Are Sephora’s CRM Practices as Fabulous as Their Beauty Products?

We looked closely at the beauty retailer’s CRM marketing strategy. Can you guess how the brand scores against other brands when it comes to CRM?

Adebisi Adewusi

May 11, 2022

Sephora is a French multinational retailer of personal care and beauty products. Can you guess how the brand scores when it comes to CRM?

Become the best CRMer you can:
CRM Hack: Monitoring the User’s Heartbeat
What Does It Mean to Treat a Customer’s Email With Respect?
To Lock or Not to Lock Customers (into CRM Journeys)
What the Efforts to Promote Responsible Gaming Look Like Form the Inside

Be Transparent 10/10

Sephora shares some information about its internal operations. The beauty retailer signed a five-year contract with CEVA Logistics to connect Brazilian customers with high-end cosmetic products. We learned Sephora is considering expanding its physical footprint in Wellington and opening a new store in North Carolina. Sephora also announced that it would be carrying Lady Gaga’s vegan and cruelty-free cosmetics brand Haus Laboratories. Scrolling to the bottom of the company’s homepage, we discovered links to pages on supply chain transparency and diversity.

As customers expect transparency, companies must make openness a part of their culture. Overall, we think Sephora does a decent job of informing customers about its operations.

Incentives and Perks 10/10

When it comes to discounts and freebies prices, Sephora delivers. Rolling out the red carpet, on the homepage, we got offered points for shopping fragrances and free shipping.

Sephora loyalty program – Beauty Insider offers rewards, free samples, discounts, and lots more to customers

Free makeup and Skin samples for Beauty Insider members

Discounted sales on a range of beauty products

Free Standard 1-3 Day Shipping on all U.S. merchandise orders

We like how the company communicated its incentives and perks early in the customer journey. For spoiling us with incentives and perks, Sephora gets a 10.

Be Relevant 10/10

Providing customers with relevant services and products helps companies to build a strong relationship with customers. Let’s have a look at how Sephora does here.

Quizzes & Buying Guides: A guide to help customers build their skincare and complexion routines with the right beauty products.

Sephora Credit Card: A Credit Card that can be used to make purchases at Sephora stores. Customers earn 4% back in rewards on every $1 spent and 2x the Beauty Insider points at Sephora U.S. stores or sephora.com.
Beauty Under $20: A range of affordable products for customers on a budget and lots more

Beauty Advisors: Personalized recommendations and chat with real Beauty Advisors with Live Beauty Help online, seven days a week.

Sephora does a great job of providing relevant products and innovative services to its customers. Way to go!

Be Helpful 10/10

Let’s see how Sephora contributes and connects with its community.

Sephora Accelerator: A platform dedicated to building a community of innovative, inspirational founders in beauty. This year the accelerator focused on incubating founders who are people of color.

Sephora has supported 900 organizations and currently partners with Best Buddies International, to provide opportunities, employment, leadership development, and inclusive living for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD).

4,500+ Sephora employees give time or money to charities. For every hour a Sephora employee volunteers at an eligible nonprofit organization, we donate $10 to an eligible charity of their choice. From where we stand, Sephora is purpose-driven and guided by strong values.

Realtime personalization 6/10

Logging into Sephora’s website, we were able to choose the location we wanted to shop from. We noticed that the homepage and content for each country were different. To test Sephora’s realtime capabilities, we placed The Ordinary Hyaluronic Acid Serum in our cart.

There was some cross-selling and upselling on the product page and checkout page. Which we found relevant.

Returning to the HP, we didn’t see any change in the content or messaging to reflect what was in our cart, our previous onsite search, or browsing behavior. Sephora missed opportunities to use their homepage to personalize our shopping experience. For instance, leveraging our data, Sephora could easily have recommended us more skincare products when we returned to the homepage. Finally, after leaving Sephora’s website, we weren’t targeted with sponsored ads.

Master UX 10/10

Sephora checked almost all the boxes when it comes to delivering a smooth user experience. Sephora’s website is easy to navigate. The homepage user interface experience is properly categorized and the main navigation drop-down menu is user-friendly.

The filtering criteria were specific for product selection, which made finding products easy. For instance, we could shop by concern or wellness.

The product page was functional with descriptions, user reviews, and ratings to help us with our purchase We could also ask questions on the product page.

Sephora’s FAQ page is easy to locate, well-executed, and covered a broad range of issues. Sephora’s website has a quiz guide to help us find the right products. Overall, Sephora’s website gave us a great shopping experience.

Leverage Social Media 6/10

Sephora has a steady following on social media. On Facebook, Sephora has nearly 20 million followers, 21 million followers on Instagram, and over 2 million followers on Twitter.

Sephora is very active on Facebook. The brands’ content is a mix of product promotion, How-to videos and Facebook live shopping sessions.

Sephora’s Instagram account had us taking skincare notes!

The brand shares beauty routines, promotes its new products, shares how-to content, product guides and lots more.

Sephora frequently posts on Twitter. But we found some similarities with the posts on Facebook and Instagram.

In all, Sephora does a decent job of using social media to engage its audience. But loses some points for cross-posting. We suggest the beauty retailer adopts a platform-specific social media strategy and considers leveraging trends and popular events to catch its audience’s attention.

Now for our verdict!

Overall, Sephora is getting 62/70 here (88%) – landing at #5 on our rankings. While we agree the brand loves its customers, we know the relationship can be much better. The brand falls insanely short on realtime personalization and its social media strategy could use a little help.

We recommend Sephora adopts realtime personalized marketing by using relevant customer data to automatically generates personalized and relevant customer communication across the customer journey. Read more about personalized recommendations here.

Adopting realtime personalized marketing will improve Sephora’s relationship with customers and make its catapult its’s CRM results to celebrity status.