How Email Personalization Can Elevate Your Beauty Brand

Beauty and makeup brands have some of the most actively engaged online customers. These consumers frequently buy online (often directly from brands instead of big box stores) and are very interested in trying new products.

That presents a huge opportunity to lean into email personalization.

With such an engaged audience of consumers actively looking to shop more and find the next great product, you can lock into their needs and interests and display personalized messaging just for them.

But first, let’s look at the data.

Customer behavior reveals shifting habits

A recent study found that beauty consumer behavior has shifted over the last few turbulent years. 

Now, 53% of shoppers buy more products online than they did pre-2020, with Gen Z and Millennial consumers both spending more. These younger generations also tend to be beauty enthusiasts, always searching for new products. And 65% of them have either kept their spending the same or increased how much they budget for beauty products now compared to a few years ago.

So what’s driving some of these trends? User-generated content and ratings and reviews. 

The same study found:

• 99% of beauty consumers always or sometimes read ratings and reviews when shopping online.
• 79% of shoppers look at average star ratings on products, and nearly half look at recent reviews.
• 41% say they rely more on reviews now than they did pre-2020.

More research shows that beauty customers deeply care about hyper-personalization. They want individualized messaging and content that matches not only their interests but where they are in their customer journey. 

The main takeaway here is if you’re doing marketing for a beauty brand, personalization is critical to success. 

Here’s the good news, Zembula makes it easy to automate your personalization. So your subscribers get 1:1 levels of personalized messaging without adding time or headaches to your current processes and workflows. 

Here are a few of our favorite examples in action.

How to use Smart Banners™ for better email personalization

So you know your customers want to get more personalized emails, but what does that really look like? And how can more personalization in email drive customer engagement?

Let’s start with the basics. Makeup Cartel is one example of a beauty brand using a suite of Smart Banners™ to provide their customers with hyper-personalized messaging. 

Except for the shipment tracking banner, each of these is a revenue-driving action. And since Smart Banners™ sit at the top of every email, on both desktop and mobile devices, it’s the first thing that’s going to draw eyes when an email is opened.

By using customer data, Makeup Cartel emails display personalized animated messaging that helps encourage clicks and conversions. And, since there are a variety of banners to choose from, you can use different banners as consumers move through their buying journey.

For example, at the start of the journey, use a personalized birthday banner like this one from one of our other wonderful beauty clients Thrive Causemetics.

Then, as your subscribers start browsing and considering products, use personalized browse and cart abandonment Smart Banner™ to encourage them to complete the purchase.

What stands out with these types of Smart Banners™ is you can use precious real estate to include animated product rotations and user-generated ratings and reviews.

Since we know UGC is a huge driver for beauty brands, having product ratings and reviews automatically displayed in banners can help boost conversions.

And you don’t need to stop engaging with your subscribers once they become customers. Use Smart Banners™, with ratings and reviews, to feature related and recommended products. 

Remember, as more consumers become beauty enthusiasts, this is the perfect way to highlight new products and brands they may love based on their behavior and past purchase history.

Learn from customer success

We work with some incredible beauty brands, including Thrive Causemetics and Makeup Cartel. And what we’ve seen is their customers actively respond to email personalization. 

Thrive Causemetics has seen a 10-17% lift in revenue in emails displaying Smart Banners™. And Makeup Cartel has seen a ton of success with their abandoned cart Smart Banners™. 

If you want to see a specific use case for how Makeup Cartel uses abandoned cart banners, check out our latest Z-Talk.