Clarins has been a household name in skincare and beauty since its creation by Jacques Courtin in 1954. In striking a balance between its heritage and its emphasis on ingredient innovation, Clarins continues to develop and optimise a high-quality product selection that is beloved by customers around the world. Despite its strong brand equity, in recent years Clarins has faced many of the challenges plaguing other beauty and luxury retailers. Consumers have moved away from buying and sampling products on the High Street, choosing instead to browse and buy online. The beauty and skincare space continues to fragment due to the entrance of newer niche brands, and consumers seek out marketplaces for label variety and convenience.

When Emilie Maunoury took over as Digital, eCommerce and CRM Director, she was immediately faced with rising customer acquisition costs as well as the impending enactment of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) across the brand’s European markets. Like other online retailers, Clarins saw a massive dip in their addressable database after GDPR officially took effect in May 2018 and were faced with the challenge of rebuilding. Later that year, Clarins brought on Wunderkind with two key goals in mind: build a high-quality, engaged CRM list and deploy a more effective and efficient retargeting strategy that would increase the value of customers on that list.

Despite the intimidating volume of list attrition following GDPR, Maunoury chose to see a silver lining: “I think it was a healthy thing because we were carrying along visitors who were not interested in the brand. GDPR was a health check for company databases, and it helped us clear out the people who were never going to be engaged customers.” Clarins knew they had to rebuild their email file in a sustainable and profitable way, rather than through tactics like list buying and sweepstakes. Specifically, they wanted to build a more engaged, higher-quality list of shoppers that were more likely to convert and remain engaged and brand-loyal over time. Clarins knew that quality was absolutely paramount in their search for tactics and technologies that would help scale their list. Manoury observed, “Everyone I met with gave me ideas for quickly acquiring customers, but I knew I wasn’t getting the quality I wanted. When Wunderkind was presented to me, I thought, ‘Oh my god, this is brilliant.’ Now, I’m adding people to my list who have been showing interest in my site and intent to buy; it just makes sense. To me, that was the biggest Wunderkind selling point—quality growth.”

Like many other beauty and skincare brands, Clarins sells their products on other marketplaces and retailer sites. Driving qualified traffic to the Clarins owned site—and then educating customers on the brand’s value propositions and bringing them down-funnel—is a critical piece of Maunoury’s remit and contributes to her team’s holistic view of Clarins consumers. Clarins wanted to find a way to optimize each visitor that landed on Clarins.com, and the brand immediately saw the impact of remarketing to these individuals through Wunderkind. The Clarins site provides consumers with a wealth of information and product education, and Wunderkind triggered emails provided a consistent, brand-right way of nurturing customers. Maunoury says that visitors were “opening, clicking and buying” through dynamic Wunderkind emails at double the rate of the brand’s previous program.

Using Wunderkind’s identity network and technology, Clarins was able to identify a larger portion of their site traffic down to an email. In just 6 months, they were able to add 68,000 emails to their CRM. This allowed them to drastically increase their triggered email reach and grow their revenue from triggered email by 13X, while fitting in synergistically with the rest of Clarins’ channel strategy.