Most businesses stick close to customers, but few cultivate relationships more intimate than global cosmetics giant L’Oréal. With 28 brands, including category icons Garnier, Maybelline and Lancôme, L’Oréal is on a mission to deliver ‘beauty for all’. If everything goes to plan they’ll attract one billion new customers. The company’s Australian operation is expected to play its part and aims to reach 2.5 million customers by 2020.

L’Oréal is leveraging Salesforce Marketing Cloud to get closer to customers and provide simple pathways to navigate L’Oréal’s many products.

Christophe Eymery, L’Oréal’s digital lead, explains the challenge faced by the 100 year-old business: “Our business was built brand by brand, and today we realise that customers are rarely dedicated to one brand – they’re multi-brand shoppers. The shift demands a portfolio approach to marketing and a multi-brand story,” he said.

Reaching more people, in more places, and doing that in a more personal way is massively complex – never mind that L’Oréal sells over 4,000 products.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Journey Builder tool provides the right answers, offering a drag-and-drop graphical user interface for customer interactions, across all media and channels. The ‘digital canvas’ Journey Builder delivers to L’Oréal marketers ensures they’re able to map customer journeys and engage with customers and prospects on a more intimate level.

“Years ago TV and magazines were the main instruments of mass communication,” said Eymery. “Nowadays we have an amazing opportunity with new technologies, and this is where Salesforce Journey Builder provide a holistic view of our touch-points. We can identify how and where our customers engage with our brands – on social media, offline or online, mobile, on their way to work, at work, wherever, whenever. We track all those customer interactions in Journey Builder and deliver messages at the right time.”

The centrepiece of L’Oréal’s personalised customer experience – and a key touch-point in the journey L’Oréal customers travel – is an app called Makeup Genius. The virtual makeup tester uses a sophisticated algorithm that effectively turns a smartphone into a mirror, allowing customers to try makeup and products on themselves to create their own look. In just six weeks 500,000 Australians downloaded the app.

Where Journey Builder provides L’Oréal with the framework for continuing the conversation, Salesforce Marketing Cloud module Social Studio is the company’s eye and ears.

There’s a lot to track. According to L’Oréal, in Australia, alone, there are 40,000 beauty-related conversations on social media every day. Social Studio does the hard work, sifting conversations for intelligence that will steer future sales campaigns. Using Social Studio’s Content Calendar, L’Oréal coordinates social campaigns, from creating and scheduling content to understanding how it performed.

“Social Studio is very powerful,” said Eymery. “The beauty industry changes quickly and new trends spring from manufacturers, and even customers themselves. We must stay close to changes and respond quickly, and Salesforce lets us do that by pinpointing what our customers expect and how they think about our brands.”
To a large extent, the company’s current success and future plans ride on a single information reservoir fed by the many streams of information flowing from all points across L’Oréal’s sales and marketing.