An iconic beauty brand raised its ROI substantially by rolling out a wide range of personalization scenarios and a messaging strategy at speed.
Sephora, the iconic beauty retailer, built a genuinely individual shopping experience across the whole customer journey, helping shoppers find the products they need without friction. To do it, the brand launched 82 personalization scenarios in the first six months of working with Dynamic Yield — including fine-tuned product recommendations, home page personalization and behaviour-based messaging. Sephora SEA got a sixfold ROI from product recommendations alone.
With Dynamic Yield, Sephora customers can easily
find the right products for their needs. Personalization
sits at the heart of our e-commerce strategy, and the
partnership with Dynamic Yield lets us build a genuinely
individual shopping experience across every customer
touchpoint.
How it was done
Sephora started by adding recommendations to the empty search results page, to pull visitors back into shopping. The recommendations were built from each user’s on-site behaviour. The strategy paid off, showing a significant lift against the control group and a 30% increase in add-to-carts on repeat visits across every market.
Next, Sephora focused on optimizing personal recommendations on the product page across eight markets in Asia, using three different strategies: similar products, complementary products and automatic recommendations. Machine learning algorithms picked the most effective strategy for each market individually, based on add-to-cart and completed-order data. The recommendation engines lifted CTR by more than 4%, which ultimately produced $6.5 of revenue for every $1 spent on Dynamic Yield.
Recommendation blocks
Sephora then optimized its loyalty programme sign-up messaging, testing two variants (for users who were not yet club members) against subscriptions and revenue per session. The experience was later adapted market by market, with traffic redirected to the winning variant. In markets where the results were mixed, automatic optimization was used to secure the best outcome.
Loyalty programme sign-up forms (different variants)
Finally, Sephora built a distinct experience to reduce the bounce rate on the store selection page, using targeted banners with popular content such as gift cards, bestsellers and loyalty programme information. That produced more clicks on products and on the loyalty programme page, and higher engagement overall.
Banner on the store selection page
Results
82
personalization scenarios built with Dynamic Yield
6x ROI
from rolling out personal recommendations
100%
of site traffic covered by Dynamic Yield recommendations
