Guide to Turn Beauty Brand Experiences Into A Revenue-Making Machine

The past two years have taught us a great deal about the art of brand experiences. Customers have learned that they were not just about the environments they took place within. It has all become about people, their needs, and expectations. It means offering personalization and valuable, connected experiences across all brand touchpoints and augmenting customers’ lives to make life more meaningful, delightful, and exciting.

Today, businesses face a new imperative: reenvision operations and their brand experience to drive revenue without more resources or taking more risks. This requires a new approach to delivering consistent and on-brand customer experiences that drive business growth and boost customer loyalty for beauty brands and retailers. 

But, how to optimize efforts and turn your beauty experience into a revenue making machine?

1. Establish Your Digital Roadmap

With a long-term digital roadmap, defining strategic, measurable objectives is pivotal to driving customer engagement and revenue. While most beauty brands are winning the digital transformation battle and getting lots of things right, the ability to maintain a holistic digital roadmap that drives revenue growth remains a challenge for many businesses. 

While specific to each brand’s journey and current level of digital maturity, here are some fundamental principles every brand should take into consideration to be digitally ready for the new normal: 

• Smooth, memorable, streamlined brand experiences: Living up to consumer expectations based on what you do and say today and the experiences you provide can help you consistently stage a brand experience that delivers on the promise and allows your customers to be one click away from the purchase.
• Leverage personalization whenever possible and drive loyalty: Integrate technology and solutions to serve consumers’ individual needs best. Drive loyalty by leveraging the power of data to understand customer behavior and incentivize actions 
• Integrate existing technologies and harness their collective power: the only way growth will scale is through a well-orchestrated and powerful technology-driven brand experience.

2. Leverage the Right Beauty Technology Solutions

As the beauty industry is constantly changing, brands and retailers have to consistently keep a finger on the pulse of customers’ needs. Therefore, brands are now adopting augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, and machine learning to enhance category experiences for the digitally savvy consumer. 

With most beauty brands today having a virtual try-on application in some shape or form, the ability to understand the purpose and needs’ technology-enablers serve has become critical in driving your business forward. And if done right, these innovative technologies can help eliminate inefficiencies, speed up production lines, increase customer engagement and conversion rate, and, most importantly, increase ROI.

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3. Get to Know Your Customers Through Personalization

The primary focus of every business is to put customers at the center of everything it does. In an era where customers have become savvier, a brand has to provide a 360-degree seamless experience that makes customers feel privileged and gives them the royal treatment to always choose your brand over your competitors. 

Engaging and delighting customers by demonstrating that brands put their needs first with proactive actions and personalized care is the best way to build long-term customer value.

Using AI and data analysis to engage shoppers with a targeted approach, brands have successfully drilled down consumer interests, personal information, and spending habits. If executed properly, personalization encourages consumers to return for more while keeping the brand top of mind.

4. Understand Your Business Metrics

Consumers like to know who they are buying from and what they offer to them. According to Forbes, 87% of customers who say they had a great customer experience will likely return to make another purchase from a brand, compared to 18% of customers who had a poor experience. Those brands that come out on top are the ones that know how to measure the brand experience precisely, manage it creatively and effectively, and ultimately maximize it. Reviewing key performance indicators and metrics can measure the value of your brand experience. 

For instance, delivering a seamless experience that draws consumers to a brand's website helps push higher conversion rates. By embracing beauty technology like AR and AI, brands can enhance their online beauty shopping experiences through interactive virtual try-on and personalized product matching solutions that drive business, with a proven 2-3x increase in conversions compared to traditional shopping online.

Also, AI-powered product recommendations are an effective way to personalize the customer experience and increase its AOV. They help target a wide range of consumers, assist in quickly discovering relevant products, and encourage them to purchase additional items. 

Moreover, an AI/AR-powered customer experience helps visitors spend more time on your website as they engage with more interactive content and a personalized approach when shopping. For example, during the 2021 holiday season, our partner's overall website revenue was 1.3x higher, and conversion rates were 1x higher using Revieve solutions.

5. Maximize Your ROI With the Right Data

With rising data privacy concerns and legislation that cookies are on their way out, brands are now switching to more viable alternatives. Beauty brands and retailers are turning from third-party cookies to zero-party data and first-party data — both are collected directly from customers but differ in who owns it and how it is collected and used. 

The beauty of collecting data is that it's ideally suited for brands' personalization efforts. For instance, brands and retailers can leverage the data for granular consumer segmentation, leading to precision targeting, better retention, and decreased customer acquisition costs. 

Companies like Revieve help beauty brands, and retailers collect and evaluate actionable real-time data about their customers, thus keeping a higher share of customers at a lower cost across channels and all locations. 

"We grew by staying focused on one goal - to help brands and retailers deliver a more valuable digital experience that provides more value to the consumer at each stage of their journey to drive sales and retain loyalty. Experiences, powered by Revieve, help them collect valuable data that can only be derived by asking consumers for their preferences. That has consistently proved higher ROI for every partner we work with," says Sampo Parkkinen, Founder & CEO at Revieve. 

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6. Review and Optimize Your Efforts

The beautiful thing about your brand experiences is that there is no ceiling on how far you can push the experiential bar in pursuit of deepening relationships with your target audience. And ultimately, anything you can do to maximize it will boost your bottom line.

But, when partnering with beauty technology companies, make sure they support your business from end to end by making solution optimization part of your journey.

At Revieve, we discovered a gap in the market: beauty brands and retailers are left on their own to implement and optimize beauty technology experiences. That gap inspired us to craft a complete end-to-end offering built around the pain points of brands and retailers looking to personalize their customer journey to help them make the most out of this massive investment.

Through it, Revieve has been able to help beauty brands and retailers achieve more significant business results with the frequent optimization of their solutions. Revieve's Partner Success Team and its 90-day Partnership Programme, Revieve ensures that its partners' solution is successfully activated, closely monitored, reviewed, and adapted based on analytics and best practices. 

Beauty tech is a journey that must have a natural fit into your overall digital strategy. It's a long road from being perceived as gimmicky solutions to becoming enterprise-grade solutions that help you achieve business goals. Beauty tech is a golden bullet if it's an integral part of your digital roadmap that taps into all consumer verticals and, thus, benefits all departments, including marketing, digital, merchandising, and sales, to name a few.

And as we look ahead, brands have a tremendous opportunity to reimagine the brand experience to boost both engagement and, as a result, revenue. With a foundation of consistency across the brand and its efforts, they can ensure seamless customer experiences, free up time to focus on growth initiatives, and build resilience that leads to long-term results.

Contact us here to know more about how we ensure your brand contributes to generating more revenue, expanding relationships with existing customers, and delivering on the company’s growth requirements.

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