Creating a compelling online shopping journey through the eyes of eCommerce customers

Over the past 10 years, a Spanish cosmetics brand, Maquillalia, has been selling an extensive range of make-up products to their devoted base of eCommerce customers. See how they increased their conversion rate by 11.20% thanks to authentic User Generated Content.

Numbers

The Story

The Maquillalia business model was adopted 10 years ago in Spain when the founders realized that a lot of the best make-up brands were not available for make-up lovers within the country. By contacting these brands and distributing them through their eCommerce, they were able to establish a successful online retailer for beauty fanatics in Spain.

Thanks to social media, the brand has been able to grow immensely. These networks have helped establish the brand voice, image, and presence among their devoted online community, who see the brand as a credible source for learning about the best products on the market. So much so, that their customers share their opinions about Maquillalia products on these networks, through User Generated images and videos.

Knowing how valuable this kind of engagement is, the brand recognized that they could do more with it, while also aiding some of the other challenges they face selling cosmetics online.

“Really, the marketing channels of before – tv ads, radio, etc. – have really lost some of their credibility in that people aren’t sure what’s real anymore. Today, people look for real opinions from real people, who identify with a specific way of life and follow it. So when customers create content, others believe it. They take it as a reference. We believe that this is really important, and it’s what we base practically our entire strategy on.”

Sara Varo – Marketing Manager at Maquillalia

Challenge

As a cosmetics brand, selling products online poses unique challenges. Namely that beauty products are very personal, and customers are not able to try the products on or see if they work with their skin-type before purchase.

Aware of the issues that arise when selling their products online, Maquillalia has always been on the lookout for new ways to cater to the needs of eCommerce customers. Bringing together their desire to use their social media engagement, while giving customers a better way to shop for cosmetics products online, they decided to leverage a User Generated Content strategy through Flowbox technology.

“We have a huge challenge, which is that people can’t touch or feel our product. We have to overcome this in some way, and Flowbox is the way that we’re working to overcome this.”

Sara Varo – Marketing Manager at Maquillalia

Solution

“We’re good at listening and are very attentive to our customers. If they want to see a certain palette in action because they want to know how it will end up looking, the texture, etc. – we do it. And this is exactly how we’re using the Flowbox tool: to show how well our products work.”

Sara Varo – Marketing Manager at Maquillalia

With authentic User Generated Content, the brand is able to show online shoppers how their products work through the eyes of other buyers. This not only gives credibility to the brand, but it also helps them to solve the greatest challenge of selling cosmetics products online: the customers’ inability to try the product for themselves.

By seeing real customers use the products and share their opinions, the brand is able to leverage the engagement of their enthusiastic online community – giving them more reason to love the brand – while providing a crucial channel of understanding the Maquillalia products.

Most importantly, the technology helps the brand improve their eCommerce performance. By integrating their UGC into galleries and carousels on their website, they’ve now seen an 11.20% increase of conversion rate.

The integration has also encouraged customers to purchase more, as they see customers creating new looks with multiple Maquillalia products and want to do the same. This can also be seen in the data with a 15.68% average order value increase.

Results