Email Marketing a Critical Element of Customer Engagement at Deborah Lippmann During Holiday Season

Email marketing will be a critical element tied to customer engagement during the upcoming holiday season for Deborah Lippmann, a global brand of beauty products used by various A-list celebrities.

Deborah Lippmann is following its brand mantra to secure customer loyalty and deliver personalized service this holiday season. Email, which generates 50% of the company’s annual sales, helps the company achieve this by having the ability to segment its audience, target customers based on previous behaviors, and build relevant promotions around these behaviors. 

Deborah Lippmann was one of the first brands to pioneer the way customers can transact through emails, by adding a one-tap Apple Pay purchase button. This is a critical piece of Deborah Lippmann's holiday sales strategy this year. According to comScore data, one out of five online holiday purchases were made from a mobile device in 2015.

Loyalty360 caught up Mark Lippmann, co-founder and Managing Partner of the Deborah Lippmann brand, to find out more about the company’s crucial email marketing strategy during the holiday season.

Can you talk about why email is a critical piece of your holiday season strategy this year, and how it impacts your customer engagement/customer loyalty initiatives?

Mark Lippmann: As a luxury beauty brand, our audience is located all over the world. You’ll find our products in Sephora, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Barneys New York, Bloomingdales, and more.  We recognized that promoting to a global audience means we have to be able to tailor content substantially.

Personalizing the content we provide to our customers is very important at all times of the year and a key part of our CX initiatives. Email marketing automation gives us a way to do this. While that might not seem very personal, it helps us communicate and reach our audience in a very localized, relevant way. Rather than a batch-and-blast approach which will quickly find its way into the trash, we can segment offers based on locations, behaviors, etc. and then create highly tailored, engaging messages for each. The integration of our ecommerce platform Magento with email platform dotmailer helps us do this seamlessly with the ability to automate the right message at the right time based on this information.

This season, we plan on using email to reach our customers with a combination of new offers, including exclusive early access to several new holiday sets, gifting guide, and Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions. We segment based on order history, re-order points, and product and category favorites which are key elements in providing a more personalized experience for our users.

What does customer loyalty mean to you and how has that definition evolved in recent years?

Mark Lippmann: Our customers may choose to shop online with us or with our trading partners including Sephora, Nordstrom, and Neiman Marcus, either online or in store. They visit our site for rich, in-depth content from Fashion Week or the red carpet, new product launches, online exclusives, and educational how-to videos. For the Deborah Lippmann brand, customer loyalty means listening to what our customers want and delivering it to them in a way that allows us to continue building a lasting relationship.

Do you expect the percentage of mobile device transactions to rise this holiday season?

Mark Lippmann: Yes. Year after year, we see mobile engagement and transactions increase. As the majority of our mobile visitors are on iOS devices, we incorporated Apple Pay single touch checkout earlier this year on mobile web and email campaigns, which has seen tremendous engagement.

For some marketers, email is a tough tool to impact massive customer engagement. How do you use it more effectively?

Mark Lippmann: Our email subscribers are our most engaged shoppers and brand advocates. Today, we track 50% of our sales activity to email activity alone. We can target customers based on purchase history and abandoned carts. Since implementing this technology, we can also directly track our sales activity. Email data at the hands of marketers can provide that valuable insight into what a customer is interested in and how best to target them – it’s another way to get your products story out there. Now we can automatically turn this data into effective information and then build a promotion around it. This was otherwise painfully time-consuming simply because we didn’t have the right tools in place. 

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