See how esmi Skin Minerals deploys one-to-one personalization across their full email program with Zembula Dimensions™, deepening loyalty and lifting revenue.

“Zembula enables us to achieve a level of personalization in our emails that would never have been possible in-house.” — Carlie Campbell, Group CRM Manager at esmi Skin Minerals

About

esmi Skin Minerals is an Australian skincare brand offering vegan and cruelty-free, results-driven skincare tailored to individual skin concerns. Known for its colour-coded treatment system and microbiome-first approach, esmi creates simple, effective routines designed to support healthy, balanced skin. Since launching in Australia in 2016, esmi has grown its direct-to-consumer presence globally, helping customers achieve their skin goals with personalised skincare solutions.

The background

As a digitally led skincare brand with a large and growing customer base in Australia, the U.S., and international markets, esmi relies on email marketing to drive retention.

And, in skincare, where individual needs vary dramatically, relevance is currency. To keep subscribers coming back, the CRM team can’t stop at generic communications. Every send must speak directly to each person’s unique skincare concerns, lifecycle stage, and purchase history.

Challenge

Personalizing every email to each subscriber’s skincare journey

Carlie Campbell, Group CRM Manager at esmi Skin Minerals, runs esmi’s ambitious email program. Like many retention leaders, she and her lean CRM team are under pressure to move beyond one-size-fits-all campaigns and give customers messages that reflect their actual lifecycle stages and shopping habits.

Deploying standard triggered flows on everything from abandoned cart to loyalty activity still barely scratched the surface. Klaviyo gave Carlie’s team enough visibility into browsing and purchase behavior to pursue personalization at a much bigger scale. One of Carlie’s key goals was to use this data to surface more targeted loyalty and promotional information in everyday campaigns, instead of limiting that context to a handful of automated flows.

The problem? Executing on this vision would be a massive production burden.

To deliver this level of personalization to even a few segments at once, her team would have to brief their graphic designer on multiple creative variations per send, set up the campaigns in Klaviyo, then create custom code for each one. The whole process would cost each team member a couple of extra hours of work every day.

Beyond BAU campaigns, Carlie also hoped to revamp esmi’s replenishment emails to better reflect how customers build their skincare routines. Most customers don’t buy a single serum in isolation; they create their own bundles, which translates into thousands of possible SKU combinations on the back end.

Klaviyo’s native product blocks couldn’t reconstruct those custom bundles inside the email. Instead of seeing the exact routine they’d purchased at the correct price, customers saw a generic treatment or a list of standalone products, making it harder to quickly restock what was already working for them.

To boost production capacity and realize the full revenue potential of her email program, Carlie needed a purpose-built email personalization platform.

When the company’s Head of Website and Innovation recommended Zembula, Carlie immediately saw how it could solve both the bundle and personalization bottlenecks her team was facing.

“Our lean team’s production capacity just could not support the kind of email personalization that the DTC skincare industry demands.” — Carlie Campbell

Solution

A dynamic, always-on personalization layer for the full email lifecycle with Zembula Dimensions™

Onboarding was high-touch and collaborative. After building an integration with Shopify, Klaviyo, and LoyaltyLion, the Zembula team sprang to action. They gathered pricing, loyalty details, product imagery, and esmi’s style guide, then quickly delivered tailored designs for Carlie’s team to review.

The result was the Smart Banner™ and Smart Kicker™: two pixel-perfect, personalized email content blocks that bookend every one of esmi’s daily batch emails.

At open time, Zembula’s Composition Engine evaluates the recipient’s browse behavior, purchase history, and loyalty status, then renders the most strategic content in both placements.

Best of all, Carlie’s team only had to upload the Zembula code to their master email template once, and they’d unlocked endless personalization.

Real-time loyalty content across 100% of broadcast email volume

With Smart Banners™ and Smart Kickers™ bookending daily batch emails, every send is now a loyalty engagement opportunity.

Today, Carlie’s team relies on the always-on Composition Engine to deploy a full library of personalized email content use cases. Sometimes emails remind customers of their tier status or points; other times, they highlight unredeemed promotions. But every time, they draw on real-time browsing and cart data to decide which products and loyalty nudges to show.

In key flows like abandonment, Zembula even pulls the customer’s first name into the imagery, making the experience feel highly targeted.

“Zembula finds the most beautiful and personal way to tell customers they can get $30 off their favorite hyaluronic hydrating serum.” — Carlie Campbell

In fact, the loyalty content has become some of the strongest-performing content in esmi’s email program, with an average CTC of 19.2%. That’s 7.7x higher than the retail email industry average of 2.5%.

Replenishment flows for every skincare routine

The BAU win gave Carlie the confidence to use Zembula for esmi’s customized triggered flows, too, starting with a revitalized replenishment flow.

This dynamic block, a product recommendation email module embedded directly into their existing replenishment template, is automatically tailored to each subscriber’s skincare routine. The recipient can see the exact bundle they purchased last time, even when that bundle is drawn from thousands of possible SKU combinations, and then rebuild their cart with a single click.

According to Carlie, this turned replenishment from an untapped revenue opportunity into a flow that consistently brings customers back.

Zembula is now the personalization layer across all of esmi’s key flows, such as welcome, abandonment, loyalty, and birthday. And each email is brought to life with on-brand modules that remind customers where they’re at with esmi and entice them to their favorite hero products. It’s the kind of deep, end-to-end personalization that Carlie always aspired to give esmi’s customers: an experience that stands out in a Promotions tab full of generic sends.

Ongoing, iterative partner support

While Zembula’s “set-it-and-forget-it” workflow means Carlie’s team doesn’t touch the platform most days, they can refine and iterate as much as they need.

From monthly content refreshes to full-scale rebrands, Zembula brainstorms with the team on every font change, tone-of-voice shift, and image update.

Together, they’ve built an active iteration and testing rhythm: Zembula handles QA on new designs and logic changes before sending updated code back to Carlie’s team, so every refresh and rebrand goes out fully vetted.

“Zembula rebuilt our entire email personalization program from the ground up.” — Carlie Campbell

Results

esmi scales email personalization by 5.8x with Zembula

With Zembula, esmi deploys email personalization at a level their lean CRM team couldn’t have supported manually, opening up a whole new revenue stream with minimal production burden.

The results speak for themselves:

• CTC rates 5.8x above retail email industry benchmarks
• ~2.5% of annual revenue attributed to Zembula-powered emails
• 100% of BAU and lifecycle sends personalized with Zembula

At 3+ years into the partnership, Carlie is excited to test new use cases with Zembula, especially as the team gears up for upcoming launches, including one tailored for sensitive skin.

“The Zembula team has already seen us through multiple launches and a couple of rebrands.” — Carlie Campbell

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