The beauty industry has experienced substantial growth since the emergence of eCommerce. With an annual compounded growth rate of 4.75% worldwide, it’s predicted to exceed $716B by 2025 and $784.6B by 2027 (Common Thread Collective Data). With the rise of online stores, beauty brands have naturally embraced digital marketing strategies, especially email marketing to establish connections with potential customers and nurture them into loyal advocates.
But, how should you precisely employ email marketing, and where should you start? This guide will outline the necessary steps for creating a highly effective email marketing strategy for your beauty business.
Why is email marketing important for beauty brands?
Email marketing is a highly effective tool for beauty brands. It lets them directly reach their target audience and promote their products or services. This is different from social media, where algorithms can limit how many people see a brand’s content. With email, messages land right in subscribers’ inboxes.
What’s more, email marketing helps beauty brands build stronger customer relationships. They can create personalized and tailored emails to their audience’s interests. The brand consistently sending informative and engaging emails builds trust and loyalty, boosting customer retention and lifetime value.
Why should you dive into beauty email marketing? Let’s take a moment to explore some email marketing statistics to understand why:
How to create a successful email marketing strategy for beauty brands
1. Set your email marketing goals
When devising your email marketing plan for beauty products, it’s essential to address these key questions:
- What is the objective of my email campaigns?
- Who is the intended recipient of my emails?
- Where do my subscribers typically engage with my email content?
- How can I effectively monitor my campaign’s performance?
Responding to these inquiries will aid in crafting focused messages that address your audience’s needs and concerns.
2. Build an email list
Fostering a devoted subscriber base is vital for the success of eCommerce brands. Creating enticing newsletter signup forms is essential to expand your beauty brand’s email list.
Let’s explore an example from HudaBeauty:
The full-page popup above incorporates all the essential elements to captivate visitors and transform them into subscribers, ultimately becoming new customers. What makes it work?
- A concise and valuable newsletter signup message that emphasizes the benefits.
- Attractive visuals that beautifully showcase the beauty product.
- A clear and on-brand call to action.
This combination of elements effectively engages visitors and encourages them to join your list.
3. Segment your email subscribers and customers
Indeed 72% of consumers prefer engaging with emails tailored to their interests. Achieving this goal involves segmenting your customer base into smaller groups, and simplifying the process of personalizing content and offers to match their preferences.
Segmenting your audience offers several advantages that become apparent shortly after implementation, including the ability to:
Easily pinpoint the distinct pain points and specific needs of each group.
Create customized messages for each segment, providing solutions that align with their requirements.
Develop targeted marketing strategies to convert subscribers into loyal advocates for your beauty brand.
Now that you grasp these benefits, how do you get started? The most effective method is to perform segmentation during the newsletter signup process. You can request subscribers to provide specific information, such as age, gender, or their areas of interest in product categories.
In the following example, note of how the beauty brand St. Ives guides new subscribers to a dedicated page once they take action.
4. Implement email marketing
Once your email list is prepared, you can decide what to send. Beauty brands typically send emails promoting new products, providing discounts, requesting product reviews, and more.
Now, let’s explore the fundamental beauty email campaigns that are vital for nurturing and converting your subscribers into loyal customers:
Welcome emails
Effective welcome emails should be friendly, visually appealing, and enticing. Remember that your first email significantly shapes subscribers’ opinions about your brand, so create a campaign that covers all the right points to keep them engaged with your emails.
Cart abandonment
Based on a case study, the average cart abandonment rate for online stores is 69.80%. Therefore, it’s crucial to find ways to recover lost revenue.
Upsell & cross-sell
In the cross-sell campaign example above, the brand aims to boost its revenue by suggesting related items, allowing customers to add more products before their order ships.
For a successful upselling campaign, use customer data to identify what potential shoppers are interested in and target them with higher-end versions of products. Additionally, emphasize why premium beauty products are a worthwhile investment, especially when they offer extra benefits compared to their primary counterparts.
Seasonal email campaigns
Remember that eCommerce stores and seasonal marketing go hand in hand. Because beauty products make for timeless gifts, consider crafting holiday emails that can effectively target key holidays for your beauty brand. These holidays include Halloween, Black Friday, Christmas, New Year, and Valentine’s Day.
However, it’s not just about creating a few holiday campaigns and sending a few holiday campaigns to your audience. According to Sitecore’s research, consumers seek experience-based recommendations tailored to their preferences. To excel, you need to create emails that transcend traditional sales pitches and focus on enhancing the customer experience.
Thank you email
Expressing gratitude to your customers is essential, whether it’s for signing up for your emails or being loyal supporters of your brand. You can set up these automated campaigns through your workflow editor to show your appreciation for various actions taken by your customers.
Here are a few examples of thank-you emails you can use for your beauty brand:
- Newsletter: Thank you for signing up.
- Purchase: Thank you for your order.
- Anniversary: Thank you for being part of our family.
- Giveaway: Thank you for entering our giveaway.
- Cart abandonment: Thank you for visiting.
5. Measure email performance
Following the outlined steps will turn email marketing into a reliable method for increasing your beauty brand’s revenue. However, this isn’t the final stage. To complete a successful email marketing strategy in the beauty industry, it’s crucial to assess the performance of your campaigns and make necessary optimizations. You can monitor your campaign’s performance through your email marketing platform’s reporting and analytics features. Here are the key email marketing metrics your beauty brand should keep an eye on:
- Email open rate
- Subscriptions and unsubscribes
- Click-through rate
- Conversions
- Unopened emails
Best practices for the impact of email marketing in the beauty industry
Baudelaire’s email marketing
Baudelaire, a brand specializing in artisan bath and body products, initiated its email marketing journey from the ground up, addressing various challenges such as acquiring new customers, improving customer engagement, and achieving a higher return on investment (ROI).
To tackle these challenges, they established fundamental email flows and a well-organized campaign schedule to expand their subscriber base, cultivate customer loyalty, and boost revenue. .
- The results
Today, Baudelaire derives a significant portion of its revenue, 52%, from email marketing alone.
- Outstanding email campaign
One of Baudelaire’s standout email campaigns focused on promoting a website launch and sweetened the deal by offering a discount. The images below show how they encouraged subscribers to explore the site’s enhancements while shopping.
- A 5.5% click-through rate.
- An impressive 27.3% open rate.
OpulenceMD beauty
OpulenceMD, a premium eye makeup and skincare company specializing in magnetic eyelashes , established itself as a prominent brand by adopting a strategic approach to encourage repeat customers and increase the average order value (AOV).
To tackle this challenge, they implemented tailored post-purchase workflows to target repeat customers effectively Additionally, they introduced upsell/cross-sell, VIP, and membership program workflows to communicate the benefits and enhance customer engagement.
- The result
Since May 2021, they have consistently generated over $40,000 monthly through email marketing alone.
- Top-performing email campaign
Their July 4 flash sale email campaign enabled them to rapidly clear their inventory, resulting in a total revenue of $32.22K. This achievement was made possible by creating a sense of urgency with a limited shopping window and an appealing discount. The campaign delivered impressive results:
- A 2.1% click-through rate
- A notable 14.9% open rate
- Top-performing automated workflow
Their welcome series included a personalized letter from the founder. Drawing from their experience, they understood that founder’s letters tend to generate high open rates. This welcome series generated a total revenue of $23.85K for the client, along with:
- A 7.9% click-through rate
- An impressive 37% open rate
Conclusion
Email marketing is a profitable channel used by most beauty businesses to attract, nurture, and convert their target audience.
Upon completing this guide, you should better understand the essential steps to advance your beauty brand.
If you need an outstanding solution, contact us to get started with IMP.
*References: Smart Bug Media, Moosend, Send Lane, Secomm.
