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Benefit Cosmetics' Marketing Triumph With Bloomreach Engagement
Benefit Cosmetics is the No.1 Prestige Makeup Brand in the UK and No.1 Brow Brand Worldwide and is synonymous with fun, instant beauty solutions. Boasting some of the most loved and iconic beauty staples such as Hoola Bronzer, BADGal Bang Mascara, Precisely My Brow Pencil, Gimme Brow+, and Porefessional Primer dominating makeup bags up and down the country.
Founded in 1976, by twin sisters Jean and Jane, the beauty brand is one of the fastest growing prestige beauty brands in the business with locations in 59 countries across five continents. With more than 3,000 Brow Bars with over 6,000 aestheticians worldwide, Benefit has become the brow destination for both product and service. Benefit is part of the world's leading luxury products group, LVMH.
The Challenge: Navigating Success in a Competitive Cosmetics Market
Benefit Cosmetics is the No.1 prestige blush brand in the United Kingdom*. So when the company decided to discontinue its previous range of blushes and launch an entirely new range of products, it needed a marketing campaign worthy of the quality products it was releasing to its loyal customers.
Benefit tapped into the partnership between Bloomreach and Mailgun by Sinch and capitalized by orchestrating a top notch omnichannel campaign. With Bloomreach utilizing Mailgun by Sinch’s powerful email infrastructure and APIs, customers send an overage weekday volume of over one billion messages, all while 99% of those messages are attempted to deliver in 40 seconds or less. This high throughput capability supported Bloomreach and Benefit in its omnichannel campaigns.
We are always looking to drive launch awareness, recruit new customers, and support our D2C site through our CRM capabilities and the campaign has definitely been a great success for Benefit. With the dashboard and analytics we have access to, as well as the reports and segmentations we can create, Bloomreach has helped us see the products that are performing best so we can optimize accordingly. Because of that, we’ve seen all of our blush sales skyrocketing versus what we saw a few months prior.
Amy Del Pizzo
The Solution: Empowering Benefit Cosmetics' Marketing Triumph
Benefit Cosmetics used Bloomreach Engagement to successfully deploy its incredible “Blush Launch” omnichannel campaign, which combined email, lead generation, and weblayers. Email marketing played a critical role in moving customers forward in their journey with Benefit after acquisition through other channels.
The Benefit Cosmetics marketing campaign was split into three sections: pre-launch, launch, and post-launch. Each section had different objectives (driving launch awareness, recruiting new customers, supporting sell-through) and communications were sent using Bloomreach Engagement to help accomplish these goals.
Benefit Cosmetics heavily segmented its customer audiences, splitting them up into previous buyers, VIPs, and customers who opted in for the waitlist (in exchange for an exclusive promotional gift with purchase offer and access to the new launch before other customers). Four pre-launch emails were sent to set the scene for the campaign, drive excitement for the new launch, and push people to sign up for the waitlist.
The customers who signed up for the waitlist then entered a short countdown workflow. Emails sent to those customers had an incredible 10.10% average click-through rate overall — a direct result of Benefit’s efforts and the real-time segmentation capabilities of Bloomreach Engagement.
When the campaign launched, Benefit’s creative marketing mindset and incredible products, combined with Bloomreach Engagement’s customer journey orchestration, proved to be the backbone of the campaign. Click-through rates on Blush Launch emails were 50% higher than the average Benefit campaign this year.
Benefit’s marketers were able to understand their customers’ journeys through Bloomreach Engagement and use those insights to inform and execute the next action of their campaign. They also reported on the end-to-end success of their launch across channels using the custom reporting and analytics tools within the platform rather than relying on complex business analytics tools or Microsoft Excel.
Ultimately, Benefit was able to attribute leads and orders to the right channels thanks to an all-in-one platform, and could make an educated decision on where to invest to optimize future campaigns.
The Results: Benefit Cosmetics' Success Metrics
Overall, the Blush Launch campaign’s metrics were overwhelmingly positive for Benefit.
The main highlight was Benefit’s click-through rate on Blush Launch emails, which were 1.7 percentage points higher than the global retail average. Additionally, Blush Launch emails generated 40% more revenue than similar emails sent by Benefit this year.
“The dashboards and ability to create reports were really handy for us,” Del Pizzo said. “We were able to create reports based on shade and see where each shade ranked in real time, as well as all of our other desired results — in one place.”
*Source: The NPD Group. Unit Division Sales of Total Prestige Blush Segment for 2021, January to December. Please email datarequest@benefitcosmetics.com for more details.
