How e.l.f. Beauty Became Gen-Z’s Latest (and Lasting) Obsession

The ActionIQ team hit Gartner Marketing last week in Denver, and we’re still feeling the Rocky Mountain high.

We loved having great conversations at our booth, talking to our community over cocktails and more — but one of our biggest highlights of the week was sharing the stage with Ekta Chopra, Chief Digital Officer at e.l.f Beauty — a leader in innovation and an incredible voice in the space.

If you missed the conversation at #GartnerMKTG, we have all the details wrapped up for you here on their journey to becoming Gen-Z’s go-to beauty brand for all things eyes, lips and face.

E.l.f. Turns a Big Problem Into a Bigger Opportunity

How do you become Gen-Z’s latest (and lasting) beauty obsession? Go where they go — their technology. Behind every screen, social channel and touchpoint that each digitally-savvy Gen-Z shopper explores lies a wealth of data and information. 

This leaves brands with a really great problem to have — they’re swimming in data. They may not have the tools they need to really use that data to their advantage. E.l.f. understood the opportunity they had with their data to generate amazing results for each customer.

The number one thing in your hand today is data, and how you use that data to build a long lasting relationship with your customer. You can get through this economy and everything else if you are a CMO or a marketing leader that truly leverages data to your advantage. You’re in the driving seat right now. We’re at the cusp of an amazing transformation.

Ekta Chopra, Chief Digital Officer, e.l.f.

Creating a Single Golden Record to Engage Customers

When e.l.f. began their digital transformation to make the most of their data to connect with shoppers, they knew they needed connection within first. Connecting their teams and data to align around the customer experience was the first step — so customer-centricity quickly became more than a buzzword for e.l.f. 

The first stop for that digital ecosystem was thinking through every customer touchpoint that they needed to bring together for a holistic view — from their site and loyalty program to the order management system. They wanted to understand how each piece of data is serving the customer and how it comes together in a single record to tell you how, where, how often they shop and engage and everything in between. By partnering with ActionIQ paired with AWS S3’s scalable storage capabilities, they unlocked those capabilities.

“The reason we selected ActionIQ was because it truly was a platform that brought all the pieces that I needed to create a single golden record for my consumer — that’s going to allow me to really engage my consumer, at any channel, any which way they want to be communicated. That was the tech investment that we had to make, and really make sure that our CDP was driving the audiences across all our marketing channels — and I think that was the single most important investment in our data-centric journey.”

Ekta Chopra, Chief Digital Officer, e.l.f.

Going from New Customer to Lasting Obsession

With ActionIQ, e.l.f. infuses customer journeys with their aggregated first-party data. With more creative ways to gather data from customers, through quizzes and surveys, e.l.f. is able to learn all of these different elements about their shoppers that will connect them to specific products within their product catalog — take skincare, for example. There are all kinds of different customer needs and priorities about their skin. Iis it sensitive, is it oily, are you buying it for your family? There are all kinds of pieces of information that demonstrate where a shopper is in their journey that e.l.f. uses to create audiences based on all of those personalized attributes.

Making the Case for Transformation

Every organization is different — and that includes their appetite for change. As a leader, you need to be in sync with your team, their appetite for change, your priorities and your resources. Transformation on this level is more of a crawl, walk and run — but quickly. Bringing your teams together around these major transformations means orienting around a core set of business use cases and then putting it out there to begin the learning process so you can continue to build and enhance and get value early on. 

This case is more difficult to make in an environment where budgets are smaller than years past. To do this, brands should focus on just a few use cases with their partners at the outset, with clear goals. By demonstrating the success of those goals and working with your team and your partners, you can scale your program.

“You also need good partners, and ActionIQ have been great partners. We use their muscle to do deeper analysis, or to go out and get more data sources, because sometimes I don’t have the bandwidth. So I think it’s really about having the right platform, having the right people, and then having the right partner.”

Ekta Chopra, Chief Digital Officer, e.l.f.

By partnering with ActionIQ, e.l.f. scales their customer data to drive results. To learn about how ActionIQ can help you drive revenue, reach out to our experts to see what ActionIQ can do for you.

ActionIQ is an Amazon ISV Accelerate Partner and is available within the AWS Marketplace.