Sephora changes the face of personalised beauty with Salesforce

With a culture of innovation and mountains of insights gleaned from its loyalty program, Sephora has positioned itself to lead the way in creating unique and personalised customer experiences. What it needed was a platform which would allow it to bring together all of its data and best of breed solutions to deliver those experiences in a seamless way.

“Salesforce presented a winning proposition as it offered a powerful engine for marketing as well as the opportunity to plug in different solutions from the AppExchange,” said Gaultier. “It also supported our omnichannel view of the customer and desire to align the online and offline experience. So if a customer goes to our APP to book an in-store service, the experience they have within the APP is carried all the way through their appointment in store.”

Sephora is now using Marketing Cloud to deepen customer engagement while improving the efficiency of campaigns through greater automation. Using Email Studio and Journey Builder, for example, Sephora is able to better leverage its huge repository of content and build personalised journeys based on customer actions and personas. With Marketing Cloud’s Transactional Messaging API, the company is also able to trigger operational email sends, like order confirmations.

Sephora is also using Advertising Studio to reach its ideal customers via channels like Facebook and Google and ensure it’s optimising return on advertising spend.

All of these capabilities and Salesforce integration with apps like Facebook, Google Analytics and Snapchat help the marketing team to orchestrate these journeys with ease and give Sephora a 360 degree view of its customers — no matter which channel they choose to interact on.

“We’ve built a strong cloud technology stack and Salesforce provides the integration and intelligence to make it all work together and ensure we’re sending out the right message at the right time on the right channel,” said Shyam Ramasubramanian Sandilya, Director, Channels and Marketing Technology at Sephora.

The early results from the use of Salesforce are promising. Measures like open rates are trending in the right direction and Sephora has experienced success with cart abandonment and back in stock journeys. At the same time, the company’s KPIs are more aligned to the overall customer experience and continuing to unearth the wow. This will ultimately drive engagement and create a positive impact for Sephora’s brand partners who trust the company to deliver a seamless experience on behalf of their brands.

Salesforce integration with other technologies in Sephora’s stack is another long term measure of success. Sephora has engaged experts from the Salesforce Customer Success team to make these integrations work seamlessly, and have benefitted from hands-on support in getting their architecture right. The Sephora team is also now expanding its use of Salesforce into a new market it’s launching.

“The ability for us to integrate everything onto the Salesforce platform is really critical to our success, but it’s also super ambitious. So it has been very important to have the Salesforce Customer Success team completely aligned on what we want to deliver,”  said Sandilya. “They have provided valuable guidance and architectural support, and are helping us to build a centre of excellence within Sephora.

“With our skilled internal team and the continued help of the Customer Success team, we have the right conditions in place to achieve great things on the Salesforce platform,” Sandilya continued.

Gaultier is also positive about where the partnership with Salesforce is headed. “I’m really passionate about our brand and the customer experience and fostering that emotional connection for customers when they see the Sephora APP, walk by a store or see a customer with a Sephora bag. By using Salesforce to create journeys that are really personal we can get closer to our customers and achieve that emotional connection.”