Flawless CX: Creating Standout Experiences in the Beauty Space
A look at the composable tools and strategic considerations beauty brands need to make to create lasting omnichannel success.
In 2024, ecommerce sales are forecasted to hit over 6 trillion dollars. Meanwhile, brick-and-mortar stores are evolving: while they still account for 70% of retail sales, they've also evolved into hubs for customer engagement and events. The future isn't ecommerce or the high street alone. Instead, brands have to connect the two, bringing their different sales and marketing channels together seamlessly.
To be successful, they have to get customer attention across all those channels, but as competition grows, ad prices rise, and consumers become more distracted, there’s only one surefire way for companies to stand out: Creating a flawless customer experience.
If you want to reach and retain more customers, you need to offer a unique, hyper-personalized, and omnichannel experience. In other words, a composable customer experience.
With composable commerce, you build up a stack of tools and integrations that’s uniquely tailored for your business, vertical, and target audience. Each piece of tech is chosen for a specific element of the customer journey.
Need to scale fast? Add a component. Need to process information faster? Switch to a new, more efficient tool. Building a composable customer experience means that you always have the best possible tech for each job, rather than using a single platform that does lots of things to a just okay standard. You can scale up and innovate on the fly. And, as new technologies and marketing strategies emerge, you can add them to your customer experience right away.
Building for Beauty
Let’s take the example of a beauty brand that sells products both online through their own storefront, and in-store via a high street retailer.
While this is a typical business model in 2024, it's also a complicated one. Many beauty brands sell through their own direct-to-consumer sites and stores, as well as high street retailers and online stores like Beauty Bay. The challenge is to deliver an amazing customer experience across every single sales channel.
What's more, despite its resilient growth, beauty is a tough industry. The current trend for “premium-ization” means that brands are under pressure to offer high-value products. Consumers also say they enjoy regularly trying new brands and products, so customer loyalty is in short supply. And customers have come to expect hyper-personalized, omnichannel marketing from brands that want their attention.
What does that mean for beauty brands? They’re under pressure to engage consumers on multiple channels, drive customer retention, and scale constantly. The good news is, a composable approach makes it possible to leverage different tools throughout the customer journey to achieve all those goals at once.
Step 1: Engage consumers
The first challenge for our hypothetical beauty brand is to engage consumers. And you don’t just need attention, you also need to know whose attention so you can target them with more relevant messaging.
There are few ways to get consumers' attention. For consumer goods like beauty products, brands often develop interactive experiences or experiential content — whether online, in-store, or on social media. Alternatively, you could focus on value: inviting new customers to try the brand with a free sample, coupon code, or personalized recommendation.
What does all that mean for your tech stack? You'll need an engagement platform that cooperates with all kinds of media, from live experiences to websites and different social networks. Depending on what kind of campaign you plan to run, you'll also need interactive, gamified, and personalizable elements.
You could start the composable customer experience with an engagement tool like Wyng, a MACH Alliance partner. The no-code platform enables marketers to engage audiences, qualify leads, and collect zero-party data with gripping interactive experiences.
We’ve already seen digital retailers use this tactic. The skincare brand L’Oréal UK uses Wyng to run diagnostic quizzes for their customers. Product finders engage consumers, collect valuable preference data for the brand, and deliver immediate value in the form of personalized product recommendations and offers.
Step 2: Drive sales
You’ve engaged customers and learned about their product preferences. You might even have collected email or SMS opt-ins. Next, you need to follow up with more targeted outreach through every channel available.
There are two reasons for this omnichannel approach. First, attribution is notoriously complicated for digital commerce, so it's wise to have a presence across different channels. Second, it's the experience that customers have come to expect. Whether they drop in on your TikTok page, go directly to your website, or walk into a brick-and-mortar store, they expect to have the same brand experience.
The easiest way to nurture a new opt-in and drive a consumer to purchase is to integrate a new component in your tech stack. Tools like Bloomreach can help you build personalized email, web, and mobile campaigns.
Yves Rocher, another skincare brand, uses Bloomreach to create customer profiles based on past interaction data. Bloomreach serves up personalized product links and recommendations that are unique to each customer who visits the website. Result: an eleven-fold increase in purchase rates compared to non-personalized recommendations.
Step 3: Leverage customer loyalty
The composable customer experience doesn’t end after that first purchase. As every marketer knows, it’s more expensive to find new customers than to retain old ones. Once you’ve engaged the customer, personalized your messaging, and closed the sale, you still have to work on retaining them.
Personalization is extremely important at this stage. Research from McKinsey shows that personalized marketing doesn’t just increase purchase rates: it also improves re-purchase rates and recommendations.
So the next element in your composable customer experience is a loyalty platform that can offer responsive, personalized experiences to any number of customers.
With a platform like Voucherify, for example, you can run all kinds of retention campaigns from a single platform, including tiered incentives, discounts on repeat purchases, or rewards for visiting a physical store. With a composable tech stack, you can even integrate promotions and loyalty with interactive experiences from other platforms, like Wyng.
Makeup brand LimeLife by Alcone uses Voucherify to run their LifeLimer loyalty program. Customers can tier up depending on spend, expanding eligibility for special rewards and member benefits.
Step 4: Keep the customer experience going
The best thing about composable commerce is that you can keep bringing tools back in throughout the customer experience.
As part of a Voucherify-powered loyalty program, you could use Wyng to run giveaways to rewards members and acquire new ones. More customer information could be fed back into Bloomreach, creating even more effective personalized outreach.
That’s the beauty of the composable customer experience. It’s agile, fast-moving, and endlessly personalizable. It solves the challenge of creating a good customer experience, while helping digital commerce brands to manage their costs and scale.
It’s a scalable, positive feedback loop that stays with the customer throughout their journey. Done right, it creates a community of dedicated customers who want to shout about your brand.
Jennifer Sego
Director of Marketing, Wyng
Jennifer Sego serves as Director of Marketing for Wyng, leading the execution of the company's marketing strategy to further drive business demand and brand awareness. Jennifer is a passionate marketing professional with over a decade of experience helping companies build impactful brands, communicate differentiated value, and grow high-performing teams.