L’Oréal’s Celine Chesnais at CAS 2016

Hi, everyone, thank you so much for having me. My name is Celine Chesnais. And I am the manager for Lux, ecommerce and digital strategy at L’Oreal in the USA, and I’m here today to talk to you how we’ve worked with RichRelevance(now Algonomy) and specifically the engaged tool and platform to really enhance and elevate the customer experience online.

So today, Where’s the clicker? There we go. I’ll be giving you a bit of background about L’Oreal and why personalization is so important for us and then walk you through a business a case study that we’ve experienced with one of our brands that showed very, very exciting results and that we know will keep on getting higher.

So just to start off a bit of background about L’Oreal.

So L’Oreal is the worldwide Judy leader, and we stand to deliver and offer beauty for all to all consumers around the world. And by beautiful for all women Judy, that is universal beauty that it’s sustainable. And Judy that is digital. Speaking of digital e commerce and digital are really important for the for the company worldwide, and ecommerce sales are boosting with such 3% versus last year. If you’re not familiar with all the brands that we have at L’Oreal, we are a portfolio of about 32 brands that are organized in four different divisions based on their unique distribution channel. Working at so I work we work specifically with the L’Oreal Lux division. So those that division includes other brands that are very high end premium luxury in fashion. And there are sold exclusively at high end, department stores and retailers. And in the US, I focus specifically on six of our brands that have their own branded ecommerce websites. And those brands are Lancome, kills, Armani, YSL, Urban Decay and Clarisonic. And all goals for the private for the division as a very strategic goal is to really always offer the best in class, most innovative and most luxurious experience to our consumers online and really establish ourselves as leaders and pioneers within the digital world. Because we know, that’s where all consumers are, they are always on their phone, they’re always on the site. They’re searching for information in real time. And we want to give them that best in class experience. So why?

So here’s now let me walk you through why we felt that personalization was so important to us.

And it goes back to a mission or statement. Beauty for all. That’s a very broad statement knowing that beauty means something different to every consumer, and that every consumer based on their beauty profile, their skin tone, their hair color, their eye color, their skin concern, but also their look, are they casual? Do they want to put on more makeup and have a more fancier look when they want to go out to party. Based on all those things, they will use either one or more products in different ways in different combinations to achieve the look that they want. So when you go up to beauty to beauty counter in one of our stores, we have beauty experts, our beauty advisors are here and they will see you so they can physically assess what shades are going to work best for you based on your eye color, your hair color, but they will also ask you a bunch of questions about are you how many? How much time do you have in the morning to get ready? How many products do you want to use? What what type of look do you want to have. And based on all this information, she’s able to gather with you through your conversation, she will give you a tailored recommendation of products or products that will work explicit specifically for you, based on your need, your concerns, and your look.

So knowing all that, we knew that we had to find a way to translate that very rich and personalized experience online. And we knew that we couldn’t have a one size fits all content strategy, we knew that we couldn’t be serving up the same content and the same information to each consumer coming to our site. Because every consumer is different. Every consumer is using different things, looking for different benefits and has different concerns. So that’s how we felt that that’s how personalization became such a key priority for us, we really use the personalization tool to replicate what the beauty for the beauty advisor knows about us and finds about us in store online.

So that is how we partnered with RichRelevance(now Algonomy) and our goals really with RichRelevance(now Algonomy). And they are an amazing partner are to use personalization across all digital touchpoints being in a web, a website or mobile platforms, our email to really personalize from start to finish the experience through product recommendation, which less presenters already talked about, but also through content personalization, which really drives up engagement and really elevate the customer experience so that each consumer feels so unique. Because we’re giving them in a seamless way content that is relevant to them. And what’s truly amazing about the RichRelevance(now Algonomy) platform is that we can really, at first we would implement a strategy, but then we can use their tool and their dashboard to AB test all the content that we put against all of the segments so that we can learn about best practices, what’s working, what’s not working, what is very engaging to each of those customer segments that we create. And then always test always learning always optimize the content so that as marketing strategies evolve as we put up new launches as our catalogue are getting. Our catalogues are getting bigger and our consumers are getting severe and severe by the minute. We always have the best tools to learn about what is most engaging to them so that we can always optimize.

So speaking specifically about the Engage platform, we wanted to share with you a case study that we saw with Clarisonic, which is our I’m not sure if you’re familiar, it’s our device friends. These tend to beautifully transform their skin using their very powerful cleansing devices. And in the past summer, what they did is they used to have this four slot carousel on the homepage that would serve different content about new launches and then always had always have a slot at the end about promotions. Very traditional, not very exciting, and we weren’t seeing the conversion and the click through rates that we wanted. And then We thought about mutual elements in the engaged strategy. And so last summer, what we did is we replaced that carousel that wasn’t really working with dynamic tiles that were that would serve up different content on the homepage based on three different customer segments that we created through RichRelevance(now Algonomy), we had one segments for new visitors, one segment for new visits for returning visitors that hadn’t made a purchase yet, and then returning visitors that have made a purchase. So we implemented this strategy in July of 2015. And since then, we are always testing, always learning and always optimizing the content that we have. So that we can really not what content is most engaging to which segments apply, learn about the best practices, apply those best practices across other segments, and then always test and we also use those insights whenever we’re creating new content. Because we know when you’re running a website, you constantly have to have new creative, and it’s a big challenge. So where are you really using leveraging that insights that we’re learning through the RichRelevance(now Algonomy) platform to always improve our creative instead of almost shooting in the dark. And since July, we’ve seen amazing results that we wanted to share with you. So our click through rate on the homepage has increased by 20%. Our revenue per session has increased by 24%. And overall, our clicks went through the roof with plus 35%. And as we keep on going as we keep on testing, and as we develop and expand the Engage strategy throughout the sites and not just to the homepage, we really are convinced that those increased percentages are only going to go up. That’s the case study about engaged.

And another thing is that we’re also of course, working very well comparing their product recommendations that we talked about. And we’ve been using them for many, many years, across all of our lives brands. And we really use them to infer using explicit and implicit customer knowledge that we have on our site, we really use this container strategically, always testing the messaging and the products that we’re serving to educate the consumer about building their beauty routine about boosting the ARV up and really created the best in class experience that feels unique to each of them based on their behavior, what we know about their hair color, the eye color, their past purchases, and we are at a point where we’re about to be able to recommend the shade and the size level, which is really exciting for beauty.

That’s pretty much it, we really hope that I really hope that that was helpful in the coming months, I hope that you get a chance to log into our site, I guarantee you that neither one of you will have the same experience and see the same content, which is truly exciting as all of us are extremely different. And that’s about it.