The local arm of L’Oreal is looking to close the sales loop and in the process have a better, more cohesive conversation, with its customers. In order to do so it's appointed a director of CRM in Australia.
Marco Ruschioni joined the business three weeks ago and has been tasked with creating more one-to-one conversations with consumers as well as doubling the businesses database of customers from one to two million over the next five years. Before joining L’Oreal Ruschioni was a global CRM director for Hotels.com.
Speaking with AdNews L’Oreal's head of digital Christophe Eymery said it's important for beauty brands to have personal conversations with their consumers and bringing in a CRM director to this market is a way for the brand to align with what the business is doing globally.
“What we've learnt across the world is there’s an appetite from consumers to learn more from beauty brands and for the past 10 years, it's not as if we've done nothing, we set up EDM programs where we dispatched emails to our consumers on a monthly basis, but this way of communication is not particularly sophisticated, it’s not very personalised,” Eymery said.
To rectify this, in February L’Oreal entered into a partnership with Salesforce, with the technology provider now housing all of L’Oreal's databases.
Eymery explained that brining Ruschioni on board, as well as the partnership with Saleforce aims to drive engagement with subscribers in the first instance and the second phase will involve driving more sign-ups.
The partnership and new role come just months after the business launched its Make Up Genius augmented reality, which at the time signalled the business shifting the focus of its advertising budgets to developing digital utilities for consumers.
Eymery told AdNews that more than half a million Australian's have downloaded the app and with the bolstered CRM offering from the brand, it now aims is to close the loop between people who are playing with products on the app and those purchasing products.
“It's great to have this [augmented reality app] but now we need to nurture it,” he said.
The Australian reported this morning that the business is looking to divert 6% of its marketing budget in the next year to its CRM effort in order to increase the cross-promotion of new brands to existing customers.
It is understood that down the line L'Oreal is expecting to partner with retailers to create bespoke in-store activations using the augmented reality technology as well as an e-commerce function that will allow people to buy products from the app.
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