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This is one of the biggest questions that fashion and beauty entrepreneurs and beauty startup founders are thinking about. Whether you want to start a hair business, a makeup line or a niche beauty e-commerce store, you need to think about how you are going to generate sales. It isn’t enough to be driven by creating cool names for products or choosing cute packaging. You need to be laser-focused on increasing sales, turnover and revenue for your beauty business. I am going to answer this question with a few ideas that you can implement for your beauty business. My approach isn’t orthodox but it does work very well for beauty businesses and beauty startups.
Create detailed and advanced email marketing strategies to sell beauty products
One of the biggest headaches for beauty business owners is thinking about how to increase sales from their email lists. You need to think outside of the box. Sending a promotional email isn’t enough and most people do not like super promotional emails that don’t solve a problem except to make you money.
Change your approach to help going from promotional to helpful. For example, if you are currently selling liquid lipsticks, do a week of 3 emails sent to your list where you answer questions about issues around liquid lippies such as how to stop your lips from cracking and how to budget for purchasing liquid lipsticks in different colours. As you can see from these email topics, these are extremely detailed and niche.
Only people who are interested in purchasing liquid lipsticks are going to care about the answers to these questions. This is how these Q&A emails will generate potential commercial intent for your beauty business. Resist the temptation to promote your liquid lipsticks. Just solve your email list subscribers problems with liquid lipsticks and put a maximum of 2 links back to your liquid lipstick landing page on your beauty e-commerce store.
Send 3 of these emails per week with 2 links backs and you should be able to generate interest to purchase within 2 weeks of doing this, assuming that your list is good and your email content is good. I would aim to convert 5% of your email list to purchase your liquid lipsticks or other products with this method in any given week.
Create a strategy that doesn’t rely just on Instagram
The days of organic reach on Instagram are over. Instagram is almost 8 years old and Facebook have engineered the algorithm in a way that means unless you are Kim Kardashian West or Beyoncé, it is hard to reach people organically. You need to be prepared to pay for Instagram advertising in the feed and you should also realise that it is more expensive compared to standard Facebook advertising.
One approach I like for Instagram is stop relying on it 100% to generate your current sales. What happens if Instagram change their algorithm and run away with your sales like a wild horseman? It’s not a good look. If you are selling beauty products and makeup, you need to be on Instagram but instead of seeing it purely as a sales platform, look at it as a mood board to showcase what your brand is about.
Post pictures that symbolise the ethos behind your e-commerce brand and don’t constantly ask people to buy on Instagram either. No one wants to purchase products from a hungry business owner. If you are selling makeup brushes for example, post aspirational pictures of your makeup brushes looking glamorous and glossy. Write a caption that showcases the glamour of your makeup brushes so people feel like they need to have it.
Instagram should be your canvas to share your moods and ideas in a way that uplifts your business. If you need ideas, feel free to get in touch with me and I can help you out since I am constantly looking at Instagram best practices and accounts that need help.
Fix the SEO for your e-commerce store
The over-reliance on Instagram means that if you are a beauty e-commerce owner, you can gain a lot more traction with less competition for your actual beauty website if you focus on SEO.
Many beauty entrepreneurs just put 100% of their effort on Instagram and neglect their website. This means there is less competition when it comes to converting people who are actually searching through Google and Bing to buy beauty and makeup products.
Sort out your SEO. You can opt to do it yourself, hire a SEO consultant or an agency if you have the budget. Your SEO needs to be fixed if you are going to increase revenue for your beauty business which means improving keyword visibility, writing keyword-enriched content that doesn’t look like spam and correct alt text and meta tags on your e-commerce store. One simple strategy to improve SEO is to write content such as blogs, articles and cheat sheets to help your customers make informed decisions. Not only will your customers be more passionate about your business, but you will also make your business visible in search when people are searching for makeup and beauty products to purchase.
Choose 1-2 products to focus on and create a super sales strategy for them
Let’s say your beauty business has a killer product which is a range of foundation for black women. It is a better idea to simply focus on this customer segment across Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram. If I was consulting you, I would tell you to create a super sales strategy that focused on this product in the following way:
- Focus on paid traffic campaigns over influencers
- Create unique ads that run at the same time across Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram so when people search for foundation for black women across the social network, they see your advertisements everywhere
- Create a segmented newsletter just for people who want to purchase foundation for women of colour
- Write a detailed guide on how to choose your foundation shade if you are a black women or a woman of colour
- Offer this guide for free to get an email from the person interested
- Create a special offer for people on the list for the guide to purchase 2 foundations from the price of 1
- Put a significant budget behind this strategy to get the revenue as much as you want
- Create a new special offer each week to raise revenues
- Rinse and repeat each month with different products
As you can see from this super sales strategy, a journey is created for the customer. People are not going to buy off the bat immediately. They need to be convinced over a period of time such as 1-3 days or a week. Use paid traffic, social media networks and emails to get the revenues you want for your best-selling products.
Have new arrivals every day or every week
The best way to increase sales for your beauty brand is to have new products available for purchase ideally every day or every week. Yes, I know. That’s a lot of product to buy and source but ultimately you have no choice. The cosmetics industry is too cut throat and brutally competitive for you to have less than 1 new arrival per week.
You really should be releasing products every day, or 3-4 times per week. Not only does this increase web traffic for your store, but it makes buyers feel like your store is serious about beauty because you constantly have new stock to share with your customers. Don’t take my word for it. Revolution Beauty, a popular British makeup brand, does about £70M in revenue per year. How? One way they generate sales is having new makeup arrivals every week. This makes more customers visit their website to see what new products are in store.
Build your beauty business by being serious and different
As you can see from my answers, increasing revenue for a beauty business needs to be taken seriously. It isn’t as simple as you posting a picture on Instagram of your product and waiting for the sales to roll in. Customers are too savvy these days. You need to dig dig, have a budget for advertising and figure out what problems your beauty products solve in order to increase sales. As a makeup lover and enthusiast, I love foundations, powder, lipstick, eyebrow products and perfume. If you want my money, you need to show me why your products are better, not just posting an Instagram update. For more help and advice, get in touch with me.