Luxasia makes beauty personal with omni-channel journeys

Luxasia has built its business on connecting world-class beauty brands with Asian consumers. With its local expertise and extensive distribution capabilities, it’s helped brands such as Burberry, Bulgari and Guerlain achieve success throughout the region. Now after three decades, Luxasia is transforming itself.

Avis Easteal, Regional Head, Consumer at Luxasia, said the business was on a mission to provide unforgettable experiences, tailored to each consumer and brand. “We want to help brands engage in local markets more effectively through the use of technology and an omni-channel approach.

Salesforce is helping Luxasia disrupt the customer experience and making beauty more personal,” said Easteal.

Luxasia has traditionally provided backoffice, instore staffing and logistics services that beauty brands need to launch and grow into Asian markets. While its approach has been successful, Luxasia’s entrepreneurial Chairman, Patrick Chong, had a vision for Luxasia to become the leader in omni-channel and forge more personal connections between brands and their customers.

Following the appointment of Dr Wolfgang Baier as CEO in 2016, the business is now delivering on that vision. It has established a single view of its customers and is using Salesforce Marketing Cloud to create tailored journeys across each brand it represents.

“Our focus is on personalisation. We need to ensure each journey is mapped to the interests of the customer while representing the brand they’ve chosen to engage with,” said Easteal. “The experience one might expect from a luxury skincare brand verses a haircare brand is very different, and we need the journey to reflect that.”

Journeys are also tailored to where each customer is at in the beauty lifecycle, and whether it is their first purchase from a brand or much later. Luxasia knows that the needs of each customer are different and that they are likely to stay with some brands for life while changing others along the way. It strives to maximise engagement and maintain connections for as long as possible. One way it

does this is by triggering journeys that take customers through the depth of a brand’s offering – whether it’s from fragrances to skincare, or cosmetics to hair care.

Easteal said that achieving this level of personalisation across more than one hundred brands would be near impossible without Salesforce. “Using Marketing Cloud, we can design 1:1 journeys quickly and use automation to deliver the right offer to the right customer at the right time. If we were to do this manually, I would need a team of 50, and life would still be really hard.”

Luxasia is not only changing the way brands engage customers online. The industry trailblazer is taking personalisation to a whole new level with a new app built on Heroku. The app extends Luxasia’s single customer view to in-store advisors and helps them deliver exceptional service.

With a quick glance of a customer’s purchase history, advisors can see which products might need to be replenished, or suggest new ones that are part of the same range. They can also seek feedback from customers on their current products and any samples they may have received. It helps advisors understand customers on a deeper level and recommend products they are likely to love.

“We’re not only selling products but emotional connections. We need to know what’s working for customers and what’s not, so that we can recommend products that make them feel great,” said Easteal.

Luxasia’s approach to innovation has put it on the fast path to success. In the last year, it’s not only implemented Marketing Cloud but also launched its e-commerce offering and laid the groundwork to expand its line of boutiques.

“Omni-channel consumer experience is key to the Luxasia strategy. Salesforce enables us to make informed decisions, to test and refine and to improve at pace,” said Baier.