Tribe Dynamics, the San Francisco-based influencer relationship management start up, analyzed beauty’s top brands’ email marketing initiatives and programs for the 30 day period between mid-September and mid-October. The analysis tracked and observed email newsletters sent by the top five beauty brands in mass and prestige as measured by their social influence and earned media value. Results take into consideration data from Tribe’s proprietary Email Marketing Analytics Platform. Below, the brands in the analysis with their earned media value:
Prestige
1. MAC: $5,654,690
2. Urban Decay: $3,287,519
3. Lancóme: $2,491,090
4. NARS: $2,458,832
5. Make Up For Ever: $2,02,815
Mass Market
1. Maybelline: $5,606,705
2. L’Oréal: $3,597,753
3. CoverGirl: $2,936,531
4. Revlon: $2,619,743
5. Rimmel: $2,028,425
Key Insights:
• MAC leads in email frequency with 0.53 emails received per day, or approximately 15 emails during the 30-day period. With the highest email frequency and EMV, MAC did not include any sales or offers collected during this time frame. Instead, the brand waives the cost of shipping on all orders. The combination of these speaks to the brand’s success building a loyal following of returning customers, without marginalizing the quality of the brand with discount-driven incentives.
• The prestige brands with higher EMV (MAC, Urban Decay) showed higher email frequency rates, emailing followers more frequently than their competition during the period.
• In contrast, the top five mass brands generating equally high EMV, in general, sent out far fewer emails and/or emails with much less content over the same time span. One of the more interesting takeaways from this data was the sheer absence of comprehensive email marketing programs among mass beauty brands. Of these brands, only Maybelline, with an email frequency of 0.14 (about 4.5 emails in the 30 days), managed to send emails beyond an initial confirmation of registration. Of this limited pool, no emails included a sale or offer, holiday special, link to video content, or specified shipping logistics. Likewise, L’Oréal and Rimmel sent only emails to confirm registration for their email newsletters, while CoverGirl and Revlon did not send any.
EDITOR’s NOTE: The email marketing programs of these brands were compared following these metrics: email frequency, percentage of emails offering sales/offers, percentage of emails highlighting a specific product, percentage of emails offering a holiday special, percentage of emails including a link to video content and the type of shipping offered within the email.
Tribe sources its data from the top 20,000 influencers in health, beauty and fashion. The brands included in each study are the most popular based on publicly available information of these brand’s annual revenue, reviews from consumers and retailers. To see the full report, click here.
