EmailSoldiers Case Study: Vichy L’Oreal

Beauty delivery through triggered emails — support of Vichy campaign

Online Diagnostics from Vichy is a project encompassing a range of tools. which allows anyone to get an online skin and hair consultation, and for the consumer to receive personalised recommendations and a tailored selection of Vichy products.

To implement the project Vichy assembled several teams:

– BBDO, McCann and The Head which were responsible for the design & coding of the landing page;

– Oggetto Web which set up integrations of the systems;

– Our team, EmailSoldiers, responsible for the email campaign management and deploying the campaigns complete dynamic data.

Altogether the project of online-diagnostics consisted of three campaigns:

1. SkinConsultAI

where a consumer uploaded a photo to the website and after that the artificial intelligence defined the skin condition. On the basis of this testing the user received some face care recommendations.

2. Normaderm

where a user filled out the questionnaire, on the basis of which got the skin care recommendations: specialists` advice and the selection of products.

3. Healthy hair code DERCOS

Where a consumer answered the questions about haircare and got hair treatment recommendations and a list of recommended Vichy products.

The mechanics of all the three campaigns was pretty much the same. The hair condition testing campaign «Healthy hair code Dercos» had interesting technicals features, so we will tell you about the work on the project on the example of exactly this campaign.

The consumer journey & experience

The only thing left is to do it: to assemble a email campaign with dynamic content.

What was happening behind the scenes

Technically the project was rather difficult and required integrations between the landing, Magento engine and Mindbox marketing automation platform.

The following data was used in the project:

This is the data the systems exchanged

Our part of work consisted in displaying the proper data in the trigger letter the client received on the results of the diagnostics.

For the email to be sent from Mindbox we set up two operations:

• Operation 1 — sending the personal data. When the user answered the questions and entered the email, personal data, like hair type and scalp properties, was put down into the additional fields of his or her profile. EAN-codes of recommended products were transferred into the product list.

• Operation 2 — sending the email. In the email the user got:

A Unique Promo Code

It could be used only once and applied only to the selection of the recommended products provided that the customer bought 2 or more goods from the selection.

Recommended products

The subscriber saw the full information in the email: name, description, price of the product, and could add the item to cart by click. Actually all the information was dynamically added to the email from the feed and we only used the EAN-code of the product in the email settings.

Text recommendations from the specialists

The subscribers got an individual set of recommendations. Separate pieces of advice from the specialists for each hair necessity were stored in Magento. There was no need in storing them in mindbox. Moreover, the additional fields in mindbox have 1000 symbols restriction. That is why the pieces of advice were sent directly from Magento, being combined for each user individually according to the results of the test.

Colour code of the product selection

Color codes (decoded)

Each Vichy product has a corresponding code. When selections of the products are compiled for the user, the color code is created. For instance, like this one:

After being diagnosed, the user gets recommendations and sees the color code at the landing page. The code at the landing page is formed with the help of JavaScript: several colours of the products are combined into one picture.

In the email JavaScript doesn’t work, html only. To compile the color code of the selection in the email was quite a challenge.

As we`even already said, each product has a corresponding individual EAN number. When the EAN is added to the email, the other data is added from the feed as well. The problem is the EAN is added to the email in random order while the color code is formed according to the treatment steps.

So we did it this way. For each product included into the campaign we created an additional field with the serial number in mindbox product list and numbered them manually.

In the email we created boxes for the parts of the color code.
In each box with the picture we created an empty array where we put a variable. Product colors served as variables.Pictures were added to the email in accordance with the two conditions:

the line of the product – X;
the number of the treatment step the product corresponds to, – serial number Y.

As the result, before being sent this part of the email looked like this:

And the recepient saw it in the email like this:

The Results

We had three campaigns like this for Vichy. When approaching a project and campaign like this it is essential the campaigns are successful in the long term.

Our first success was an immediate win with significant subscriber growth. The second important win from the campaigns was far more etailed, granular and relevant data for the Vichy team. This ensure future email campaigns could leverage far more granular, personalised information ensuring our client was better able to meet the needs of their clients and drive increased sales, and higher basket value.

The conversion to the purchase from the trigger after the diagnostics is 1,5% higher than the conversion of the promo with the topic “Hair treatment”.

2000+ people get diagnosed, the total number is ~3000 times.
50% users from the ones who made purchases after being diagnosed used the promo-code.