Nosto x Dermalogica | Boosting CVR & AOV Through Personalization

About Dermalogica

Dermalogica is a professional-grade skin care brand, founded in 1986 by skin therapist Jane Wurwand. Dermalogica sell their iconic skincare products online, in their own select stores and department stores, as well through their network of professional skin therapists worldwide, for whom Dermalogica is the number one choice.

Challenge

During the pandemic, stores and beauty salons closed for months, meaning that 100% of Dermalogica’s sales went online. Shoppers who would usually shop exclusively in stores or at their local Dermalogica skin centre were now flocking to the site, and they needed a more simplified user experience than their other digitally native customers.

As a business whose in-store sales were founded on the concept of an in-depth, face-mapping skin analysis, a professional consultation service to guide customers to the best products and treatments for their skin, Dermalogica were faced with a unique challenge: how to translate the extremely tactile, personal experience of shopping for premium skincare into the digital space, and ensure that the site became a viable option for those who were used to an in-store experience.

They knew that in order to convert and retain all this new traffic, they needed to identify the key touchpoints onsite at which customers could most benefit from a more consumer-friendly, elevated commerce experience, and deliver for them the same high quality experience they were used to from their in-store visits. Dermalogica’s ecommerce team had used Nosto for about a year at the start of the pandemic and had already been impressed both with the flexibility and performance of the tool, and the tactical and strategic advice they received from their CSM.

Together with their CSM, they identified three key touchpoints.

Solution

Touchpoint 1: The personalized skin consultation

At Dermalogica, the in-store experience revolves around the opportunity to have a professional skin consultation with an experienced professional skin therapist, and then receive product recommendations tailored to the customer’s own unique skin type. Dermalogica had begun replicating that experience online as far back as 2018, with a new digital Face Mapping. The Face Mapping web app harnesses facial recognition and AI technology to analyze a user’s face through their webcam or smart phone camera to identify any skin concerns. It then recommends the user a selection of products.

The challenge that Dermalogica had was that if a user navigated away from the Face Mapping web app and failed to click the ‘Email my results’ option, their recommended products would be lost. At a time where more customers than ever were needing to use these online consultation tools, the team at Dermalogica wanted to ensure that users checked out with their personalized skincare regimen, as it would significantly increase their chances of returning. Dermalogica worked with the front-end team at Nosto to create a sticky widget which follows a user who has completed the Face Mapping process throughout the site, prompting them to click on a slide-out, which reveals the recommended products so they can easily add them to bag at any moment during the remaining journey.

Touchpoint 2: The upsell conversation

Another benefit of in-store interactions, from both a business and customer perspective, is knowledgeable salespeople who can truthfully recommend complementary products to the shopper’s intended purchase, enhancing the customer’s experience and connection to the brand while also driving average order value (AOV) for the store.

Nosto’s Dynamic Bundles stepped in to take the place of the in-store product expert, dynamically recommending complementary products from set categories to go with the currently viewed product so that the shopper could ‘complete their regimen.’ For example, if a customer visits a moisturizer product detail page (PDP), they will see an exfoliant, cleanser, and toner, all with attributes that tie them closely to the viewed product and therefore make them a perfect match.

Touchpoint 3: The second visit

Even in physical store situations, it can take more than one visit for an indecisive shopper to become a customer—online takes more visits for someone to actually convert. Dermalogica wanted to recreate that feeling of a shopper being ‘remembered,’ and also increase the ease of use and shorten the path to purchase for their new traffic who weren’t used to shopping online.

Enter the Returning Visitors popup. Using a combination of Recommendations and Pop-ups, and targeted towards the Returning Visitors lifecycle segment, this pop-up greets returning visitors who haven’t yet made a purchase a few seconds after they hit the site. It uses a personalized recommendation type to serve the shopper with the two products they showed the most interest in on their last visit—and crucially for Dermalogica, the two that Nosto determines they are most likely to convert on.

Results

Using Nosto to replicate their in-store sales strategy brought solid results to the Dermalogica ecommerce store:

13% post-click conversion on facemapping.me web app in the first month

Over 5% click-through rate (CTR) on the returning visitors’ pop-up

6.93% improvement in AOV since all three campaigns were implemented

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