About

Sephora UK, a leading beauty retailer, is part of the global Sephora brand, which operates in 35 markets with more than 3,200 points of sale and over 30 ecommerce sites. After Sephora acquired Feelunique, Sephora UK relaunched in 2022 and has since expanded to 14 retail locations while growing rapidly as an ecommerce-driven business stocking over 300 brands.

The background

The online beauty landscape in the UK is very competitive and heavily promotional. As such, the Sephora UK CRM team sends frequent broadcast emails covering sitewide discounts, rotating category events, and loyalty communications tied to the brand’s tiered rewards program.

Using personalization to drive loyalty is a standing topic of discussion and core business priority. The team is responsible for communicating tier status, rewards eligibility, lapse prevention, and points reminders across the company’s full subscriber base.

Challenge

Implementing email personalization in a high-volume program with a lean team

Emily Brown, CRM Manager at Sephora UK, leads a small team responsible for executing this full program. When Sephora UK relaunched after the Feelunique acquisition, a new loyalty program, a growing retail footprint, and rising expectations intensified the pressure on the CRM team.

Emily and her team had the customer data and the ideas to personalize every send. What they didn’t have was a production path that could keep up with the demand.

The business had a personalization tool, but it was built for ecommerce and on-site experiences, not email. Getting personalized content into a daily batch email required custom code, and every request had to go through the development team.

“We brief requests to the development team, and delivery timelines depend on overall priorities,” Emily says. “Items are usually added to the backlog and scheduled based on strategic importance.”

When no developer was available, a member of the team would attempt their own coding. The process took half a day, sat outside their core responsibilities, and required significant back and forth, with a limited success rate.

The alternative was raw HTML, which technically worked but didn’t match the premium design quality of the rest of Sephora UK’s emails. Much of the personalized email content the team envisioned, like tier nudges, reward reminders, lapse messaging, never made it into the daily batch email. It stayed confined to triggered emails that reached only a fraction of total send volume.

If a customer missed the triggered email, the daily promotional emails that followed offered no reinforcement, an opportunity the team recognized but couldn’t yet act on.

What the team needed was a way to bring lifecycle and loyalty content into every send, not just the triggered touchpoints that few subscribers saw. Ometria, Sephora UK’s ESP, recommended Zembula.

After completing a full-scale loyalty program re-launch, Emily led the evaluation of Zembula and one other UK-based provider. The competing platform was more expensive, less flexible, and relied on rigid templates.

“We would send the email, but we wouldn’t be able to personalize the content the way we wanted to.”

Solution

Pixel-perfect loyalty content in every daily email send with Zembula Dimensions™

Implementation began with the Smart Banner™ and Smart Kicker™, two dynamic image blocks that bookend every daily email with personalization, placed in Sephora UK’s master email template. Zembula handled the bulk of the setup, and the integration with Ometria was seamless: the ESP’s block-based campaign builder accepted the Zembula code directly into an existing HTML block with no further template changes required.

At the moment each email is opened, Zembula’s Composition Engine evaluates the recipient’s data in real time and renders the right personalized content into both placements, without further changes to the email HTML.

Emily made a proactive decision to go live with loyalty and lifecycle use cases first, ahead of a planned cart and browse data integration.

The testing approach

To measure impact cleanly, Emily ran a longitudinal audience test: a 50/50 split where half of Sephora UK’s subscribers saw Zembula’s personalized banners and half did not. Once assigned, subscribers stayed in their group for the full test duration, giving the data time to reflect real purchasing behavior rather than a single campaign’s performance.

The results surprised both teams: the Zembula-enabled audience showed measurable lifts across units per order, revenue per customer, and purchase frequency, even without cart and browse signals. The 0.5% increase in purchase frequency was particularly notable, as the metric can be one of the hardest to move. Once cart and browse data are integrated, Sephora UK is positioned to see even stronger results.

Loyalty in every send

Zembula took the strongest elements of Sephora UK’s loyalty program and put them in front of every subscriber, every send, not just the fraction who opened a triggered email at the right moment.

Now, if a customer is approaching a tier upgrade, nearing a reward threshold, or at risk of lapsing, that message follows them through personalized email content, reinforcing the loyalty touchpoints that triggered emails alone could only deliver once.

Peak campaign production

Sephora UK runs Black Friday as a multi-week event, and the production demands match the scale. The team typically spent a large amount of time building emails featuring multiple products and brand banners, each requiring individual design assets, manual offer updates, and duplicate campaign versions for every audience segment.

With Zembula, Emily provided the designs and offer details once. The platform handled real-time offer updates, personalized brand sequencing based on each customer’s shopping and browsing history, and eliminated the need to rebuild campaigns when promotions changed mid-event. All of the content rendered in Sephora UK’s own fonts and design standards, maintaining the premium visual quality the team needed.

The result was roughly a week of production time recovered, which the team redirected toward content strategy and segmentation instead of rebuilding the same campaign over and over.

That operational shift extended beyond Black Friday. During Sephora UK’s major loyalty sales, the team previously spent extensive time before each event manually inserting promotional banners into triggered campaigns, then more time removing them afterward.

Now they place the Zembula code once and toggle the banner on or off from within the platform: set it and forget it, across every campaign.

A true partnership

Emily also credits the weekly collaboration calls as a differentiator. Zembula’s developer joins every call, so Emily speaks directly to the person doing the build rather than a go-between who relays requests and waits for answers.

For a lean team managing a high-volume program, having a developer available every week meant answers in the room instead of requests in a queue.

“Working with Zembula is a collaboration. They think things through, they use their knowledge, and they question what I’m saying rather than just being yes people.”

Results

Validated results in three weeks, built to scale

By bringing loyalty and lifecycle personalization into the daily batch email, Sephora UK’s CRM team now reinforces tier, rewards, and lapse messaging across every send, reaching subscribers that triggered emails alone could never consistently reach. And, across every single use case, from coupons and loyalty to BFCM, birthday, and rewards, no personalized touchpoint ever dipped below a 5% CTC.

Even in an early test without cart and browse data, the results exceeded expectations:

• 21% click-to-conversion rate across all personalized content types
• Test results that exceeded the team’s expectations, and a partnership built to scale them
• Loyalty, lifecycle, and peak-season personalization deployed across the program

The results have also shifted how the team works. Emily has introduced two additional team members to the platform, and the goal now is for every campaign brief to start with the question of what Zembula can bring to it.

Looking ahead, Sephora UK is preparing to roll out product recommendations through Zembula, a capability the team has already tested and provided feedback on.