Building a Personalisation Programme with Competitive Edge

Sephora is one of the most recognisable beauty brands in the world – with an incredibly loyal customer base and a clear vision for how great retail should feel. In the UK, the team had already made impressive strides in digital innovation, with experimentation and customer insight playing a key role in their approach to ecommerce.

Our role was to help take that momentum and shape it into a clear, scalable personalisation programme, one that could be aligned across teams, guided by data, and designed to deliver meaningful impact over time.

Appearing Competitive in a Price-Sensitive Market

In a market where customers compare quickly, Sephora’s new customer offer provided a strong acquisition incentive. Ensuring this was surfaced early in the journey captured attention from shoppers likely weighing multiple options.

Enhancing Rather than Sacrificing the Customer Journey

Retailers often lean on pop-ups to push important offers.  However, pop-ups are quickly dismissed, only shown after multiple page views, and therefore reduce the segment exposed to them.  By instead making the offer persistently visible and accessible across the journey, we ensured customers were continually primed for the saving, without adding friction.

Simple Targeting Tweak, Huge Benefits

New customer offers are typically shown only on the first visit, missing higher-intent customers who return multiple times before purchasing (a sizeable segment).  This small change delivered outsized results, particularly for this high-intent group who had previously been overlooked.

Working closely with Molly (Senior Optimisation and Personalisation Manager) and Suzie (Head of Ecommerce), we’ve helped ensure Sephora’s personalisation efforts are rooted in strategic clarity, not just reactive execution. From aligning with brand goals to mapping customer journeys, we’ve partnered to put structure and direction behind what was already a strong foundation.

Together, we developed a tailored audience segmentation model – built around Sephora’s real customer types and intent signals – which now underpins how they run personalisation in Dynamic Yield. It’s made it easier to identify friction, surface opportunities, and serve relevant experiences in ways that reflect how customers actually shop.

But more than that, it’s enabled the team to move faster and more confidently, with every personalisation idea run first as an experiment, then scaled based on results.

Sephora now has a programme designed not just to optimise journeys, but to build stronger connections with customers and to keep them at the forefront of beauty ecommerce in the UK.

We’re proud to play a part in it.