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Don’t waste another dime on bloated channel reporting and vanity metrics.
Don’t waste another dime on bloated channel reporting and vanity metrics.
Salesforce customers will be able to use WhatsApp for marketing, commerce and customer service messages.
Salesforce and WhatsApp are teaming up to provide new avenues for brands to communicate with consumers through messaging, and develop new customer experiences centered around a conversation.
The partnership, announced at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference this week, is an integration between the WhatsApp Business Platform and Salesforce Customer 360. It is expected to be generally available in 2022.
Called Whatsapp-first business messaging, it allows Salesforce customers to use WhatsApp business messaging across marketing, commerce and customer service interactions.
“We're partnering with Salesforce so all businesses that use their platform can use WhatsApp business messages to answer customer questions, run marketing campaigns, and sell directly in chat,” Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of WhatsApp parent company Meta, wrote in a Facebook post. “More and more people prefer to communicate with businesses over text. That's why we launched our Cloud API earlier this year and are now partnering with Salesforce.”
The partnership centers one-to-one conversations as primary communication points between businesses and customers. This holds out the possibility of more direct and personalized interactions than would come from formats like email or social feeds.
The potential benefit for consumer brands comes into view in a quote from L’Oréal Chief Digital & Marketing Officer Asmita Dubey.
“As more customers use their mobile devices as their primary way to engage our brand, we need a single messaging solution that pulls in information across sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT, to help us deliver personalized customer service, deliver product recommendations, and increase sales,” Dubey said. “Being able to do all of the above on WhatsApp as a single messaging platform could have a tremendous opportunity in beauty, to drive conversational commerce and build greater engagement.”
Through the integration, messaging can become the foundation for a wider customer experience that can be crafted using WhatsApp and Salesforce tools.
“For example, customers may receive a WhatsApp message with a reminder about an upcoming order arriving next week,” Salesforce writes. “As an extra incentive, the message could include a promotion with a 20% discount for a new or related product offering. The user could then confirm via a button whether to automatically add this new product to their next order.”
The platform will also draw on AI insights to personalize the messages with intelligent promotions and recommendations, Salesforce said.
Additionally, Salesforce will offer customizable message templates. These can include brand and product media, while others could showcase products and services with interactive messages that in turn allow consumers to purchase products in WhatsApp or leave a review. The messages will also have customizable buttons that enable users to respond with a single click, or open a web link.
When it comes to initiating a message, there is further opportunity to integrate with Salesforce Genie, a newly-launched data platform that is designed to power a real-time CRM.
“This enables companies to target those audiences with real-time data that informs Click-to-WhatsApp ads on Facebook and Instagram to drive customers to a one-to-one messaging experience,” Salesforce writes.
Ecommerce has long been an important part of Meta properties Facebook and Instagram, as brands sought to reach customers using the platform’s advertising and outreach tools. Developing more commerce tools for WhatsApp appears to be a growing focus for the platform. Last month, a new integration for consumers in India called JioMart enabled grocery shopping in WhatsApp. This underscores how WhatsApp is not only an emerging surface for commerce, but it is also one that is widely used globally. WhatsApp is also a widely used business tool, with more than 100 million messages per day on the app. Pairing it with Salesforce’s enterprise focus and data integrations, it is looking to help major brands start a conversation with consumers.
Product innovation, marketing and ecommerce helped boost sales 49% in the holiday quarter.
e.l.f. beauty Poreless Putty Primer. (Courtesy photo)
The clouds are getting darker in today's retail environment, but e.l.f. Beauty is shining. Digital commerce and marketing growth is a primary reason.
The makeup and skincare brand posted the following results for the quarter ended Dec. 31, 2022:
The brand is also outperforming category trends. The cosmetics category grew 8% over 2021, while e.l.f. grew 36%.
“We grew our market share by 150 basis points and increased our rank to the #4 brand as compared to #5 a year ago,” CEO Tarang Amin told analysts. “We continue to be the fastest-growing top five brand by a wide margin.”
The strong results proved validating for a brand that prides itself on offering affordable cosmetics, and digital-forward marketing. They were also another sign of the resurgence of beauty as people return to in-person experiences post-pandemic and seek affordable luxuries that can provide joy despite tougher economic conditions.
Here’s a breakdown of the digital drivers of growth for e.l.f., and how it is showing strong results in a tough economic environment:
@meghantrainor A special @elfyeah radiance report: It's an E.L.F.ING GLOW STORM! Please exercise ✨extreme iridescence!✨ (and thank you @weatherchannel for inspiring the glowcast!)🤍 #elfpartner
The brand prides itself on marketing that is both bold and pioneering on emerging channels.
One example came in the form of a holiday kickoff with the singer Meghan Trainor delivering a Weather Channel-informed report on social channels to celebrate the restock of the brand’s Halo Glow Liquid Filter, which was a viral sensation.
“The trifecta of e.l.f., The Weather Channel and Meghan Trainor helped us reach new audiences and entertain our community,” Amin said. “The campaign generated over five billion press impressions, exceeding last year's holiday campaign by a wide margin.”
The combination of innovation on product and virality in marketing helps attract a new audience for the brand.
“They see the viral buzz,” Amin said. “They see other people talking about this prestige quality, these great prices and particularly these days with platforms like TikTok, we get consumers doing their own demonstrations and comparisons.”
When it comes to metrics, Amin said the brand explores, “What percent behind each product are we pulling in new users?”
It's often up more than 50%, and attracts the core consumer in Gen Z as well as millennials and Gen X.
“I think the quality of these products at the prices we have and our ability to engage them really are attracting even more consumers to our franchise,” Amin said.
e.l.f. also deepened its marketing investment. The overall share of marketing is now 16%, as compared to 7% three years ago. It will increase to 17-19% this fiscal year.
“We recently completed our annual Nielsen marketing mix analysis and again saw exceptional ROI results, giving us further confidence that our marketing and digital initiatives are driving brand demand and delivering profitable growth,” Amin said.
Strong ROIs were observed across digital advertising and influencer marketing, while PR was “off the charts,” Amin said. Experimentation also plays a key role in developing these channels.
“The other thing about us is, we're not afraid to test and learn our new platforms. So we were one of the first beauty brands on TikTok. In the early days, it was hard to get attribution on TikTok. We now can see almost immediately when something goes viral on TikTok, the impact it has on our business and our ability to be able to attract that,” Amin said.
When it comes to ecommerce, Q3 digital consumption trends were up over 75% year-over-year, said CFO Mandy Fields. Digital channels drove 17% of total consumption in Q3, up from 14% a year ago. In the quarter that includes the holidays, digital channels were particularly strong through Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
A big point of emphasis for digital growth is the company’s Beauty Squad loyalty program, which provides early access, exclusives, free gifts and bonus points. The program grew enrollment 25% year-over-year to 3.5 million members. The loyalty program helps to boost the value of individual customers.
“Our loyalty members drive almost 70% of our sales on elfcosmetics.com have higher average order values, purchase more frequently, have stronger retention rates and are a rich source of first-party data,” CFO Mandy Fields said.
Plenty of brands and retailers reporting earnings over this week are speaking of a slowdown in demand as a result of inflation and cooling demand in the economy. They also talk of consumers trading down to more affordable and smaller products that challenge margins. Amin batted away that kind of talk.
“No, we've not seen any slowdown in demand,” Amin said.
The response spoke to the unique place that beauty sits in this moment.
“What I'd tell you is, historically, mass color cosmetics, mass skin care has fared really well in…recessionary environments,” he said, referring to the Lipstick Index that posits beauty sales rise during economic downturns as people seek the small joys when they have less to spend on bigger items.
But there’s also a timing factor coming out of the pandemic.
“This is a category that really did suffer during the pandemic when people were restricted from their normal behavior,” Amin said. “So I've long felt there's a lot of pent-up consumer demand for the categories in which we compete, and we very much are seeing that.”