The Tech Stack every Cosmetic Brand Store Should have

Do you sell makeup, skincare, supplements or hair accessories? Then the Cosmetics Brand setup is the right choice for you. As a cosmetics brand, your customers often know what they want, but with a large range of products, it can be hard to navigate these and find the perfect one for them.

Creating an easy and helpful experience is a great starting point for a Cosmetics Brand. If you can find out what they are looking for but also provide great customer service, you’ll get customers coming back to you just for the experience and the lifestyle you can create.

Octane.ai

Octane.ai has a great solution to finding out more from your customers. They have a feature that allows you to create a quiz hosted on your website.

 Using a series of questions and multiple choice answers, Octane.ai integrates with your Shopify store so you can recommend products from the results page that can be added to cart straight from the page.

You can even go a step further and recommend product collections. For example, if your quiz was recommending a type of foundation, why not upsell primer and concealer as well?

Klaviyo

Gathering this kind of information will be helpful for Cosmetic Brands as it allows you to start communicating with your customer in a way that connects with them on a personal level. By showing them, you understand what they want or what they might be looking for, you can start building a repertoire with them that will make them want to come back.

Klaviyo is the ideal email solution for Cosmetic Brands. Their advanced segmentation, when used with Shopify and Octane.ai, is going to allow you to create personalised content throughout your email strategy.

You should use custom properties to segment your Flows and the Post Purchase Flow is one of the most important places to do this.

The Post Purchase Flow is designed to inform Subscribers of what’s happening with their purchase but is also a good opportunity to upsell new products to gain that important repeat purchase.

If you can segment your Flow by skin type, brand, product type etc, you can use personalised content and create the right data feeds to recommend the best products possible based on what you already know.

Klaviyo SMS

Using Emails alongside SMS is a proven way to improve the performance of your marketing. For Cosmetic Brands it’s likely website visitors will make impulse decisions or need a little persuading to make a purchase.

Retargeting is a cheaper solution to acquisition so using automated Flows is a great way to do this. Klaviyo also has an SMS service that allows you to send Email and SMS messages alongside each other in a Flow or as a campaign.

Using an SMS Campaign to tell Subscribers about limited offers or sales is a great way to boost interest. Due to the high open rate of SMS, sending a campaign for a 50% off sale for 1 hour only is likely to gain a lot of attention and create a boost in revenue.

Reviews.io

The Post Purchase Flow is also an ideal place to start gathering user-generated content through reviews.

For a Cosmetic brand, there is no better social proof than seeing someone using and reviewing a product. But for many, the reviews of the Cosmetic company are also very important. With Reviews.io you can request both product and company reviews.

With a new customer is best to ask them about their experience with your business early on as this will give you insight into how their experience went. Not only does this give you areas to improve, but it also adds trust. Particularly with Cosmetics Brands, knowing the brand is helpful, has good customer service and is giving back is enough to persuade someone to buy from them.

Therefore if you can gather company reviews that show off your best values it will help you gain new customers, and encourage repeat purchases to leave a product review.

Gorgias

In the cosmetics industry, there are often free big questions: is it vegan? Is it cruelty-free? Can I return it if I don’t like it? If you find yourself answering these questions a lot Gorgias has a great feature.

You can use Gorgias to automate a lot of your responses. It does this by finding keywords and sending a response based on that keyword. So if a customer mentions ‘vegan’ or ‘cruelty-free’ you can trigger an automated message to send.

Integrating your Facebook Messenger with Gorgias, also means you're integrating Octane.ai with Gorgias and Octane.ai can do the exact same automated responses as Gorgias.

Streamlining these FAQs across both platforms will not only get answers to customers as quickly as possible, it keeps all the conversations and information in one place, making it easier for your customer service rep and freeing up some of their time to deal with other messages.

LoyaltyLion

There is a lot of competition for Cosmetic Brands and customer retention can often be a challenging area. Once a customer decides to buy from a Cosmetic Brand, it’s important you give them a reason to stay. Rewarding your customers for their loyalty is often used in this industry, but with LoyaltyLion you can create a truly custom experience.

LoyaltyLion tiers is a great way of showing your most loyal customers how much you appreciate them. Tiers can be created by the amount spent per customer, and different amounts of points and rewards can be made available to them. In particular, offering free gifts is a great way to boost excitement for your loyalty program.

A way you could use this could be the following:

• At 1000 Points they get a free makeup sponge
• At 2000 points they get a free makeup bag
• At 5000 points they get a free makeup brush set
• At 10000 points they get an eyeshadow palette worth $50

By using this structure, your customers will want to be in your will want to be in your top tier to get this extra benefit, therefore are more likely to continue shopping from your brand.

Furthermore, LoyaltyLion integrates with both Klaviyo and Gorgias. With Gorgias, you’ll be able to see what points someone has pending or approved and be able to answer questions on the Loyalty Program quickly and easily. With Klaviyo, you can sync and create custom properties based on pending points, approved points, loyalty tiers and enrolment dates.

This means you can always show your subscribers how many points they have in your emails, you can trigger emails to send after purchase to let them know when their points have been approved and you can send reminders each month to let them know they have rewards ready for them to use.

What you can achieve

By using the tech stack above, you’ll combat one of the main issues many Cosmetic Brands have: “how can we make ourselves different?”

Through API’s and inbuilt integrations at the click of a button, you can create an effective tech stack that streamlines the customer experiences and your brand values across all platforms to show potential customers why they should purchase from you.