The Alaena Story
Luxury organic beauty brand leans on Probance Ecommerce Essentials to launch marketing and increase loyalty with easy automation.
Probance Helps Alaena Reach New Customers with Premium Marketing
Based in Biarritz, Alaena is a premium spa and brand of organic skincare products, Alaena Cosmetics, which are sold online and in luxury hotels and boutiques.
20 – 30%
monthly revenue from Probance emails
60%
average open rate on scenarios
4200
subscribers
Three Surfing Sisters
Alaena takes its name from the three sisters who founded the company, Alaia, Hélène and Anne. The surf-loving sisters were inspired by their love of nature – and by their dermatologist and cosmetic surgeon parents – to launch a new type of beauty company. Alaena aims to reinvent organic skincare by combining medical expertise with organic formulations. The idea is that the most effective active ingredients in beauty products, inspired by esthetic medicine, exist in nature as well.
Building a Niche Brand in a Competitive Market
While the spa has existed since 2015, Alaena Cosmetics only launched in 2018. Ecommerce quickly became a major force for the niche organic beauty brand, and it currently represents 60% of the company’s revenue, which doubles annually.
They had been using MailChimp to send out mass emails about the spa, but when the beauty brand and ecommerce site launched in 2018, the team wanted to do more with their marketing automation. “With our previous tool, we were limited by the lack of personalization. In particular, we wanted to cross-sell – recommend products that would be complementary to the skincare routines that women already had,” says Margaux Bacquey, Alaena’s Head of Communication.
Margaux Bacquey
Head of Communications, Alaena
“The technical team was super quick to react. Anytime we had a question, the answer would come right away. One month after the initial call to Probance, we were sending out our first emails.”
Getting Closer to Customers with Probance Personalization
With the ambition of becoming the reference for clean beauty in France, they needed to let people know about the brand. While their PR company had done a good job getting press coverage, Alaena was looking for an accessible, easy to use marketing solution to communicate specifically about the Alaena skincare products. “The customers for the products are not necessarily the same as for the spa, and so we needed to acquire a new and loyal customer base.”
“Also, in line with the premium nature of Alaena, we wanted to get closer to our customers by offering them a more quality experience, a more personalized experience,” says Bacquey. Co-founder Anne Peres had heard that Probance would be able to help them better communicate with their clientele, and leverage more complex data to do so.
Premium Design to Enhance the Brand Image
One of the things that made it easy to get the project off the ground was the responsiveness of the Probance Customer Success and technical teams. “The technical team was super quick to react. Anytime we had a question, the answer would come right away,” says Margaux Bacquey. “One month after the initial call to Probance, we were sending out our first emails.”
While Probance offers a turnkey solution, the Alaena team opted for more autonomy in terms of deciding themselves what scenarios to implement and how the newsletters should look. But the Probance Customer Success team were on hand to help with best practices. “Our contact, Claire Lécrivain, was really helpful in making suggestions about which scenarios and customer journeys would be most effective. She also really understood our positioning, the fact that we’re a premium brand, so we need our design and functionality to be on that level.” And with great results from the outset, there was little need to fine tune.
The Probance Ecommerce Essentials solution is managed by Margaux Bacquey, who handles all the content for newsletters herself, to maintain strict control over the premium image of the brand. With the Probance solution, they don’t need to call on a costly design agency and can easily create professional email designs in-house.
“With this latest version, there are no constraints at all, we can change anything we want, button design, fonts, colors, photos and everything. Our customers are happy with the content and the look and feel, and that’s good for our brand.”
Cross-Sell Scenario Boosts Revenue
The Alaena team gets clearly visible results with regular reporting. “After we make a change, by the next day I can see if it’s working or not.” They’ve had very good results with the cross-sell scenario, and don’t need to tweak it further – it runs by itself. The cart abandonment email and the post visit email were also successful, with average click rates from 15 to 40%. Now, on any given month, 20 to 30% of their revenue for the brand comes directly from emails.
Subscriptions Boosted, Quality Maintained
The solution has been welcomed as a real enabler of the luxury-style marketing they want to do. The loyalty of customers has been enhanced, and their numbers are going up, with a 10% increase in the subscriber database over the year.
Alaena don’t have access to the sales data from the high-end hotels they sell to, like the Georges V in Paris, but they do for their spa, although it is run as a separate business. “The next step is to connect the sales data from the spa with the ecommerce data. That way we can provide unified, high-quality quality advice throughout the purchasing process.”
Benefits
Boosts revenue
Stop leaving money on the table with cross-sell, upsell and cart abandonment emails.
Visible Results
Regular reports help you see your ROI clearly and easily.
Boost Your Brand Image
Control the design so the look and feel of your messaging is perfectly on brand.