The Beauty Shopping Experience has become evermore and increasingly digital, something that can be observed online as well as in-store. Digitally enhancing the beauty shopping experience can also mean a large number of different things, and it’s hard to pin down what a digital shopping experience really stands for. Is the very act of shopping online a digital shopping experience? Yes, of course. Does digitally enhancing the beauty shopping experience also mean more than that? Also, yes. Here are our top 3 ways that the beauty shopping experience can be digitally enhanced:
1) Skin Diagnostic Tools
These tools encompass everything from an in-store digital consultation, like No.7’s colour picker, which zaps your face with a little machine and tells you what shade in their collection best suits you, to selfie-based technology that promises to analyse your skin and so find and address problems. This is especially useful to those who might have trouble vocalising their skin troubles, though it’s not currently very useful for anything beyond facial skin, so limiting its scope. Skin diagnostic tools also include devices like L’Oreal’s ‘My Skin Track pH’ which captures small amounts of sweat from skin pores to give an accurate acidity reading, provided of course you’re happy wearing the device and making it a part of your daily routine. At this point the diagnostic even stops being visual and the beauty shopping experience is digitally enhanced by measuring something that the vast majority of people aren’t even aware of or don’t think about.
2) Augmented Reality
When it comes to digitising the beauty shopping experience, augmented reality has become a very large talking point. It’s also one of the more immediate forms of digitally enhancing the beauty shopping experience, designed in such a way that it can be used for advertising, especially across forms of social media like Instagram or Snapchat. An example of this would be Dior’s recent augmented reality makeup filter, used as advertising, and using essentially the shame technology that gives you puppy ears in your selfies. Augmented reality can be more serious than that too, something that can be specifically used by those who go looking for it. This includes digital makeup mirrors, which are increasingly gaining traction for use in-store as well as online.
3) Personalised Beauty Recommendations
When someone goes to buy beauty products online or in-store they are overwhelmed by having too many choices. One way of solving this dilemma is by offering a personalised quiz that removes choice paralysis for customers. This provided them with their personalised matches while also helping them find personalised complementary products, saving the customers time and helping brands and retailers increase ROI as well as enhancing the customer beauty shopping experience. This also works in-store and online by creating a digital profile of the customer and adapting everything from landing pages to personalised, targeted emails. In this way, the beauty shopping experience is made more efficient, faster and does away with the unwanted series of products that can be considered both irrelevant to the customer (so they are far less likely to buy) and generally annoying to their customer experience. My Beauty Matches is an example of a website currently doing this on a large scale.
Beauty Matching Engine offers AI-powered beauty personalisation technology to diverse beauty brands and cosmetics retailers. Contact us for a demo and learn more.