L’Oréal is leading the way in beauty product ecommerce with year after year of explosive online sales growth due to creative handling of online sales channel partnerships and the active use of digital measurement to monitor trends and evaluate the impact of changes in product page content on the user experience.
In a speech explaining the winning formula, L’Oréal’s Global Ecommerce Acceleration Director Antoine Borde said ecommerce accounts for 8% of the company’s total revenues, but 30% of its growth. “It's a real growth driver when it comes to increasing our sales and our business at L'Oréal.”
The L’Oréal brand strategy is to create strong partnerships with global and local online platforms and to micro-manage content on product pages to boost traffic, conversions and sales.
“We are not a retailer so we have done it by partnering and co-creating the beauty experience with partners around the world,” Borde said. “We help them because we know how to sell beauty online. The way you design a product page and produce content and speak to your consumer is very different for beauty.”
Measurement is a key advantage of the online retail space, and involves everything from tracking traffic and conversion rates to inventory and media. L’Oréal’s ecommerce team will test between 5 and 50 versions of a single product page in one day, “because we are able to measure the impact in real time.”
“Content, ratings and reviews, getting the right assortment, creating a strong traffic strategy, a strong promo strategy … all these elements have influence. We have the organization to create all these elements, and have also invested in the tools to properly measure each of them.”
Borde stressed the effective use of online-offline strategies. “Do not consider ecommerce as a silo. The online-offline bridges are super strong. You see consumers at Walmart going on Amazon to check prices, and vice versa.”
L’Oréal works with Edge by Ascential to monitor trends and activity on online platforms and product pages. “When developing content, you have to adapt it to the platform. It is the same for ecommerce, which is why we need Edge to measure that. Sometimes we need to create 30 to 50 assets for the product page,” Borde said.
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