The Business
Born on Molton Street in London in 1971, Molton Brown is a brand with a uniquely British heritage. All their products, which include beauty, bath, and fragrances, have been made in England from day one, and they pride themselves on their commitment to quality and sustainability. The brand champions beauty that’s kinder to the environment, actively working on reducing waste, promoting recycling, and conducting zero testing on animals.
Molton Brown is a leading brand in the prestige cosmetics portfolio of the Japanese company, Kao Corporation. Consumers can find Molton Brown everywhere around the world, from travel retail to luxury department stores and esteemed hotels.
The Challenge
Molton Brown’s legacy e-commerce system was unable to support the kind of luxury experience befitting the brand’s customers. In the crowded luxury beauty sector, customers expect seamless, personalized experiences across every touchpoint. However, Molton Brown couldn’t handle high levels of online traffic reliably or share customer data readily with ERP and supply chain systems. In addition, the brand’s website had become dated, lacking key functionality expected by consumers.
Looking for ways to grow Molton Brown Limited, Japan’s Kao Corporation knew customer experience was key. Kao sought an omnichannel customer experience that lived up to the Molton Brown legacy. With a key strategic focus on experience, the company set to work on delivering exceptional customer interactions — but it needed the right technology to help it inspire online shoppers. To create a distinctive and consistent experience both in store and online, the company selected SAP solutions.
“We wanted to make sure the experience of the brand would be consistent across channels, whether it’s outlet, wholesale, hotel, retail, or e-commerce. Whichever channel the consumer visits, they see our product categories the same way in the aisles as they see online, so consumers will never get confused. They’ll get a more seamless experience.”
The Solution
Data fragmentation, multiple legacy tools, and fast-evolving privacy standards were making it difficult for Molton Brown to manage journeys and maximize value from every customer interaction. The brand decided to implement the SAP Commerce Cloud solution due to its comprehensive digital commerce functionality, which it knew would enhance personalization, peak-traffic handling, and speed. To adopt a retail omnichannel mindset, the team also integrated SAP Commerce Cloud with the SAP Emarsys platform, further breaking down data silos and empowering the brand to deliver personalized engagement and drive greater loyalty.
SAP Emarsys’s seamless integration with SAP Commerce Cloud wasn’t the only reason Molton Brown was drawn to the omnichannel engagement platform. The luxury beauty brand was also keenly interested in SAP Emarsys’s predictive segmentation and AI-powered lifecycle management, ease of use for building and testing consumer journeys, and the possibilities for connecting their SAP Cloud ERP with their front-end strategies.
Creating a truly luxurious omnichannel journey
When it comes to a luxury brand experience, most consumers picture interactions that are effortless for them and make them feel pampered. As a producer of exceptional artisan fragrances, Molton Brown takes the luxury experience seriously and strives to elevate the consumer experience across the complete customer lifecycle.
The Molton Brown journey includes automated campaigns that foster long-lasting loyalty:
- Welcome Series: New contacts are welcomed through a series of contacts across touchpoints, providing education about available products and transparency about how Molton Brown creates ethical, sustainable products.
- Birthday Program: This campaign filters by tier and uses webhooks to add loyalty points, and then SAP Emarsys sends a targeted voucher code.
- Friends and Family: This campaign enables the brand to reward their most loyal subscribers with exclusive sales and benefits.
- Replenishment Triggers: Based on consumer data and preferences, consumers receive automated reminders to replenish their favorite Molton Brown products before they’re inconvenienced by an empty bottle.
- Abandoned Cart: Automated notifications remind consumers that they were shopping for products and make it easy for them to return to finish their purchase on the Molton Brown website.
The brand continues to expand and enhance the customer lifecycle. They’re planning a new retention and win-back campaign, which will feature filters to keep consumers from receiving competing offers, participation checks, and A/B testing to form a control group.
Reaching the right audience on the right channel at the right time
Molton Brown engages with consumers across numerous channels, including email, SMS, and multiple social media platforms. With SAP Emarsys, they’re able to engage their consumers and educate them about their ethical, artisanal products using a high-touch, end-to-end omnichannel journey.
The brand seamlessly delivers different content across channels based on audience segmentation. For instance, knowing that their Gen Z audience dislikes using email and prefers to use their phone or social apps to engage, Molton Brown targets the different generations with different channels based on such known preferences. Consumers may see different content on Instagram than on Facebook, but the message still gives information that’s specifically targeted for that consumer. By integrating product and transaction data from SAP Commerce, point-of-sale, and loyalty systems into SAP Emarsys, Molton Brown gains a complete customer view. This enables more sophisticated segmentation and a deeper understanding of customer preferences and behaviors, which in turn drives more relevant engagement and stronger loyalty
Molton Brown also uses Send-Time Optimization in SAP Emarsys to predict when consumers are most likely to engage with a message. By sending the right message at the right time, the brand has seen a 5-10% increase in open rates.
Analyzing growth opportunities
KPIs and clear results are incredibly important to Molton Brown. The brand measures performance on a wide variety of metrics, including conversion rate, email health, customer lifetime value (CLTV), growth and retention, and loyalty engagement. Molton Brown uses the dashboards and analytics available in SAP Emarsys to understand which channels are performing better, enabling them to optimize their strategies and deliver more seamless experiences.
“Integrating data from all channels to get a unified view of the customer helps the leadership team gather insightful analytics from which they can derive actional insights. This is how we inform marketing strategies to improve overall customer experience.”
Driving key sustainability initiatives
One of the most critical KPIs for the Molton Brown leadership team is ESG, or Environmental, Social, and Governance. They tie their programs and planning to how sustainable they are in their product choices. Through their launch of their new refillable solutions (part of their effort to eliminate disposable plastics) and by carefully targeting sustainability-minded shoppers (such as those who browsed sustainability webpages), Molton Brown found that there was a 22% average order volume increase for ESG shoppers vs. non-ESG shoppers, as well as a 37% increase in frequency of purchase. From this, Molton Brown uncovered that their customers were not only buying sustainable products across the market, but that customers cared about how sustainable the product was.
According to Naresh, “We recognize the growing consumer demand for sustainable products and services, which is why we integrate sustainability into our core strategy. It gives us the competitive edge in terms of driving brand loyalty. To enhance the effectiveness of our sustainability initiatives, our digital strategy is critical. With SAP Emarsys, we can leverage data-driven insights and also understand how to enhance the effectiveness of these sustainability initiatives for our sustainability-minded segments.”
“We have planned a variety of ESG [Environmental, Social, and Governance] initiatives to grow, promoting our ESG presence further with our refillable bottles. We also launched a loyalty program and have planned various ESG reward club points and promotions. We’ll continue to focus on that and innovate new ways to promote consumers to use more refillable bottles, which are more beneficial for the environment. We also opened a subscription channel for customers to have that complete lifecycle. We are connecting all of this with SAP Emarsys, SAP Commerce Cloud, and our loyalty programs.”
Using data from every touchpoint
Molton Brown engages consumers across email, web, multiple social platforms, and SMS. With the SAP Emarsys unified customer profile, the brand can create a holistic view of the customer and leverage data to automatically segment customers into relevant audience and deliver more targeted, relevant messages. This enhanced experience helps drive long-lasting loyalty.
Optimizing results
“We’re A/B testing regularly and testing different functions, which means we can measure incremental revenue. We’ve seen really good results from an engagement rate perspective as well, and I think what we’re proving is that when you get to know your customers and you send them more personalized messages that they want to see, it helps everything — we see revenue grow, engagement rates grow, better traffic, just a better overall customer experience.”
The Impact
Thanks to SAP Emarsys, Molton Brown’s marketing is now focused on lifecycle value and omnichannel orchestration. By breaking down data silos and unifying customer profiles, they’ve created a seamless journey across digital touchpoints, so when customers visit different channels, they can see that it’s all one brand that delivers a consistently luxurious and satisfying experience.
The brand has achieved:
- Triple-digit growth in year-over-year email revenue in 6 months
- 5x increase in revenue from email
- 20-25% increase email open rates without increasing unsubscribes
- 10x increase in weekly subscribers
- 5-10% increase in open rates by implementing Send-Time Optimization
- 50% growth of the CRM database in 6 months using Web channel
Going forward, Molton Brown plans to continue innovating as they scale SAP Emarsys across markets and consolidate their marketing tools.
Optimizing results
“Consumers expect brands to respond and interact with them in real time. Thanks to SAP Emarsys and SAP Commerce Cloud, we never have to worry about performance issues during high-traffic peaks and can be there for our customers.”