Sephora makes adding to Pinterest easy as 1-2-3
In early 2012, Sephora noticed an emerging beauty trend—people were regularly saving their favorite beauty products and inspiration onto Pinterest boards, and many of those images were from Sephora. As a result, a growing number of potential clients were discovering Sephora products on Pinterest and visiting Sephora.com. To help improve the discoverability of their brand and make it easier for their clients to save and share their favorite beauty products, the Sephora team added the Save button to tens of thousands of product pages during a major website redesign.
Sephora coordinated the introduction of Save buttons with the “Sephora Color Wash” campaign, aimed at helping people get acquainted with their site’s new look. People participating in the campaign were encouraged to find and pin color-coordinated beauty treasures on Sephora.com, giving them more opportunities to use improved site features like search and navigation. Within a few short months Pinterest became a top 10 referring site for sephora.com.
“Sephora and Pinterest were a natural fit together for beauty aficionados. We wanted to increase the awareness of our brand and bring Sephora into their daily Pinterest lives, so we made it even easier for our clients to do what was coming naturally.”
Connecting with people through email
Marketing emails are one of Sephora’s primary client engagement programs. Naturally, they wanted to experiment with ways to use email to drive Pinterest activity. In addition to regularly including links to their Pinterest account in email footers, Sephora also creates Pinterest-centric emails and enables people to save products directly within the email. To help drive a more connected experience with Sephora’s Pinterest profile, they create new boards that reflect the design of their emails, such as the Color Blocking board, which appeared in a fall 2012 email.
Pinnable emails result in significantly increased Pinterest activity for the products featured. The Color Blocking email generated more than 14,000 saves. Two of the most saved images to date were featured in a Pinterest email that went out to their entire client list. In the month following the first email campaign, Sephora also saw 60% growth in traffic from Pinterest.
“We realize that clients are busy and don’t always have time to immediately purchase products from our emails. We wanted to make it easy for them to save for later if they saw something they liked, but weren’t quite ready to buy.”
When we create content for our site or emails, we think of additional ways that we can help the story along on Pinterest. We use web analytics to look at top Pins, test quote layouts from brand founders, and try different product shots—we spend time learning about what works and experiment often to get it right.