The Objective
Lighting up purchases for the Holidays
Sephora creates a welcoming experience that makes customers feel like they belong to something beautiful. When it comes to TikTok, Sephora takes an evergreen approach within TikTok Ads Manager to achieve lower-funnel objectives while supporting key tentpole moments with larger, awareness-driven One Day Max and Branded Hashtag Challenge activations. To drive purchases around its biggest event of the year — the Holiday Savings Event — Sephora turned to a test-and-learn strategy to drive results.
The Solution
Sparking creator content with Gift Code Stickers
Sephora's Holiday Savings Event is an annual promotion leading up to the holiday season, and an integral time for Sephora to inspire purchasing. To drive qualified traffic to its website with added incentive, the brand used In-Feed Ads with TikTok's new Gift Code Sticker to create a seamless in-app path to purchase.
For the campaign, Sephora partnered with TikTok beauty creators who are part of the brand's #SephoraSquad to create content on their accounts promoting the Holiday Savings Event. Creators like @soniavalencia03030 inspired TikTok users with their favorite makeup and skincare products to drive interest in the event. Sephora then used Spark Ads to leverage the creator TikTok videos for its makeup ads, which helped the brand show up authentically while giving helpful shopping tips from the beauty creators.
These Spark Ads also featured the new Gift Code Sticker, which offered a promo code to help viewers save during the promotion. Gift Code Stickers are a clickable code that brands can layer onto ads without extra cost to help drive more purchases. Users who clicked on the sticker could then redeem a special offer with the code "YAYHOLIDAY" copied and automatically driven to the checkout page. To measure how successful the new ad solution would be for Sephora's makeup ads, the brand strategically launched without the Gift Code Sticker and later added it in the middle of the campaign to compare purchase performance. Results instantly proved positive.
Meanwhile, Sephora's evergreen advertising strategy allowed the brand to take a phased approach to conversions leading up to the holiday campaign to prime for lower-funnel success. Sephora spent the summer and fall of 2021 optimizing for upper-funnel events such as Page Views, which allowed it to build a pool of high-intent audiences to retarget for events like Add to Cart and Complete Purchase. Sephora also used the TikTok Pixel to leverage custom audiences like site visitors and purchasers, and then created lookalike audiences based on those behaviors. This comprehensive targeting strategy ensured Sephora got in front of the right audience to dazzle beauty lovers of TikTok.
*Please note the Gift Code Sticker shown in the video ad example is a previous version and the design specs have since been updated. For more information on and a visual example of the latest version of Gift Code Sticker, please see the Help Center article linked here:
https://ads.tiktok.com/help/article?aid=10007422
The Results
Giving makeup advertising a holiday glow up
‘Twas the season for success! Sephora’s evergreen approach combined with its affinity for testing and learning enabled through new product adoption paid off for its Holiday Savings Event campaign. By using the new Gift Code Sticker, Sephora saw a significant increase in conversions — purchases increased by 75% and payment value (the total amount spent per transaction) increased by 57%. Moreover, in just three days, the purchase rate increased by 6.1x after Sephora implemented the Gift Code Sticker.
*All results based on TikTok Pixel data
