How does a multimillion-dollar global brand with thousands of employees and even more happy customers continue to grow? It’s a question that many enterprise brands face as they strive to keep their presence, customer base, and sales growing—and bareMinerals is no exception. The cosmetics brand known around the world for its clean, mineral-based makeup experienced early growth on the QVC shopping channel, but has been evolving its omnichannel strategy over the past three decades. The company has been focused on connecting directly with its loyal community of customers, wherever they choose to shop, and investing in its online shopping experience in particular.
“We’ve invested a lot of time over the past year in building up the digital capabilities of the brand,” explains Carney Nir, Vice President of Ecommerce & Digital Experience at bareMinerals. “We want to ensure that consumers—whether they’ve landed on the site for the first time or they’ve been shopping with us for 25 years—have a bespoke, customized experience to help them feel more confident.” This is particularly important in the competitive beauty industry.
In addition to migrating to Shopify Plus and its advanced shopper features, bareMinerals added Buy with Prime to its site, which allows Prime members to check out with benefits like fast, free delivery and easy returns. A third initiative was launching a display ad campaign with Amazon DSP to reach engaged shoppers across the web through tailored ads that feature Buy with Prime products that they might be interested in.
“This has been critical for us to move the needle,” Carney says about the initiatives. In fact, after adding Buy with Prime, bareMinerals has seen a 60% uplift in shopper conversion and 40% uplift in revenue per site visitor. And the Amazon DSP campaign helped deliver a combined return on ad spend (ROAS) of 12.8x across Amazon.com and bareMinerals.com.
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An experience that shoppers trust
BareMinerals has spent decades building its loyal customer base, but the average consumer has come to expect a lot out of brands. Shoppers want to learn about and purchase products on preferred channels that they trust. And they want their orders shipped fast and free, with easy returns. According to Wunderman Thompson’s The Future Shopper Report, 70% of consumers said they wished that retailers and brands offered similar services to Amazon Prime.
BareMinerals has stayed at the forefront of these expectations over the years, innovating not only its products, but also its shopper experience. Adding Buy with Prime to its ecommerce site has helped bareMinerals on that path more recently, establishing trust with shoppers because they know that they’re going to get a checkout and fulfillment experience that they love from Amazon.
“Buy with Prime really adds that level of credibility because of the trust that consumers have with Prime,” Carney says. “Being able to offer that to consumers when they’re shopping our site gives that extra level of confidence, and we see that in the results.”
A big part of that trusted Prime shopping experience is the fast, free delivery that consumers now expect from all of their favorite online stores. Myriad research points to the importance of fast shipping and free shipping in shoppers’ purchasing decisions.
“Buy with Prime gives our customers the free and fast shipping that we know is very important to them,” Carney says. Similar to industry research, bareMinerals’ own post-purchase survey results show that 70% of its customers rank fast shipping as “very important.”
The added trust is particularly important in the beauty industry where brands—both big and small—are vying for shoppers’ attention. Buy with Prime has actually helped bareMinerals stand out in the crowd and attract a higher volume of new customers. For shoppers who are new to the brand, Buy with Prime helps establish trust early and allows the shopper to try a product without having to meet a minimum order threshold or worry about a complicated returns process. This helps remove “any hesitation they might have about the order,” Carney says.
She adds, “Beauty is so competitive, so it’s very easy for another new brand to swoop in and be the hot brand of the minute. So, Buy with Prime is helping us acquire new customers.”
A new way to drive traffic
Another tool that bareMinerals has leveraged to stand out in the crowd is the Amazon DSP solution for Buy with Prime, which uses display ads to remarket to engaged shoppers as they browse thousands of sites and apps beyond Amazon.com. The solution taps into exclusive Amazon shopping signals and audiences to display relevant ads to shoppers who have expressed interest in bareMinerals products, or similar products and categories. Different than the traditional Amazon DSP offering, the unique solution for Buy with Prime merchants points shoppers directly to the Buy with Prime product pages on bareMinerals’ site.
This aspect of the solution was especially compelling for the teams at bareMinerals and Within, a digital marketing agency and Buy with Prime Partner. Says Josh Miller, Executive Director of Paid Media at bareMinerals, “Amazon DSP ads that point to a brand’s ecommerce store is very interesting because, basically, it’s marrying the best of two worlds. Amazon has a tremendous amount of data that is valuable to the ad strategy, while the dotcom store has the rich experience that’s tailored to its shoppers.”
Josh’s team was particularly interested in the shopping signals and audiences available through Amazon DSP. “Any demand-side platform (DSP) can place ads in specific inventory, but the thing that sets Amazon DSP apart is its unique data,” he explains. “So it makes the clicks or eyes on your ads worth more than others.”
With help from Within, bareMinerals launched an Amazon DSP display ad campaign for its Buy with Prime products. The campaign saw ROAS of 6.9x across its ecommerce site and a combined ROAS of 12.8x across Amazon.com and bareMinerals.com.
Although the ad solution’s uniqueness makes it hard to compare to other advertising efforts, the team believes that “it’s a good tool to have on our belt,” Josh says. “It clearly worked, and it was interesting to see what the ROAS looks like across our two main digital stores—especially because that’s been a particular blind spot.”
A checkout that converts
Since adding Buy with Prime to 50-plus SKUs on its ecommerce site, including its award-winning loose powder foundation, bareMinerals has seen a 60% increase in shopper conversion and 40% increase in revenue per visitor.
“I don’t think we’ve really seen results like that with anything that we’ve tried,” Carney admits. “If we see a few points of conversion increase, we’re happy. We know that this is going to have a significant incremental revenue uplift for the year”—which is exactly how an enterprise brand already at the top of its game can continue to grow.
She acknowledges the delicate dance that growing ecommerce brands have when expanding to additional sales channels, not wanting a new channel to sabotage sales of existing channels. bareMinerals also has a dedicated Amazon Store and sells through department stores and specialty retailers.
“I think there’s a tendency, particularly for established brands, to think ‘I’m going to lose my customers if I add another channel and I’m going to lose that data’,” Carney explains. “But that doesn’t happen.” Merchants using Buy with Prime keep the customer and order information from Buy with Prime orders, which they can use for post-purchase nurture campaigns and building customer relationships.
Echoing Josh’s sentiments, she points out how Buy with Prime helps improve returns on the company’s marketing investments, especially during big sales events and shopping seasons. Because Buy with Prime orders are shipped in as fast as one day, shoppers have more time to get their gifts for those key shopping events, like during the holidays. For merchants like bareMinerals, those extra days mean more opportunity for last-minute sales.
“Adding Buy with Prime allows us another 5–7 business days of selling during peak holiday periods,” Carney says. “This means that tens of thousands of customers have the ability to purchase products online and get them delivered in time for the holidays.”
Whether during the holidays or an average day during the year when a customer runs out of tinted moisturizer, Buy with Prime and its suite of solutions are helping bareMinerals deliver for its customers. And at the end of the day, that’s what’s most important to the team: “Really valuing and celebrating the community of bareMinerals fans,” Carney says. “For us, Buy with Prime is a really nice benefit, but more importantly, it has allowed us to provide our consumers with additional benefits.”