is to focus heavily on recommended products. Go through the data you have with your customers, and with every email you send, add a Smart Block™ to your email that features recommended products. 

Zembula’s Campaign Decision Engine pulls in customer data based on their browsing and purchase history to generate some related products that are more likely to appeal to them. Plus, it’s easy to add user-generated ratings and reviews on these products, which helps make consumers more likely to buy.

Another holiday-specific tie-in for your emails is to create a holiday gift guide. Customer data can help you develop hyper-personalized guides for customers based on their purchase history, even breaking product recommendations down into specific categories such as skin or hair care versus makeup. 

Build campaigns around subscription boxes

Subscription boxes and sales are growing trends in eCommerce — including for beauty brands. As a result, brands have an opportunity to launch or highlight subscription box services during the holiday season, which could be a perfect gift for beauty lovers. It could be a potent revenue driver since this category of consumers is more likely to explore different products and brands.

Here’s another area where Smart Banners™ can help drive engagement. Create banners that feature subscription boxes as a special holiday gift. And since Smart Banners™ are great ways to improve message visibility, you can also use them to alert customers when their box has shipped, or they need to update their credit card information. 

Make your emails holiday-focused

Now is the time to review your current triggered welcome campaigns and ensure everything focuses on the holiday season. What may work to convert during the summer due to a long time frame may need to be compressed during the holidays. 

For example, you may have a welcome campaign that ends with a coupon or discount. Review your current campaigns to ensure customers who sign up during the holidays get these emails before the season ends. 

Also, look to revamp your templates to make them more holiday themed. With the Zembula platform, it’s easy to transform your email templates, including Smart Banners™ and Smart Blocks™, into something more holiday-friendly. It’s the small details that matter.

Ready to give Zembula a try?

If you are a beauty brand that wants to do more with your emails, get in touch. 

One of our email experts will set you up with a demo for the Zembula platform to see how much you can hyper-personalize your emails at scale.