Who they are

Thrive Causemetics is a mission-driven beauty brand. They combine high-quality, 100% cruelty-free vegan cosmetics with a philanthropic model designed to empower women and support communities in need.

The background

For Thrive Causemetics, selling more products and increasing revenue goes beyond boosting the bottom line; it helps fund the support of women-led causes through their Bigger Than Beauty campaign.

With increased competition among beauty brands, Thrive wanted to find ways to boost its revenue stream, focusing on creating more hyper-personalized messages for customers. Tied to that, the marketing team wanted a process to streamline workflows, ensuring readers got individualized emails personalized to their purchasing and browsing interests without increasing IT involvement or requiring additional manual updates.

The challenge

Like many modern beauty brands, loyalty and repeat purchase rate are crucial for Thrive Causemetics. Introducing new products, rewards, and personalization are key to retention. However, doing it seamlessly while creating awareness for new products or purchase opportunities and tailoring announcements strategically by applying them to the right audience group is an art.

This is where Zembula came in. We worked with Thrive to raise their loyalty game by empowering their customers with real-time loyalty information against their browse, cart, and past purchase behaviors. So whenever loyalty program members receive a Thrive email, they always know what kind of spending opportunities they have.

The solution

We partnered with Thrive and implemented Zembula Dimensions to help streamline setup and create an easy-to-use personalization strategy. That started with dynamic email banners and using a process we call bookending the daily email with personalization. 

After testing it with many retailers, we’ve found it’s the most effective way to add personalization to the daily email. Plus, it doesn’t impact the marketing team’s workflow. The approach uses a Smart Banner™ at the top of each email sent and a Smart Kicker™ at the bottom. 

To start, we begin with implementation and testing. We created a four week longitudinal test measuring revenue between two audiences. In the “A” group, the readers didn’t see Dimensions, and in the “B” group, they did. To reduce noise from the testing, audience members are only added to a group when the images load in their email the first time. Once added to a group, they remain in it for the entire testing period. This ensures statistical significance.

The results

After running the longitudinal revenue-based audience test for four weeks, Thrive Causemetics saw a 17% revenue lift from the audience seeing Dimensions and delivered 12x return on spend.

Here are some of their results:

• Return on spend: A 12x return on spend, achieved through a fully automated program.
• Revenue lift: Thrive saw a 17% lift in revenue using Dimensions.
• Unique daily email use cases: 67 personalized use cases.
• Time to test: 4 weeks of longitudinal testing.
• Time to launch: 3 weeks, 7 weeks all-in, including testing.

The takeaways

With Zembula Dimensions, Thrive Causemetics transformed its email program through automated personalization, delivering major revenue lifts and return on spend while improving operational efficiency.