Case Study: Sephora Offers Ratings and Reviews via Mobile

Sephora, known as a consumer-friendly haven for sampling cosmetic brands, fragrances and beauty tools, recently tapped its shopper base for product ratings and reviews via a mobile site that the company launched at the end of 2009.

As the beauty retailer evolves its mobile strategy, Julie Bornstein, senior vice president of Sephora Direct, hints that there will be additional elements that will extend beyond ratings and reviews to enable consumers to tap their smartphones for in-store shopping opportunities. Here’s a snippet from the full interview with Ms. Bornstein on eMarketer Total Access:

eMarketer: Sephora is conducting a test that involves shoppers’ in-store use of smartphones. How does that work?

Julie Bornstein: If you search for a retailer on your smartphone, you’ll get the closest location and phone number of the store. It makes it easier to find the store. You can click on the information and it will automatically dial the store. It’s a very practical and useful way of putting the information in your mobile device.

eMarketer: Apart from the test with Google, how else is Sephora involved with in-store shopping via smartphones?

Bornstein: We have a mobile ratings and reviews for all of our products. So if you go into the store and either type in the SKU number or the name of the product at a category or brand level, you will get the results and can read all the ratings and reviews.

eMarketer: Are there any other ways that Sephora would like to leverage mobile technology specifically to help in-store shoppers?

Bornstein: We agree that mobile presents huge opportunities from a retail perspective in-store and have many ideas and plans in the works.

The first thing that became clear to us, and that was of interest to our clients, was the ability to harness the incredible information from reviews on product which people love in all spaces but beauty in particular. There’s a strong interest, and we wanted to figure out how we could make that great amount of digital information available to our clients.

Our first mobile application was the mobile view of ratings and reviews that’s very easy to use on your phone. When you’re walking around in our stores and trying to decide between two products, and you’re the type of person who likes to see what other people have to say, then it’s very easy to access that. That’s what Sephora has done to date in the mobile space. We launched it at the end of 2009.

eMarketer: So that’s the one way Sephora has been using mobile in-store.

Bornstein: We also have a very active Facebook presence and are able to leverage that since Facebook is so mobile-friendly. We talk about new products and new launches there. We have over 500,000 Facebook fans. The work that we do with Facebook is also easy to access through your mobile phone.

eMarketer: Besides reviews, comments and ratings, are there any other capabilities or features Sephora offers in-store shoppers through their mobile phones?

Bornstein: You can shop and browse reviews at the category level and see the various products. It’s very focused on ratings and reviews.

eMarketer: A lot of retailers offer customer reviews. What differentiates Sephora’s offering?

Bornstein: We were the first ones to create a mobile site for ratings and reviews. This was one of the first things that we did online that we knew our clients in the store also wanted to be able to access when they were shopping in the store. It was the first thing we designed for the mobile space.

From a beauty community standpoint, we have the largest online beauty community with over 1 million reviews. There are probably no products on our site for which we don’t offer a review. We have a very active, engaged reviewer base. We invite our store shoppers as well as our online shoppers to rate and review products. It’s a very robust database of product ratings and reviews.

We launched ratings and reviews on our site in 2008. At the end of 2009, we created a mobile ratings and reviews site. And it continues to grow month over month.

eMarketer: How do you promote the mobile ratings and reviews site to in-store shoppers?

Bornstein: We have a loyalty program called Beauty Insider with millions of members, many of whom shop primarily in the store and receive e-mails from us to find out what’s going on in the store. It’s a great way to communicate with a large base of our clients. We’ve communicated by e-mail, via Facebook, we’ve put some signage up in the store and, as we evolve our mobile strategy, we have plans to do more to make sure our client knows that this mobile offering exists. We’ll do more in-store promotion.

The full version of this interview is available here, to eMarketer Total Access clients only. Every day they have access to new interviews with digital marketing leaders and trendsetting entrepreneurs.

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