Haircare brands have been experiencing significant growth and competition over the past few years, in marketing where retention rates are usually higher than in other industries. With more acquisition and retention channels available for any brand, it's easy to connect with customers. But it's hard to do it the right way. As the needs for haircare are always divided into sub-niches (long, short, dyed, curly, wavy, coiled, straight hair, etc.), there is room for plenty of effective marketing strategies.
At Panoramata, we analyzed a dozen top-performing hair care brands to gather helpful marketing insights. We highly recommend incorporating these email ideas into your next campaign to give it a boost.
Attract customers using social proof
Personal care is one of the major industries where customers rely on the opinions of others (most especially the current product users) before trying it out for themselves. Bragging that experts approve your product adds reliability and confidence among prospective customers. Gussi, a hair treatment brand, has effectively utilized this approach by sharing that a celebrity hairstylist and salon owner uses the same product and have been amazed by the results seen on his own clients.
There’s always something about popularity that attracts customers like a magnet. Gussi has partnered with an influencer who’s known in this field of expertise. So, popularity plus expertise takes this social proof email to the next level.
Another thing we love about this newsletter is the way they managed to present different types of social proof in a single email. One was coming from a hair professional/salon owner, one was a press mention from a famous French magazine, and one was a statement based on a client’s experience. This combined testimonial strengthens their claim.
Even pro-stylists are gushing over Gussi!
Specify the reasons to love your products
One of the ultimate goals of any business, in general, is for the customers to love their products and keep coming back. So, how do you convince the customers to love them? Customers naturally love products that meet (or exceed) their needs. But the competition nowadays goes beyond the basic features and functions. For a beauty product, some aspects are considered before trying it out. For instance, the ingredients, the science behind the formulation, its usability, etc.
You can list down as many unique attributes of your products as possible. Then the more it will be convincing for people to give it a chance to touch their skin/hair/body. Take this example from Sienna Naturals.
Here, the brand created a simple lineup of important characteristics of the products they offer. They chose to use short, non-technical words which in a way, could be easily understood and remembered by the customers. They laid out each point with enough spacing so customers can easily digest what was written.
10 Reasons To Love Sienna Naturals 🤍
Share knowledge and useful tips
Sure, they’ll love it! Emails that share tips, guides, and interesting knowledge can capture your audience's attention. This serves as an important channel to share valuable resources for a certain topic or problem. At the same time, it’s an opportunity to showcase how your products can address these specific concerns.
This email from Sienna Naturals supplies not just tips but knowledge and a quick guide on how to check your hair’s porosity. It empowers the audience to be able to test their own hair. And if they’re not pleased with the result, they can resort to the very same brand that made them do this vital checkup in the first place.
This is an example of a solution-focused approach as they present the tips to solve a known problem first, then a test to find out what might be the cause, and finally the solution — their product! Not to forget that they were able to promote their blogs with a CTA to find more topics. So it’s an excellent route towards conversion, eventually.
4 tips for keeping your hair hydrated 💦
Promote your custom solutions
Capitalize on the concept that every individual’s hair is unique and personalized solutions are key to addressing particular needs. Many hair care brands embrace this fact that’s why they offer custom, targeted solutions by taking a set of questionnaires so they can assess the hair type and create a distinctive formula based on the result of the quiz.
Check out this email from Function of Beauty and how they incorporated the quiz and a helpful guide to answer it correctly and smoothly. For this, they used supporting illustrations, categories (hair type, structure, moisture, etc.) short definitions of each category, and the processes of how to determine to which their hair belongs — they called it a cheat sheet. By doing this approach, the customers would feel that the Quiz was easy to accomplish because there was an available guide. It addresses hesitation since most of the quizzes out there take a lot of time and brain cells to accomplish. Remember, quizzes are there to get detailed information needed and not to exhaust the customers.
For you, by you – get customized haircare
Show your values as a brand
Prose understands the importance of taking a break from promotional content. To introduce your brand better, it’s crucial to share content that aligns with your mission and values. Prose, in this email, shares their way of leading towards sustainability and being a certified B-Corp company. So they were able to put emphasis on their care for the planet, apart from creating hair care solutions. Through this, they reorient the customers on the values they uphold. And if they share the same values, they’d embrace the brand seriously and would even participate in its advocacy.
This email also shows that Prose serves both the people and the planet. It’s a way of building a strong brand image. Remember, people would love to know that your company is not just here to make money but to make a difference too.
For Earth Day, and every day.
Offer products relevant to the season
Every season has its pros and cons so there’s definitely a need to adjust your offers to make them timely and relevant. Otherwise, you can’t expect a good conversion considering the current demand.
Briogeo focused on the 3 main problems that summer can bring about and presented their product as perfect for this time of the year. It’s a straight-to-the-point approach to offering a solution backed with social proof and a little trivia about UV protection. The subject line “Don’t do summer without it” seems powerful as it connotes that the product is a must-have. The solution to the main problems, the use of social proof, and the beauty of the subject lines create a winning combination to make this email stand out.
Don’t do summer without it
BFCM Tactics & Best Practices
Start Early
Even before BFCM, start promoting an "Early Savings" sale to build momentum before launching your main BFCM offers. The most successful brands during BFCM are those that start early and run the longest campaigns.
Leverage Pop-Ups
Before and during BFCM, use pop-ups across your website to highlight your offers. This captures attention and allows you to collect emails for targeted follow-up campaigns.
Don't Be Afraid Of Using Similar Visuals
Worried that you don't have enough assets for multiple emails? Don't be. Sending similar campaigns is common practice, as Briogeo does here.
Create Momentum
Make sure to plan a campaign that runs for several days. Increase discounts, change your offers, and send last minute & last chance emails.
Acknowledge the Context
People receive 100s of offers per day - make sure to acknowledge this in your emails as well ("you know what day it is", "a lot of emails today", etc).
