An explosion of digital channels has created a complex ecosystem for fashion and beauty brands to navigate when looking to engage customers today. But it has also unlocked new, unprecedented opportunities to enhance consumer connectivity for the brands willing to reimagine their approach.
Early adopters of AI-powered personalisation are already seeing conversion rate increases of up to 92 percent, while top-performing retailers engaging customers across three or more coordinated channels significantly outpace competitors, according to Braze’s Retail Customer Engagement Review. Indeed, the difference between struggle and success can lie in harnessing the transformative potential of new tools and technologies, when implemented thoughtfully.
BoF’s knowledge report “Rethinking Fashion and Beauty’s Digital Customer Experience,” in partnership with customer engagement platform Braze, reveals how leading retailers are seizing these opportunities.
Industry executives from brands and retailers including 111Skin, Tala and LuisaViaRoma, and independent experts from Wharton Business School and future agency Radar, shared their insights alongside Braze’s head of retail and e-commerce industry marketing, Meredith Mitchell.
Now, BoF shares some key insights from chapter three, “Strategies for Success”, examining the actionable approaches brands can adopt to overcome today’s engagement challenges.
Levelling Up Personalised Digital Touchpoints
- When fashion and beauty retailers remain trapped in rudimentary demographic segmentation, they miss opportunities to create the individualised experiences that drive both conversion and premium pricing power.
- Luxury beauty brand 111Skin uses “tech learning” to provide customers with tailored skincare solutions while offering “the option to engage with a real human, get follow-up advice and get a more personalised routine,” says chief marketing officer Michael Edelmann.
- AI-powered decisioning tools are making personalisation achievable without time-consuming manual effort. Platforms like BrazeAI use reinforcement learning to dynamically determine optimal messaging, timing, channels and incentives for individual customers in real-time.
Creating Synergies Between Stores, Sites and Social Platforms
- Rather than operating channels in isolation, leading retailers are creating seamless experiences that bridge digital and physical touchpoints.
- Activewear brand Tala, for example, designs physical spaces to encourage organic content creation. “We structured how we were going to use the physical space to bring in content creators,” says Morgan Fowles, chief executive officer. “Now they have our elevated dressing room, our lighting, our background, our logo, our products, all at hand. It’s creating a world for them to make content in.”
- “A journey is iterative and never truly ends,” says Meredith Mitchell, head of retail and e-commerce industry marketing at Braze. “It is crucial to provide value with every brand interaction that a customer will have with your brand — and it should not stop just because someone is not engaging or opening the app.”
- E.l.f. Beauty increased monthly mobile app usage by 125 percent over six months on Braze by connecting social media activity with in-app experiences. Braze links social media engagement with the app, so E.l.f. knows what content interests consumers and makes the app feel like a natural extension of Instagram.
Unifying Siloed Teams and Systems
- The most critical strategic lever remains internal: ensuring channels and teams feed into a cohesive whole. Cross-functional collaboration proves essential.
- Thirty-one percent of Braze-defined “Ace Brands” — those using customer-centric, real-time data focused on the entire customer lifecycle — meet across teams multiple times weekly, enabling shared goals and better analytics for more personalised messaging.
- At 111Skin, retail staff access customer shopping history globally, creating what Edelmann calls a “system-wide and ‘global vision’” that enables personalised in-store experiences informed by previous online or international purchases.
Rebuilding Brand Loyalty in a Value-Conscious Era
- Creating meaningful loyalty requires shifting from discount-driven programmes toward relationships based on relevance, trust and differentiated experiences.
- Some retailers are updating programme language from “loyalty” to “clubs” or “memberships” to emphasise community and exclusivity rather than passive rewards.
- AI enables brands to predict customer behaviour and deliver hyper-personalised experiences at scale, with timing proving to be critical. By leveraging data on when customers are most likely to convert and modelling churn propensity, retailers optimise messaging for maximum impact.
Discover more strategies for success in the report, including a deep-dive into “composable” technology architectures built on MACH principles — Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless. This approach treats technology like building blocks that can be quickly rearranged, enabling brands to launch campaigns and respond to trends without the friction of traditional systems.
Also in this report, BoF explores the current state of digital customer engagement in fashion and beauty, and the four critical challenges that fashion and beauty brands face while reimagining their omnichannel customer engagement strategies.
Download the full knowledge report to explore what it takes for fashion and beauty retailers to reimagine customer engagement strategies.
This is a sponsored feature paid for by Braze as part of a BoF partnership.
