Taking Beauty Market Share With a Personalized Approach
As beauty and wellness brands continue to micro-target shoppers online, research from e-commerce solution provider Scalefast reveals that generational cohorts continue to diverge in terms of shopping habits and attitudes.
According to Scalefast, three times as many younger consumers (age 18-34) have shopped regularly from a direct-to-consumer brand (13 percent) compared to those above 55 (3 percent). While the data shows the fast growth of d-to-c by branded manufacturers and digitally native brands over the last several years, there continues to be a massive multigenerational opportunity to increase market share.
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In the latest WWD-produced webinar, Amadine Soares, vice president of products at Scalefast; Jennifer Walsh, founder of Beauty Bar, and Mina Zandbar, vice president of e-commerce and digital strategy at Wella Company, joined WWD Eye and beauty reporter Ryma Chikoune in sharing insights into strategic marketing to bolster e-commerce beauty sales by creating optimized campaigns that drive traffic and boost conversions.
Scalefast works with brands across industries to focus on a company’s e-commerce strategy so that products remain at the core of a business.
In fact, Soares said, in the same way, that brands are hyper-focused on delivering high-quality products, “Scalefast is hyper-focused on optimizing e-commerce and each element of e-commerce [including] automating the platform, optimizing payments, increasing authorization rates, anti-fraud, optimizing the user experience the consumer journey, and increasing conversion and retention.” Put simply, she said, Scalefast allows brands to focus on their core product, while it focuses on its e-commerce.
In effect, Scalefast can help brands elevate e-commerce in many ways, understanding that one solution does not fit all. One solution is to help a company with its direct consumer channel which can launch in just a few weeks with the company’s look and feel, be multiterritory, multibrand and offer local languages and currency to consumers. Another solution is to help a brand with specialty stores, which caters to a sort of flash sale in a limited time frame. But Scalefast can also help brands control its third-party marketplaces, such as Amazon, Walmart and Target.
Meanwhile, she said, Scalefast’s tools also allow brands to do online personalization segmenting of its audience, making sure that consumers see what the brand wants them to see according to what they like most.
In terms of generational differences, Scalefast’s recent data has found that beauty brands have great opportunities when they strategically segment their audience. In its consumer survey taken in the second quarter of 2021, younger consumers were found twice as likely to have shopped with branded manufactures compared to those over age 55 while also reporting they are more willing to try new digitally native d-to-c brands.
At the same time, younger consumers were found half as likely to have recently bought beauty through a subscription service as those over 55. Notably, young consumers were also less inclined to shop through traditional retail stores, saying they prefer to go direct to the brand.
Across all solutions, Soares told WWD, Scalefast is very consumer-centric. In fact, its e-commerce analytics tools allow brands to understand exactly what their consumers do from the moment they enter the store — no matter the way a brand has set up its e-commerce — to the time they leave the store.
“It allows them to understand what they’ve seen what they haven’t seen what they were curious about what made them purchase, or what frustrated them,” Soares said. “And this tool is really powerful because it’s added in a couple of minutes and it tracks everything. You don’t need to anticipate anything. You can track everything consumers are doing so that at any time you can go back and improve your store through optimizations, and in a continuous manner.”
As the trend for young consumers continues to shift toward preference this data is helpful as Walsh, Zandbar and Soares agreed winning d-to-c is “all about the content.”
“Because when you’re owning your own journey and your own brand, then you can talk to your consumer, the way you want to talk to them,” Zandbar said. “If you know your customers and their needs, and you own your own journey and the [consumer facing] side of your own business you can talk to them in that language. You’re talking to your customers directly and you own the journey of your customers in your hand.”
FOR MORE WWD BUSINESS NEWS:
Scalefast Data Identifies What Drives Beauty and Wellness Consumers to Try New Products
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