How Clarins built a full-funnel customer journey with Tinyclues & Wunderkind
Clarins has been a household name in skincare and beauty since its creation by Jacques Courtin in 1954. In striking a balance between its heritage and its emphasis on ingredient innovation, Clarins continues to develop and optimize a high-quality product selection that is beloved by customers around the world.
Despite its strong brand equity, in recent years Clarins has faced many of the challenges troubling other beauty and luxury retailers. Consumers have moved away from buying and sampling products in-store, choosing instead to browse and buy online. The beauty and skincare space continues to fragment due to the entrance of newer niche brands, and consumers seek out marketplaces for label variety and convenience.
It was against this backdrop that Clarins sought out the help of Tinyclues and Wunderkind, to help tackle some of these pressing issues – and to build a high-performing, full-funnel online customer journey, all the way from inspiration through to conversion.
Challenge 1: Top of funnel
Grow your customer database and recruit new website visitors
Like other online retailers, Clarins saw a dip in their addressable database after GDPR officially took effect in May 2018, and were faced with the challenge of rebuilding. Given that most visitors landing on a retailer’s website won’t convert – and even fewer if they’re first-time shoppers – Clarins wanted to add these prospects to their email list so they could nurture the relationship over time.
Using Wunderkind’s Identity Network technology, Clarins was able to identify a larger portion of their site traffic down to an email address. In just 6 months, they were able to add 68,000 (5x) email subscribers to their CRM, using behavioral intent signals to spot the perfect moment to present visitors with personalized, targeted overlays for email capture – for example, with a prompt to ‘send products to email/save for later’.
Challenge 2: Mid-funnel
Build the best audience within your existing customer database
Tinyclues is a CRM Marketing Technology Company that enables marketers to deliver on their business goals through marketing that puts customers first. Tinyclues uses deep learning to precisely predict buying intent for offerings down to the SKU level. Clarins’ marketing team uses Tinyclues to leverage their 360° customer data and build the most relevant audience on the fly – using advanced segmentation to send targeted email campaigns via Clarins’ Marketing Cloud.
One great example of this approach in action was the launch of Clarins’ Spa at Home collection for the festive season. The marketing team needed to identify, within their customer database, the customers that would be most interested in this specific Christmas offer – without ‘spamming’ those who didn’t fit this profile.
By deploying Tinyclues’ data-rich audience-building and targeting capabilities, Clarins was able to focus its outreach on only the most qualified customers – and saw an 83%+ increase in conversion rate as a result, compared with in-house segmentation.
Challenge 3: Mid-funnel
Orchestrate multiple campaigns to optimize customer engagement
Around the time of Clarins’ Spa at Home launch, the beauty brand was also looking to promote two flagship products: a dehydrated skin oil, and a newly formulated Hydra Essential lotion.
Understanding that some customers are interested in multiple topics (with varying levels of interest in different categories and skincare solutions), the Clarins marketing team needed to prioritize which offers to promote to whom, to maximize both revenue and customer engagement.
In instances like this, when multiple offers need to be promoted to the customer database, Clarins uses Tinyclues to make sense of their first-party data – using Tinyclues’ insight to segment and target campaign messaging to the most relevant prospects, according to their likelihood to purchase a specific promoted offer.
As a result, Clarins were able to reduce their email unsubscribe rate by -17%, and increase their open rate by +78%, compared to rule-based pressure management.
Challenge 4: Bottom of funnel
Support your marketing campaigns & maximize on-site conversion
The majority of shopping carts (77%) are abandoned – and retailers typically have very little recourse for effectively and efficiently retargeting those prospects if they aren’t logged in or otherwise recognized. Clarins was facing this exact challenge, and partnered with Wunderkind to increase performance in this area.
With Wunderkind, brands can recognize more people on their site than is otherwise possible – and then deliver a personalized experience, both on-site and in inboxes. Using a combination of Wunderkind’s identification technology and high-performing product, category and cart abandonment emails, Clarins was able to remarket to prospects who had abandoned their sessions, providing them with relevant, tailored content and an easy mechanism to return to the site and complete their purchase.
The result was a 13x increase in revenue from triggered emails, exceeding Clarins’ ROAS target by 3.3x.
Commenting on the successful partnership with Wunderkind and Tinyclues, Emilie Manoury, Digital, Ecommerce and CRM Director at Clarins UK, said: “The two solutions enable us to grow our high intent prospect base, while ensuring we retarget them in the most relevant way, recommending products they have a high propensity to convert to”.
If you’d like to find out more about how Tinyclues and Wunderkind can work together to increase performance across the entire marketing funnel, get in touch for a demo.
