Background

95% sales stemmed from offline prior to the pandemic year. Beauty events are one of the popular offline sales drivers regularly activated by luxe brands to excite shoppers. Luxe shoppers love the attractive deals, engaging advices from the experts and beauty advisors at beauty events, which made them tend to spend more on impulse. While live streaming has bloomed over the pandemic year, it was an extremely hard challenge when the brief is to build a 12-hour virtual event with 8 unique brands. We knew that the lack of engaging interactions and assisted browsing joy of an ordinary online setting is hard to lure the attention of luxe shoppers from behind the screen, and even more so to getting them to shop in the moment. We need a breakthrough formula to bring back the joy of beauty event that would excite luxe shoppers and boost sales.

Describe the creative idea (30% of vote)

To engage a category with high need for information transfer without face-to-face interaction, quality engagement and faster conversion are key to close the loop. We brought in the concept of “ask now, know now” to improvise the basic ‘see now, buy now’ livestreaming model on Facebook with Jumper AI. Whilst the onscreen excitements are on-going with all the physical event hypes, such as experts and influencers appearance to offer limited-time offers and advices, a simple hashtag at the comment column would activate an assisted product browsing by the bot based on selected interest, and concurrently offer a more intimate option should the shopper prefer to speak to a real-life beauty advisor. This creative framework has helped to achieve personalization at a much bigger scale than a physical event, where we could serve hundreds interested shoppers at one time and capture them right when the purchase intent is high.

Describe the strategy (20% of vote)

To build up the event excitement, the complexity stemmed from the individual brand’s unique audience base and the need to amplify its respective brand collections, line-up of KOLs and experts while ensuring the overall event awareness is widely spread. First, we consolidated all brand voices into one event hub page to hype up the bigness of the 8 brands in one event to build a larger pool of interested audience. At brand level, we applied L’Oreal Target Precision Optimisation framework that segmented the audience base uniquely to each brand for its dedicated brand show. With the larger audience pool drawn to the event hub page, we can re-engage them to response to different brand sessions throughout the 12-hour event to catch the limited time offers across all brands. The additional CRM and CRM look-a-like audience setup has also helped to contribute to the high attendance and conversion rate.

Describe the execution (20% of vote)

The virtual event offered shoppers curated content mirroring a physical event at home’s comfort. Each featured brand dedicated 1.5 hour with celebrities and influencers to promote products and activities, while mix-modelling of bot and real-life advisors incorporated assisted joy of physical shopping. In 2-week, a comprehensive media plan was drawn for the event with customized target for 8 individual brand plans. 10 days prior to the event, an event hub page was setup to build excitement. PR content was distributed to titles beyond Facebook reach. Brands launched messenger ads and prospect collection to recruit shoppers participation in brand session. On event day, video ad was live 30 minutes prior to build viewers base. Hosts direct viewers to activate messenger via brand’s hashtag and addressed concurrent enquiries without on-screen disruption. Messenger ads continued to engage past purchasers and cart abandoner post-live session via different re-marketing strategy to drive higher conversion rate.

List the results (30% of vote)

The first ever 12-hour virtual beauty festival has achieved an overwhelming response and made a feature in Forbes.com and listed as Facebook Business Case Study: Integration of social commerce. Business Achievement • One month’s worth of online sales in 24 hours • 33% above the set event target • Increase CRM base for respective brands, up to 4 digits Media achievement: • Activated >15,000 chats • Reached 2.6 million people • 47,000 video views • 12% post-engagement rate • 85 times higher engagement vs. global beauty industry standard “Experimenting with new sales formats always requires meticulous planning, and planning an all-day virtual beauty festival with multiple brands was an incredibly ambitious effort. Thanks to Facebook, Wavemaker, iDotYou and Jumper.ai, we were able to host an outstanding live event that deepened our engagement with our audience and boosted sales. It was a great success!” Eda Lim Head of Digital and eCommerce