Sephora UK (formerly Feelunique)

The Challenge

Feelunique is Europe’s largest online beauty retailer, and is passionate about offering customers innovative, digital-first experiences. The brand was recently acquired by Beauty retail giant Sephora, and underwent a rebrand to become Sephora UK.  

With a range spanning 30,000 products from over 500 established and emerging brands, the Sephora UK marketing team wanted to make sure that customers were only targeted with products and brands that were most relevant to their interests and tastes.

To achieve this, the team used Ometria to segment its newsletter audiences, based on the brands that customer had previously purchased from.

While this produced greater engagement and higher revenue per email compared to non-segmented, unpersonalised sends, Sephora UK wanted to use a more sophisticated approach to identifying shopper tastes and preferences that took into account factors beyond simply what a customer had previously purchased.

So the marketing team used Ometria’s AI-based Predictive Segmentation functionality to build its newsletter audiences.

The Solution

Using Ometria’s predictive segmentation engine, the Sephora UK marketing team sent subscribers a personalised newsletter campaign that targeted shoppers based on their affinity towards certain brands.

Each of the newsletter subscribers received a version of the campaign that was themed around a cosmetics brand that was most likely to interest them.

Audiences were automatically created using machine learning, rather than relying on simple rule-based segmentation.

The taste profiling algorithm takes into account factors such as:

• The individual’s purchase and browsing behaviour.
• Relationships between similar people and products.
• Temporal correlations, based on the buying cycle of each product.
• Reinforcement learning, based on whether a shopper responds to machine-generated predictions in the expected way.