How Glossier Built a Personal Relationship with Their Customers Across Every Touchpoint

With Segment, Glossier now has a complete view of the customer journey across multiple domains.

Industry: E-Commerce / Location: New York, NY / Employees: 144

BRYAN MAHONEYGLOSSIER CTO

Based on anecdotal data, we had an idea that Into The Gloss was driving traffic to Glossier, but we were never really able to measure it. With Segment, now we know how many people are browsing both Into The Gloss and Glossier and we know that those who do are 40% more likely to purchase than people who just browse Glossier.”

The Company Glossier, a popular e-commerce site for cosmetics, and its beauty blog counterpart, Into The Gloss

The Challenges Keeping things on track and consistent across domains

The SolutionCross-Domain Analytics from both sites with Segment

The ResultsBuilding personalized relationships with customers

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Glossier, a popular e-commerce site for cosmetics, began

its journey as an esteemed beauty blog. The blog, Into The

Gloss, documented the beauty regimens of inspiring women

around the world. Thanks to the publication’s helpful

interviews, Into The Gloss quickly became a top online

destination for beauty and attracted a loyal following.

Into The Gloss founder, Emily Weiss, used her blog as a

platform to launch Glossier, a digitally native beauty brand.

Glossier quickly became a success, with Into The Gloss’

reader base catapulting the cosmetics line into one of the

fastest growing brands.

What sets Glossier apart from other e-commerce companies

is its ability to listen to and speak directly with its customers.

As Glossier grew, they leveraged customer feedback to

continually innovate and develop relevant products.

In addition, Glossier’s content-rich environment and

Into The Gloss’ platform provided an ongoing conversation

that customers could engage with on a daily basis.

The Company

“I saw the need for a beauty brand that speaks to its consumers directly, offering them a chance to engage beyond the traditional touch points of purchase, use, and mass marketing. That’s what we’ve created with Glossier—a beauty brand that we want to be friends with.”EMILY WEISS, FOUNDER & CEO

The Company

Building a Marketing Stack that Keeps up with Growth

By mid-2015, Glossier had rapidly growing online sales.

However, their analytics stack hadn’t kept up with that

growth. They were struggling to build a comprehensive

marketing stack. It took too long to test, implement,

and standardize the email, fraud detection, and analytics

tools that the company needed to scale its customer

interactions. Glossier was also hyper-focused on the

complete customer experience and needed a way to

analyze their customer interactions, not just on their sites,

but also through payments, ads, and email campaigns.

Into The Gloss had grown as well. They hired a full-time

staff of writers and started covering more topics.

The editorial team had also discovered the limitations

of its standard Wordpress setup, and was in the process

of migrating to a custom designed website. That move

presented the company the opportunity to align their

marketing and analytics stacks across the two domains.

Keeping the Customer Experience Consistent Across Channels

A common tool stack was important for Glossier to maintain

a shared customer experience with Into The Gloss. Not only

did topics and editorial style need to be aligned, but emails,

touchpoints, and funnels had to be coordinated across the

sites. For example, the marketing team wanted to personalize

their email campaigns based off of customer actions across

the two sites. They needed to keep the emails relevant

without spamming customers with separate campaigns.

The ChallengesOverall, the engine behind Glossier’s growth was its appeal

to Into The Gloss readers. Moving forward, Glossier had to

maintain that relevance by knowing what was important

to both audiences. The team could already analyze basic

tracking data on each site, but the real power lay in

segmenting their audiences into those who were already

readers and customers and those who were not.

Measuring Conversion Across Domains

Comparing browsing behavior between the two groups

would allow Glossier to build Glossier products that fit the

interests of Into The Gloss readers. Crucially, Glossier needed

the ability to measure the impact of these editorial initiatives

on e-commerce revenue.

However, there was no way of reliably knowing whether

a customer on Glossier also read Into The Gloss or what

actions that customer took on both sites. Tools like Google

Analytics were only able to connect those actions together

if the user clicked on a link taking them directly from one

domain to the other.

Without being able to unify a user’s actions across the

domains, the Glossier team could not evaluate which

articles on Into The Gloss were most popular among Glossier

shoppers or know what products on Glossier appealed to

different types of readers on Into The Gloss.

The Challenges

The SolutionCollect

The Glossier team needed a way to collect behavioral data

and send that data to all their marketing and analytics tools.

After evaluating several options, they chose Segment as

their customer data platform. Segment made it easy to collect

customer events on both sites and provided an e-commerce

tracking plan to help Glossier learn exactly what data was

important to capture for retail businesses.

Unify

Once that data was flowing from the two sites into

Segment, the technology team was able to quickly try out

new marketing and analytics tools. They added various

advertising integrations, out-of-the-box analytics tools, fraud

detectors, and two email providers. Segment populated each

new tool with the data from both sites, allowing the team to

get up and running immediately.

Whenever a user shares an email address on either site,

Segment would send that data off to Glossier’s email

providers. With both sites funneling behavioral data into

one email account, the Glossier team was able to create email

segments based on any brand interaction.

When customers open those emails, Glossier wanted to

understand that context as well. Glossier interacts with

customers in many areas outside of its site and blog: through

its email provider, payment provider, and ad platforms.

Segment made it easy to pull data from these cloud apps into

Glossier’s Redshift warehouse where the analytics team can

measure ad spend, email open rates, and credit card payment

information alongside all of their site data.BRYAN MAHONEY, CTO

“Segment is how we stay at the cutting edge of the e-commerce industry.”

The Solution

Act Though Glossier could understand behavior on each site

independently, it needed a way to tie user behavior together

across the two domains. The Glossier team wanted to know,

for example, if a customer read a blog post on Into The Gloss

and later bought a related product on Glossier.

To find these answers, Glosser used Segment’s Cross-Domain

Analytics feature, which appends a common Cross-Domain

ID to visitors who browse multiple sites a company owns.

A critical benefit for Glossier was that the Segment

Cross-Domain solution uses second-party cookies, which

are more reliable and respectful of customers’ privacy than

other options on the market.

Cross-Domain Analytics gave Glossier a way to match

a customer’s pageviews on Into The Gloss with that same

customer’s conversion events on Glossier.

With Segment, Glossier has a complete view of their

customer journey across both of their domains. They’ve

been able to try out different marketing and analytics

tools quickly and land on the marketing stack that works

best for their team.

Data from Glossier’s sites, email tools, payment apps,

and ad providers is now centralized in their Redshift

warehouse. Their analytics team regularly analyzes that

data to measure the lifetime value of different customer

segments and understand the ROI of their marketing efforts.

Having standardized data in all their tools made it easy for

the team to construct common campaigns across all their

users, an improvement over their previously fragmented

campaigns for each site.

The Results IntegrationsGlossier Google AdWordsBing Ads Facebook Pixel Google AnalyticsHeap Inspectlet Klaviyo MailChimp Stripe RadarWebhooks Redshift Looker

Into The GlossFacebook Pixel Google AnalyticsKlaviyo

“Based on anecdotal data, we had an idea that Into The Gloss was driving traffic to Glossier, but we were never really able to measure it. Worse, we didn’t have the data to know how to engage with our readers on Into The Gloss in a way that would encourage them to check out Glossier. Now that we have Cross-Domain Analytics, this information is easily accessible.”

BRYAN MAHONEY, CTO

“Now we know that people who browse both Into The Gloss and Glossier are 40% more likely to purchase than people who just browse Glossier. What’s more, we know exactly how many Into The Gloss readers are never ending up on Glossier and have built new campaigns to encourage them to check out our products.”

BRYAN MAHONEY, CTO

The Results

Facebook Ads Google AdWords StripeZendesk

Cloud App Sources

Lastly, using Cross-Domain Analytics, the Glossier team knows

which articles on Into The Gloss drive the most conversions

on Glossier and which products on Glossier are most popular

among Into The Gloss readers.

Glossier is using the information they’ve gained through

Segment to push the envelope of what can be done in the

e-commerce space. Not only is the Glossier team optimizing

their content and funnels across multiple domains, but

they’re also creating new ways to build personalized

relationships with their customers. Every customer touchpoint

is an opportunity to have a meaningful conversation.

“Not only does our customer journey data end up in our analytics tools, but we’re able to use those insights in our email campaigns. When we launch a new product, we know based on reading habits which of our customers will be interested in the product and can reach out to them in a way that is customized and relevant.”

BRYAN MAHONEY, CTO

The Results

Segment is the platform that collects and unifies your data across every customer touch point and sends it to all of your marketing and analytics tools. Segment is trusted by thousands of companies, including Crate & Barrel, Walker and Company, Bonobos, and Gap.

About Segment