Sephora

The Objective

Sell more with TikTok

Sephora, leading global prestige beauty retail brand, is one of the most well-known brands when it comes to makeup, skincare/hair care, and fragrances. With 36 stores throughout Brazil, an e-commerce and app, which deliver in the whole country – they worked in partnership with TikTok to boost its online sales during the end of the year, with Consumer Week and Sephora Friday.

But more than selling, Sephora had an extra challenge: they needed a way to correctly attribute sales to the channel, to prove their efficiency and to correctly measure the return on media investments in this channel. Does TikTok really deliver?

The Solution

Exclusive discount coupons

As with any date marked by promotions, everyone who buys online is looking for the best prices. Therefore, Sephora's strategy was to bet on exclusive discount coupons for TikTok.

It would be a way to drive sales and still have a clearer view of the impact of the platform, bypassing the limitations of a last-click attribution model. A customer who purchased something using the coupon would very likely have seen the ad on TikTok, even if they had completed the purchase after clicking a link in search, for example.

To create the campaign, Sephora enlisted the help of our TikTok Creative Exchange platform, TTCX, which connects brands with creative partners. There, the company found the talents from the agencies Donna and Spark. Together, they produced a series of creatives, highlighting TikTok's exclusive discount coupons.

As Sephora wanted to view revenue results, the most suitable format due to the cost-benefit ratio was In-Feed Ads, optimizing the campaign for the user's purchase event.

The Results

Sales beyond attribution

The coupon strategy was spot-on. Last-click attribution models do not identify, on average, 79% of TikTok-driven purchases, according to a KnoCommerce research.(1) And that's almost what Sephora saw happen: of all sales made by customers who used TikTok's exclusive coupon, only 30% of them were correctly attributed to our Consumer Week platform - and the number was even more disparate during Sephora Friday, where only 2.08% of purchases using the exclusive coupon were correctly attributed to the platform. The rest was credited to other digital channels on the brand's analytics platform.

This is because content on TikTok is highly engaging. So much so that 58% of our users often leave to visit the website or app of a brand later, so as not to disrupt the videos browsing experience.(2)

When someone sees an ad on the platform, it is not always the case to click and buy at that very moment. It is possible that they go after a more in-depth review of the product, search other channels, and only then enter the website or app and make the actual purchase. But their motivation was really that content they saw on TikTok. Shall we take the test too?