Skincare Email Marketing: A Guide for Beauty Brands
When your beauty business grows and develops, your marketing should follow suit. Skincare email marketing is a way for your brand to adapt to growing audiences, keep their trust, and even boost sales, leading to further successes.
Here we’ll touch upon all the benefits that email marketing can bring to your business and go through your must-knows about it one by one. Let’s hit send and dive in!
Table of Contents
Key Takeaways
Start your skincare email marketing by building a steady subscriber list from your customer base.
Pick an email marketing platform that fits your needs and integrates with your ecommerce site.
Create an effective email marketing strategy by setting clear goals, planning your content, and analyzing results.
Personalize certain email offers to different parts of your subscriber base to present them with relevant info and make them feel seen.
Keep seasonality in mind and craft your email marketing strategy accordingly, with attention to trending products.
What is Email Marketing and How Can It Grow Your Business?
Email marketing is a type of marketing where your brand sends emails to your customers. The emails you send to customers can range from automated shipping updates all the way to personalized offers and discounts.
Brand owners and marketers across the globe see email as one of the most effective marketing channels, with the return on investment (ROI) being around $40. It means that every dollar you spend on email marketing, you get 40 bucks back in return.
And the high ROI is just one of the benefits of email marketing. There are other areas where email marketing can help with your goals.
You can motivate your customers and drive up sales with emails about product launches, special promos, and reminders to refill your customers’ faves.
You’re not depending on social media or other algorithms to reach your customer. With skincare email marketing, you land right in their personal inbox, letting you approach them directly and personally.
Skincare email marketing can encourage repeat orders. Sending emails to your customers is a way to remind them of your brand, and since skincare is consumable, you might approach them just in time when a refill is needed.
When done right, personalized emails make your customers feel special and appreciated, fueling brand loyalty.
How to Start Email Marketing: A Step-by-Step Guide
Build an Email List
The first step to any successful email marketing strategy is to collect emails and create a subscriber list. You’ll have to collect emails by incentivizing your existing and potential customers to sign up and voluntarily share their info.
One way to grow your subscriber list is by using lead magnets. That’s something valuable you can offer in exchange for someone’s email address. In the skincare email marketing world, you can do this with:
Discount codes and coupons, appearing as either pop-ups on your website or shown somewhere in the buying journey,
Guides and tutorials that your customer can receive after signing up (for example, a guide to glowing skin, tips on nighttime routines, makeup tutorials),
Quizzes about the customer’s skin type, where, upon successful completion, you ask for their email to share the results,
Early access or special discounts for an upcoming skincare collection.
These are just some of the skincare email marketing ideas for building an email list. You can, of course, offer something unique that only you can provide to your customers.
My suggestion is to really focus on your lead magnets, whichever one you ultimately use. Thoroughly consider what’s the most valuable thing you can pass on to your customers and trusty followers, because if your lead magnet is sloppy and without value, they’re going to see right through the shtick and go straight for the Unsubscribe button.
Choose an Email Marketing Platform
Choosing the right email marketing platform is crucial because that’s going to be the place where you write, design, send, and track your skincare email marketing campaigns.
There are different email platforms, each with its strong and weak points, but before you go checking them out, you should consider these aspects:
Ease of use. Is it beginner-friendly, or do you need coding (HTML) experience to use it?
Automation possibilities. See whether you can create automated email marketing campaigns for things like personalized offers, thank-you emails, and refill reminders.
Integration with your ecommerce platform. Your email marketing platform should seamlessly integrate with your chosen ecommerce platform (e.g. Shopify, WooCommerce).
Some of the most popular email marketing platforms you can check out are Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Omnisend, and ActiveCampaign.
Create Your Email Marketing Strategy
Set Goals and KPIs
No successful email marketing strategy can do without clear goals and KPIs. You need to know what you’re working toward and what you want to achieve in a specific time frame to analyze whether your skincare email marketing is effective.
You can go by different frameworks when setting the goals, but the most popular are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) or OKR (Objectives and Key Results).
Below, I’ve prepared a handy guide that outlines KPIs and objectives commonly set in email marketing.
| KPI and what it means | Objective | Skincare industry benchmark |
|---|---|---|
| Open rate — the percentage that indicates how many people opened your delivered email | Increasing engagement with the brand | 20–25% |
| Click-through rate — the percentage of delivered emails that received clicks (on CTA or content) | 3–4% | |
| Conversion rate — the share of people who completed an action (sign up, download, purchase, etc.) | Driving sales | 1–2% |
| Unsubscribe rate* — the share of people who unsubscribed after receiving your email. | Growing/keeping a steady audience | 0.2–0.5% |
*The unsubscribe rate shown above is typical for brands in the skincare industry. Any spikes should tell you that you need to change something, whether it’s the contents of the email, the frequency, or targeting (more on this later).
Plan Your Content
To keep track of what and when you send to customers, you should create an email content calendar. You need to find a balance between diverse and topical information and automated email flows (sets of emails).
As a skincare brand, you have a lot of touchpoints where you can educate your customers on routines, products, and ingredients — you can use that angle in your skincare email marketing with, for example, bi-weekly or monthly newsletters, first-purchase discounts, and launch announcements.
Overall, your content calendar should cover both promotional and educational angles, but the industry suggests a proportion between them, which is 20–30% promotional emails and 70–80% educational emails.
Analyze and Optimize
To grow your skincare marketing, you have to follow the metrics we looked at above, like open, click-through rate, conversions, and unsubscribe rate. When you send your first emails, compare them to the industry averages and see if you should continue in the same direction or change something.
You could even let your customers help you by selecting a small part of your subscribers and asking for their opinion with a short questionnaire about mobile-friendliness, visuals, and the contents. Adding a small discount coupon would be the cherry on top of their help. Happy customer = happy business owner!
Bonus Skincare Email Marketing Tips
Segment the Audience & Personalize the Emails
When you collect email addresses on your site, you have a choice to offer customers to fill in other relevant information about their skin type, so in the future you can segment them into the same group on your email platform. This way, you can customize product promotions you send out and only send the customers the most relevant offers.
Keep in mind consistency and timing
One of the cornerstones of quality skincare email marketing is keeping a steady yet realistic routine. Consider how much time you can dedicate to email marketing, and if you’ll need additional help with things like visuals or copy.
However, smart timing of your promotions and educational material makes your business stay timely and helpful to customers. Think, hydration routines during winter and sunscreen ABCs in summer.
Final thoughts
With marketing, email or otherwise, it’s all about creating a deeper connection with your audience. You’re destined for success if you can keep your emails helpful, personal, and relevant to the customers reading them, no matter what age or skin type they are, or where they’re from.
Approach building your email marketing as a house where you can always add building blocks as you go. When you notice results and sales from emails, you’ll also see possibilities to keep bettering your strategy and content.
May your efforts bring real results and happy customers!
Frequently Asked questions
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Email marketing is a type of marketing where your brand sends emails to your customers. Email is considered one of the most effective marketing channels, with a high return on investment. Other benefits are personalization opportunities, direct connection with customers, and driving up sales.
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You should start by offering a small discount in a banner or a pop-up on your website for those who subscribe. As your business grows, your skincare email marketing can evolve and become a point system with different benefits and offers.
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You should focus on a good balance between promotional and educational emails. The skincare marketing industry suggests around 20–30% of promo and 70–80% more educational emails.
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Absolutely, it can! Emails at the right time, with grabbing hooks, and quality visuals are a more effective marketing tool than you might think. The conversion rate for email marketing in skincare starts from 1% but can be as high as 5%.
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Your beauty brand can make a questionnaire or a quiz that’ll help you understand your customers better, be it asking questions about age or skin type. When you segment customers by specific needs or possible interests, you can create personalized emails, making them feel more understood and appreciated.
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