Building a Personalisation Programme with Competetive Edge
The Sephora Story
Sephora is one of the most recognisable beauty brands in the world - with an incredibly loyal customer base and a clear vision for how great retail should feel. In the UK, the team had already made impressive strides in digital innovation, with experimentation and customer insight playing a key role in their approach to ecommerce.
Success Story
Grounding personalisation efforts in purpose
We worked closely with the Sephora team to help take that momentum and shape it into a clear, scalable personalisation programme, one that could be aligned across teams, guided by data, and designed to deliver meaningful impact over time.
Challenges Faced and Strategic Focus
Our role was to help take that momentum and shape it into a clear, scalable personalisation programme, one that could be aligned across teams, guided by data, and designed to deliver meaningful impact over time.
Appearing Competitive in a Price-Sensitive Market: In a market where customers compare quickly, Sephora’s new customer offer provided a strong acquisition incentive. Ensuring this was surfaced early in the journey captured attention from shoppers likely weighing multiple options.
Enhancing Rather than Sacrificing the Customer Journey: Retailers often lean on pop-ups to push important offers. However, pop-ups are quickly dismissed, only shown after multiple page views, and therefore reduce the segment exposed to them. By instead making the offer persistently visible and accessible across the journey, we ensured customers were continually primed for the saving, without adding friction.
Simple Targeting Tweak, Huge Benefits: New customer offers are typically shown only on the first visit, missing higher-intent customers who return multiple times before purchasing (a sizeable segment). This small change delivered outsized results, particularly for this high-intent group who had previously been overlooked.
Key Focus
- Grounding personalisation efforts in purpose
- Building customer loyalty
- Customer first personalisation
Key Points and Success Highlights
Together, we developed a tailored audience segmentation model - built around Sephora’s real customer types and intent signals - which now underpins how they run personalisation in Dynamic Yield. It’s made it easier to identify friction, surface opportunities, and serve relevant experiences in ways that reflect how customers actually shop.
But more than that, it’s enabled the team to move faster and more confidently, with every personalisation idea run first as an experiment, then scaled based on results.
Sephora now has a programme designed not just to optimise journeys, but to build stronger connections with customers and to keep them at the forefront of beauty ecommerce in the UK.
We're proud to play a part in it.
- +150% Increase in social media engagement
- 30% Growth in website traffic
Programme in focus
Thoughts from our collaboration
What the client said
"Conversio has been pivotal in our goal to quantum leap personalisation. Their approach has been refreshing, working with us to understand our business needs, our vision. We now truly understand our audiences and their behaviour, resulting in a robust strategy and roadmap to meet our customers' needs. Conversio’s end-to-end capabilities have allowed us to work at a pace, delivering insights and great results."
Suzie Thomas, Head of Ecommerce
What we love
"With a deep commitment to understanding their customers and building relationships, Conversio bring the brand to life online. This allows us to create playful, immersive, and personalised digital moments that truly engage shoppers."
Beth Hodge, Head of Client Success
What Other Clients Say
Ocado
"I highly recommend Conversio to any business looking to optimise their online presence and drive measurable results. Their professionalism and dedication make them a standout partner."
Shelby Moncherry Desfosse, Digital Product & Optimisation Lead
Laithwaites Wine
"Data is at the heart of what Conversio do, which enables us to work with experts in identifying key pain points/opportunities and looking at suitable solutions to address these via a robust, but flexible, test plan."
Dave Wood, Head of Digital Performance
Monsoon
"Conversio provided incredibly valuable insight to support and extend upon core business strategies allowing us to channel focus on site areas with the highest potential; critical amidst challenging trading conditions. A series of targeted tests, despite their simplicity, drove significant revenue gains translating into a positive trend shift for topline metrics. This process is an important aspect in being able to quantify the value the CRO programme and Conversio add to the business. We’ve formed a strong working relationship with the team over the last few years and have every confidence in the guidance and recommendations that they make."
Jamie Russell, Ecommerce Manager
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Common Questions
Your Questions, Answered
What services do you offer?
We offer comprehensive optimisation, experimentation, and personalisation as part of our bespoke programmes which encompass a broad range of disciplines including analytics, data warehouses, workshops, UX design, etc.
How do I get started and is there a trial?
We recommend a 6-month Activation Period which facilitates onboarding, discovery workshops, analytics, tools, and programme setup. Depending on goals and objectives, we will agree on success metrics for the period to measure performance with no lock-in if these are not met.
How much do your programmes cost?
Our programmes are tailored to your stage and need, and we use a series of assessment and qualification criteria to establish the right balance of strategy vs. execution. This can include data and analytics, audience segmentation, software, and tools. Broadly speaking, entry-level programmes start from around £10,000 per month.
Do you work with small businesses?
Absolutely! We are passionate about helping businesses of all sizes thrive. There are some prerequisites in order for us to be able to deliver value and run a successful programme, such as a minimum of 150,000 MUVs. These are assessed on a case-by-case basis.
What makes Conversio different?
We take a very different view of experimentation. We were founded on the principles of honesty, transparency, and sustainability and these values are woven into the fabric of everything we do. No inflated results or metrics, no manipulative tactics. Just humans engineering for humans.
What is your typical programme timeline?
For the purposes of achieving significance, our Activation Periods usually run for 6-months with onward programme terms of 12 or 24 months. Naturally, a longer term enables us to offer more favourable, incentivised pricing.