How Personalization is Helping Yon-Ka Paris Boost Conversions and Revenue

Yon-Ka Paris understands the value of personalized shopping experiences. Since 1954, the skincare company has been selling botanically-enriched creams, lotions and booster concentrates in spas worldwide. And since 2015, Yon-Ka Paris has been selling its products direct to consumers via its e-commerce website. Yon-Ka Paris’ products are all tailored to help meet the unique need of every skin type. Since personalization is such an important part of the company's products, Yon-Ka Paris puts a big focus on creating high-touch and personalized marketing experiences when communicating with its customers.

For help in creating these personalized marketing campaigns, Yon-Ka Paris turned to technology platform provider Listrak. After analyzing Yon-Ka Paris’ goals, Listrak recommended using its Predictive Content Solution to send out timely emails with personalized content. So far, the personalized email campaigns have delivered twice as many conversions and four times as much revenue as other email marketing programs. In an interview with Total Retail, Brittany Boykow, e-commerce manager and digital marketing analyst at Yon-Ka Paris, details how the skincare brand is successfully using customer data to personalize its marketing emails.

Total Retail: Why is it important for Yon-Ka Paris to have personalized communications with its customers?
Brittany Boykow:  As e-commerce continues to grow, customers are overwhelmed with more messages in their inboxes than ever before. It’s so easy to become just another overlooked email that the customer never even opens. Sending personalized communications allows brands to break through the noise and deliver a more personalized shopping experience that's unique to each customer. Presenting them with products and content that they're actually interested in helps give an edge up on the competition because it helps increase open, clickthrough and conversion rates, as well as trains subscribers to look out for your emails because they know that they contain something valuable and aren't just impersonal mass email sends.

TR: Why did Yon-Ka Paris partner with Listrak? What challenge was it trying to solve?
BB: We launched our website in June 2015. This was a completely new space for us since previously we had strictly been a B-to-B company, and we didn’t completely understand who our end customer was. Our challenge was trying to reach this new customer base, learn more about them, and communicate to them in the most effective way possible. We discovered Listrak in the midst of this, and it was the perfect partner for us because it allowed us to engage with this new consumer at all steps of the buying process, from discovery all the way through to post-purchase. Suddenly we went from struggling to reach the consumer to being able to send relevant, timely messages at just the right moment in their customer journey. This was a complete game changer for us.

TR: Can you describe the personalized email marketing program Listrak created with Yon-Ka Paris?
BB: The personalized email send featured a dynamic gift-with-purchase (GWP) offer at the top of the email that varied in aggressiveness depending on what segment the subscriber fell into. Below that were product recommendations that were unique to each subscriber and were based on machine learning algorithms that delivered data-driven personalized products with the intention of influencing each customer on their unique journey to purchase. The content section below that was matched to each subscriber based on his or her own personal interests, which was determined through Listrak’s natural language processing. This helped to foster increased engagement through personalization. Customers were divided into five different segments, and for this particular campaign, the email was sent once.

TR: Was the program designed to promote a particular product or event, or is it an ongoing program for Yon-Ka Paris?
BB: The campaign was designed to explore the effectiveness of offering a highly targeted, personalized email. Separately, we frequently send product recommendations, predictive content and promotional emails, but never have we combined all of these features into one email send. We wanted to see if we could drive more customer engagement and strengthen conversion rates by doing so. The results of the program were far better than we were expecting. We saw twice as many conversions and four times as much revenue. It really demonstrated the effectiveness of sending a personalized email to each individual customer. We were able to see how a personalized message really influenced and impacted their buying journey in such a positive way.

TR: What's next for Yon-Ka Paris and its relationship with Listrak? Any new programs on the horizon?
BB: We recently launched a loyalty program, and have been using Listrak to promote and grow it through advanced customer segmentation and personalized email sends. One strategy that we've tried is reusing the email I mentioned above and swapping out the offer, which previously was a GWP, to customers bonus points for purchasing on a specific day or selecting specific products. The email continues to perform better than any other email type we've sent, which really speaks to how important it is to send personalized emails.