A few months ago, a friend in the skin care industry turned me on to Sephora. I popped into a store one day around my birthday, and a sales consultant pointed out that I’d get a set of free lip glosses by joining their loyalty program.
It was 2 weeks ago today that I stopped by for the second time, and left with a handful of new products to try. This evening, I received an automated email from Sephora that exemplified many CRM best practices.
For starters, I loved that their system was smart enough to match my in-store purchases with my loyalty account. Secondly, I loved that they pulled all the data – including the very familiar product shots – into the email. Engaged by the personalized content, I decided to review a product – huge score for Sephora!
But it didn’t end there. Having submitted my review, I was met with a thank you screen. But not a basic dead-end thank you screen.
The page included shop CTAs as well as a postscript, prompting me to answer a question about the product reviewed, if I had “a sec”.
So I did. In fact, I answered two. They made it very easy to do, and during the process I found myself more engaged in thinking about skincare and beauty products than I have been in a while. I also became aware of the fact that I can turn to Sephora.com for user-generated Q&A, which might be a reason to return in the future as a shopper.
They emailed me a few hours later to tell me that my reviews had been posted, and I didn’t click through that email. But I’m still very impressed by the way that Sephora paired the customer data they already had with some well-time drivers.
Why Drive Ratings & Reviews with Email Marketing?
Sephora’s model for re-engaging recent customers offers many benefits, including:
- Creating a more engaged customer (me!).
- Increasing the likelihood that I’ll return to Sephora.com.
- Opening a door for another shopping experience when users visit the site.
- Adding user-generated content (UGC) to their site, which creates a more complete and search-optimized web experience for other users.
CRM Best Practice Takeaways
Here are some tactics that I learned from Sephora’s well-designed post-purchase experience.
- Design a timely, automated post-sales experience to re-engage the customer by collecting their feedback.
- Ensure that your systems can match sales transactions back to particular individuals, and develop a content pipeline that leverages the sales data.
- Embed personalized content in emails; familiar images capture the user’s attention.
- Leverage the human characteristic of wanting to help others by asking for help in the form of reviews, and reminding users of the value it provides to others.
- Stick to your brand voice.
- Always consider the next step — how can you keep the user engaged?
- Once a user is engaged in providing content or feedback, provide them an easy way to continue doing so.
- Reuse the customer feedback that you collect to bring value to future prospects.
Have you been successful with a campaign like this one? What do you think about it?
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