How L’Oréal Wins Big Online, One Shopper at A Time
Personalized CX, AI automation, revenue up 149% and rising
A Rosetta.ai case study of SHU UEMURA
The L’Oréal Luxe Division has recently added personalized marketing on many of its websites, including Shu Uemura.
L’Oréal Luxe is the world’s largest beauty group, providing consumers with the best products — and, in their own words, a unique experience.
CDO of L’Oréal, Lubomira Rochet, has spearheaded customer centricity for the brand and stresses the importance of building personalized consumer relationships.
“Digital technology has changed the way we market; An important goal is having the ability to build rich, personalized consumer relationships and create content that engages consumers and makes them happy to share it.”
Source: Commonwealth Magazine
So to make every experience unique, the idea is to build personalized consumer relationships.
To make this happen, the Shu Uemura site needed a complete back-to-front solution that could organize their large cosmetics product line and relate to customers individually.
The problem: lots of products to tag, lots of unique customers to engage
The product line runs deep at L’Oréal. Their Global Brands Portfolio includes consumer products, L’Oréal Luxe, professional products and active cosmetics.
Besides that, data analysts organize Shu Uemura products into must have, makeup, skincare, pro tools, special offers and last chance.
Then there are product attribute tags, which is where it gets tricky. Finding ways to efficiently and systematically identify product attributes was a big challenge for Shu Uemura.
But it had to be done if L’Oréal wanted to achieve their main goal of recommending products to individual customers.
Understanding customers used to take time
In the past, L’Oréal’s Data Team had to identify VIP customers one by one from their CRM database. Then they had to customize different EDM marketing campaigns. The process took a lot of time and money.
Realizing this was not a sustainable SOP, the Data Team decided to take action. In June 2020, they found a SaaS company in a Facebook community and reached out to them.
The company was Rosetta.ai and the attractive part of the offer to the Data Team was that the machine learning algorithms can automate product tagging, identify customer preferences, and provide extremely accurate recommendations.
The solution: automate tagging, engage customers with personalized recommendations, make more cross-sells
Building personalized consumer relationships will put you ahead of the pack in ecommerce in 2021. Salesforce did a large study last year showing more than half of all shoppers expect empathy from brands online and now there are many solutions for engaging online customers emotionally.
The Rosetta.ai personalized marketing solution is unique because it uses a visual-AI-driven recommendation engine optimized for beauty and fashion ecommerce. For Shu Uemura, it does three things:
1) Automates product tagging
2) Provides personalized contextual recommendations
3) Delivers personalized pop-ups
Automated product tagging
The Rosetta.ai solution automatically creates product tags for individual preference profiles, a rich source of data for you to create truly personalized recommendations.
This solution saves time and money because the AI can look at the product catalog like a human Data Analyst and create tags.
The automation relies on computer vision trained by Rosetta.ai beauty and fashion industry experts, ensuring the tags are written to industry standards.
Product category tags can be set (#brands #feature #material #skin #position, for example), and tags can be written into product descriptions.
Beyond that, the AI takes over, identifying tags from catalog images:
The additional product tagging detail makes shopper preference profiles more insightful, which helps Shu Uemura build better customer relationships.
What’s more, the extra detail in the data provides extra insight into why certain products are trending. This helps with future product development.
Personalized contextual recommendations
The Rosetta.ai service uses deep learning technology to analyze consumer preferences and onsite behavior. As shoppers visit, the AI analyzes the context of the experience and delivers personalized recommendations.
The visitor may be on the landing page, category page, product details page or cart page, but the algorithm always ensures that the right products are recommended in the most appealing way (Trending this week, Frequently bought together, Similarly price products, etc.).
For example, Shu Uemura uses the “Recommended just for you” component on their product details page.
Preference profiles include the favorite colors, preferred makeup attributes, and past purchase history. This data is used to select the best products for that individual customer at that particular time.
The extra tagging work on the backend enriches individual preference profiles, making recommendations more accurate.
The right recommendation in the right context makes each experience unique and drives more cross-sells. It makes customers click on more products, stay longer and buy more. For Shu Uemura, average order value went up 109%.
Personalized pop-ups
Rosetta.ai can create personalized pop-ups that offer one-to-one recommendations or discounts.
These pop-ups engage customers as individuals on the Shu Uemura site, and convert more than generic offers, especially with hesitant shoppers.
Hesitant shoppers make up 10%~20% of all website visitors, but with personalized pop-ups, Shu Uemura has been able to encourage them to buy more and conversion rates are up 140%.
The results
L’Oréal’s goals for adding personalization to their online marketing included improving CVR, AOV and revenue, as well as saving time and lowering costs.
In less than a year they were able to achieve all those goals with the Rosetta.ai personalized marketing solution. The large gains speak for themselves, with increases of 140% for conversion rate, 109% for average order value and 149% for revenue.
Business growth for Rosetta.ai clients like L’Oréal and Shu Uemura is steady and strong because the solution offers real one-to-one personalization, not segmentation.
Customers are emotionally engaged by the results and the AI-driven automation frees up human resources behind the scenes to focus on other tasks.
About Rosetta.ai
Rosetta.ai offers fashion-optimized, image-based AI personalization for unique onsite shopping experiences, authentic email marketing campaigns and preference analysis insights.
On average, our clients double their order value and triple their conversion rate because shoppers on their websites are more engaged by the industry-leading accuracy of our personalized recommendations.
Rosetta.ai has been featured in Forbes Top 25 ML startups and Analytics Insights Top 10 companies.
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