Buyer retention is an attractive factor.

But it surely doesn’t occur with out an ongoing funding in personalised buyer experiences, mentioned Ekta Chopra, chief digital officer at cosmetics model e.l.f.

“We’re not simply attempting to achieve our present prospects,” Chopra mentioned. “We’re trying to construct long-term relationships with new ones.”

E.l.f.’s essential mechanism to attract individuals in and maintain them round is its loyalty program, with greater than 2.7 million members. However there’s solely a lot a model can do to maximise the worth of a loyalty program as a retention car with out well-organized buyer knowledge.

“Members come from completely different locations, they’ve completely different preferences and the information even lives in several methods,” Chopra mentioned. “We’ve constructed our personal homegrown methods to try to accommodate this, however as the information grows it turns into not possible to take care of.”

Function fashions

The problem grew to become extra acute throughout the lockdown stage of the pandemic, when e.l.f., which hasn’t had a brick-and-mortar presence since 2019, noticed a greater than 60% spike in new prospects visiting its web site and making purchases.

E.l.f. employed a head of CRM and buyer development in July 2020, Shiseido vet Brigitte Baron, then gave her a workforce and empowered her to start out kicking the tires on buyer knowledge platforms. RFPs had been despatched to the standard CDP suspects, together with Salesforce – e.l.f. is a long-time Salesforce buyer – however a number of the responses had been disappointing.

What sure CDPs hyped as their “secret sauce” felt extra like a black field to e.l.f., Chopra mentioned.

“They wouldn’t share their algorithms or fashions with us,” she mentioned. “However we need to construct our personal fashions and we need to know the way a associate does what it does.”

E.l.f. finally alighted on ActionIQ as its CDP associate, largely due to its knowledge modeling capabilities. After centralizing its first-party buyer loyalty knowledge inside ActionIQ, e.l.f. was in a position to white label ActionIQ’s predictive fashions and use the fashions it had constructed itself off of the platform.

“Now we have a enterprise workforce that wants to have the ability to do issues on their very own and never need to continually ask the information workforce to drag stuff collectively for us,” Chopra mentioned. “Some platforms have these superb technical methods to carry knowledge collectively, however that’s not useful to us except the facility may be put within the fingers of the marketer.”

Look-alikes wanting good

One in every of e.l.f.’s first orders of enterprise was to develop a retention technique for brand spanking new prospects who got here to its web site organically throughout the first yr of COVID.

“These individuals had been spending some huge cash, however we wanted to entice them to stick with us,” Chopra mentioned. To do this, she mentioned the manufacturers want knowledge to customise e mail and paid media and to construct look-alike fashions.

For instance, e.l.f.’s essential enterprise is colour cosmetics, but it surely additionally has a nascent skincare line.

Utilizing ActionIQ, e.l.f. can get a greater understanding of who involves its web site and the actions they take so it could actually ship extra personalised buyer journeys and apply fashions to foretell conduct. Is that this somebody’s first or second go to to the location, for example? Is the particular person shopping for colour or skincare, and if the reply is skincare, how possible are they to come back again and purchase the identical product or a complementary product? Does providing a pattern assist?

“Having the ability to reply these questions helps us inform our engagement methods via e mail, textual content and push. It helps us attain these audiences on paid channels and it lets us present a personalised expertise when individuals come again to the location,” Chopra mentioned.

Going deeper

However e.l.f. additionally brings extra subtle knowledge sources into the platform, mentioned Tamara Gruzbarg, VP of strategic companies at ActionIQ.

Customer support logs are a very good instance.

“This lets you perceive the expertise throughout all contact factors, not simply from the advertising or shopping for perspective and even simply based mostly on the solutions you get again whenever you promote a survey,” Gruzbarg mentioned.

Customer support data is the actual deal, as a result of it’s “proactive engagement from the shopper, together with the explanation they referred to as in, how the decision was dealt with, the result and, importantly, how all of these issues impacted their future lifetime worth,” Gruzbarg mentioned.

Now that e.l.f. has its knowledge basis in place – “Yr One was all about getting our knowledge sources collectively and getting individuals internally to start out utilizing it,” Chopra mentioned – the following step is to seek out and add new knowledge sources that enrich what it’s already received, together with each third-party knowledge and demographic knowledge.

And a few knowledge sources, like on-line quizzes, for instance, may even serve double responsibility as a knowledge supply and a real-time engagement tactic, Chopra mentioned.

“‘Personalization’ has change into a buzzword, however that’s what we need to do,” Chopra mentioned. “And that’s true whether or not it’s a part of our advertising technique or whether or not we’re bringing this type of data into our thought course of as we construct and check new merchandise, which is one thing we’ve now began to do.”