Returning from our BeautyTech Dinner, which took place on 20 June, we are back with some insights beauty industry experts provided on how they are harnessing data to improve their ROI.
The highlighted attendees included Global Brand Building Vice President of Coty, CMO of Feelunique, Head of L'Oreal Luxe CRM, CEO of ByTerry, Global E-commerce Director of Unilever, Head of Digital La Mer, Head of Digital Rodial, Chairman of Brand Alley, Head of Beauty House of Fraser, Head of Beauty Marketing at M&S and more.
During the dinner, brands and retailers contributed to the discussion by recounting their personal experiences of using data by answering the following questions:
- What do you want to achieve using Data?
- What are the biggest challenges to doing this?
- What have been your past data-driven successes? Biggest learnings from them?
What do you want to achieve using Data?
Around the table, it was commonly argued that the use of data at the various organisations is aimed at getting to know their customer better, allowing them to retarget their customers by providing them with a more personalised experience, for example, through targeted advertising such as programmatic ads. It was also stated data is scraped from other sources to have more comparative data about own branded products from different channels.
Furthermore, it was mentioned that they are able to easily identify and keep a record of customers that know what they want. However, it is difficult for them to portray the type of customers who are not finalising their purchases, and they are willing to learn how a better understanding of data can help with this matter. Data allows you to spot your VIP customers to 'treat them' with exciting offers and loyalty programmes, but in order to know what non-converting customers are looking for, they need to return several times to your site. The collection of data sometimes does not necessarily provide intuitive information, in cases where consumer behaviour is not clear enough. This is why, apart from having the necessary technological tools to collect data, time is key in providing rich, and discerning information.
What are the biggest challenges to doing this?
Moreover, retailers and brands found that the greatest challenges to harnessing data to improve ROI was that they are currently at the disposal of massive amounts of data however, most of them fail to know what to actually do with it, or how to analyse it. For instance, they might have data coming in to their server from different sources, yet, these two different fountains of information cannot be compared or correlated, so the data loses its value and becomes insignificant.
Additionally, the vast amount of data that brands and retailers have access to make it difficult to funnel through the information and decide what is relevant for analysis. All the beauty companies at the dinner agreed that even though they are keen to maximise the value of the data they currently hold, managing the analysis of such vast amounts that websites with certain traffic provide, limit their abilities to make use of it.Personalisation was also a main topic discussed as a challenge, because many beauty companies feel that there is opportunity to exploit their data to provide a more customised experience, yet, it is a challenge to develop it in house, as they lack the amount of capital and technical efforts required.
What have been your past data-driven successes? Biggest learnings from them?
Finally, in terms of past driven successes and learnings, there were certain common areas which were raised around the table. Many of the brands and retailers had started re-targeting email campaigns through data provided by the customer profile on their sites. However, their learnings suggested that the opening rate of emails was not really high. Therefore, re-targeting via email requires knowing specifically each type of customer, in order to send personalised emails to each of them and achieve an increase in the rate of opened emails. Furthermore, another point that came out quite often, was that loyal customers, who consider themselves VIP, demand from beauty brands and retailers to be treated as special. This does not mean sending advertisements of discounted products, because they actually would pay the full price for it, but instead, they expect for brands and retailers to apply Beauty AI predictability tools, for them to know in advance what their customers are interested in.
This leads us to the main theme discussed throughout our blog surrounding the topic of beauty personalisation and AI: What is its potential to enhance your customers' journey?
Discover our view in our next blog post!
