How does a multimillion-dollar global brand with thousands of employees and even more happy customers continue to grow? It’s a question that many enterprise brands face as they strive to keep their presence, customer base, and sales growing—and bareMinerals is no exception. The cosmetics brand known around the world for its clean, mineral-based makeup experienced early growth on the QVC shopping channel, but has been evolving its omnichannel strategy over the past three decades. The company has been focused on connecting directly with its loyal community of customers, wherever they choose to shop, and investing in its online shopping experience in particular.
“We’ve invested a lot of time over the past year in building up the digital capabilities of the brand,” explains Carney Nir, Vice President of Ecommerce & Digital Experience at bareMinerals. “We want to ensure that consumers—whether they’ve landed on the site for the first time or they’ve been shopping with us for 25 years—have a bespoke, customized experience to help them feel more confident.” This is particularly important in the competitive beauty industry.
A key investment was migrating to Shopify Plus, which has allowed bareMinerals to offer a virtual try-on feature and personalization using AI, including tailored product recommendations and content for shoppers. Another initiative was adding Buy with Prime to its site, allowing Prime members to check out with benefits like fast, free delivery and easy returns. “This has been critical for us to move the needle,” Carney says about the initiatives. In fact, after adding Buy with Prime, bareMinerals has seen a 60% uplift in shopper conversion and 40% uplift in revenue per site visitor.
An experience that shoppers trust
BareMinerals has spent decades building its loyal customer base, but the average consumer has come to expect a lot out of brands. Shoppers want to learn about and purchase products on their preferred channels. They want to know that they can trust the site that they’re shopping on. They want their orders shipped fast and free. And they want to know that they can easily return the item if it doesn’t work out. According to Wunderman Thompson’s The Future Shopper Report, 70% of consumers said they wished that retailers and brands offered similar services to Amazon Prime.
BareMinerals has stayed at the forefront of these expectations over the years, innovating not only its products, using the latest advancements in skincare science, but also its shopper experience. Adding Buy with Prime to its ecommerce site has helped bareMinerals on that path more recently, establishing trust with shoppers because they know that they’re going to get a checkout and fulfillment experience that they love from Amazon.
“Buy with Prime really adds that level of credibility because of the trust that consumers have with Prime,” Carney says. “Being able to offer that to consumers when they’re shopping our site gives that extra level of confidence, and we see that in the results.”
A big part of that trusted Prime shopping experience is the fast, free delivery that consumers now expect from all of their favorite brands. Myriad research points to the importance of fast shipping and free shipping in shoppers’ purchasing decisions.
“For bareMinerals, adding Buy with Prime gives our customers a shopping experience that they know and trust, with that free and fast shipping, which we know is very important to our customers,” Carney says. Similar to industry research, bareMinerals’ own post-purchase survey results show that 70% of its customers rank fast shipping as “very important.”
On the operations side, the bareMinerals team can rest assured that Amazon will handle fulfillment for Buy with Prime orders and get them to customers fast.
That added trust is particularly important in the beauty industry where lots of brands—both big and small—are vying for shoppers’ attention. Buy with Prime has actually helped bareMinerals stand out in the crowd and attract a higher volume of new customers. For shoppers who are new to the brand, Buy with Prime helps establish trust and allows the shopper to try a product without having to meet a minimum order threshold or worry about a complicated returns process. These fulfillment benefits remove “any hesitation they might have about the order,” Carney says.
She adds, “Beauty is so competitive, so it’s very easy for another new brand to swoop in and be the hot brand of the minute. So for us, Buy with Prime is helping us acquire new customers.”
A checkout that converts
Since adding Buy with Prime to 50-plus SKUs on its ecommerce site, including its award-winning loose powder foundation, bareMinerals has seen a 60% increase in shopper conversion and 40% increase in revenue per visitor.
“I don’t think we’ve really seen results like that with anything that we’ve tried,” Carney admits. “If we see a few points of conversion increase, we’re happy. We know that this is going to have a significant incremental revenue uplift for the year”—which is exactly how an enterprise brand already at the top of its game can continue to grow.
She acknowledges the delicate dance growing ecommerce brands have when expanding to additional sales channels, not wanting a new channel to sabotage sales of existing channels. bareMinerals also has a dedicated Amazon Store and sells through department stores and specialty retailers.
“I think there’s a tendency, particularly for established brands, to think ‘I’m going to lose my customers if I add another channel and I’m going to lose that data’,” Carney explains. “But that doesn’t happen.” Merchants using Buy with Prime keep the customer and order information from Buy with Prime orders, which they can use for post-purchase nurture campaigns and building customer relationships.
She also points out how Buy with Prime helps improve returns on the company’s marketing investments. Because they’re still driving the same amount of traffic to bareMinerals.com through paid channels, “those investments are, in effect, becoming more efficient,” she says, “because we can see conversions attributed to Buy with Prime.”
What’s more, because Buy with Prime orders are shipped in as fast as one day, shoppers have more time to get their gifts in time for the holidays. For merchants like bareMinerals, those extra days mean more opportunity for last-minute sales.
“Adding Buy with Prime allows us another 5–7 business days of selling during peak holiday periods,” Carney says. “This means that thousands of customers—tens of thousands of customers—have the ability to purchase products online and get them delivered in time for the holidays.”
Whether during the holidays or a random day during the year when a customer runs out of tinted moisturizer, Buy with Prime is helping bareMinerals deliver for its customers. And at the end of the day, that’s what’s most important to the team: “Really valuing and celebrating the community of bareMinerals fans,” Carney says. “For us, Buy with Prime is a really nice benefit, but more importantly, it has allowed us to provide our consumers with additional benefits.”