Sephora’s Beauty Roulette: A Creative Email List Building Tactic

Sephora's Beauty Roulette: A Creative Email List Building Tactic

DJ Waldow on October 27, 2011 Follow @djwaldow

You can have the most compelling email creative and copy, the best subject line, the highest inbox deliverability; however, if you don’t have an email list to send to … well … you have nothing.

That’s one of the reasons I’m such a huge fan & advocate for list building techniques and tips. Last month, I gave a presentation titled, List Building: The Secret to Email Marketing at Social Fresh Charlotte. In this deck, I provided 13 list building tactics that email marketers should consider.

Shortly after Charlotte, my friend and Social Fresh president, Jason Keath, shared this super-creative email list building technique from Sephora with me last week. The landing page has some dynamic aspects to it, so I figured it would be best to show you via a screencast (thanks, Screenr!). Check it out below.

If you are having trouble seeing this for some reason, you can also view on my Screenr page.

In the screencast, I mentioned the follow up email that Sephora promised to send me. I was not able to capture it during the screencast, so I Skitch’d it & dropped it below so you can see what it looks like. Not bad, huh? (Who said email was dead? Certainly not the Facebook Exec Team, right Jay Baer?)

Sephora's Beauty Roulette Email Follow Up

I’d love to hear form the Sephora team about how effective this was in growing their email list. Even more interesting to me would be how this list performed going forward. Were these subscribers more or less engaged compared to other sources? How many have used their codes at checkout? If this information is not proprietary, I’d love for someone from Sephora to weigh in (even percentages would be helpful!).

I loved this email list building tactic. What did you think?

Cheers,
DJ Waldow

TCoughlin 7 pts

Clever approach that makes a nice use of interaction via the spin-the-wheel action, but personally I would have been turned off by having to pre- register as a Sephora user before being able to play. But then again, I have no interest in Sephora in the first place, so I am negatively biased up front in my opinion. If it was for a pound of coffee or a free pizza, I'd likely be a lot less turned off by the premise of pre-registration.

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djwaldow 33 pts moderator

TCoughlin Sorry for the confusion. You actually did NOT have to pre-register as a user before playing the roulette game. You just have to register as a Sephora user before using the code.

Ah, that's a world of difference. In that case, well done Sephora, and I'm not just saying that because my wife once got suckered into selling for you.