7 min read

e.l.f. Drives Business Growth With the Power of Braze

Always looking to push the boundaries, e.l.f. wanted to improve its digital customer experience and drive higher adoption of its loyalty program. They also wanted to expand to new mobile channels like SMS and push.

e.l.f. turned to Braze and Stitch to launch more effective, more creative campaigns that engaged customers across multiple channels and points in the customer lifecycle.

As a result, e.l.f. achieved a 125% increase in monthly mobile app usage, a 58% increase in loyalty offer redemptions, and significant improvements in customer engagement and redemptions through their loyalty program.

INDUSTRY

PRODUCTS USED

e.l.f. Beauty hasexperienced remarkable business success in recent years. In March 2024, the company achieved a major milestone: Generating over $1 billion in annual net sales. Their growth hasn’t slowed since, with a 40% increase in quarterly net sales noted in their November 2024 earnings report and 23 consecutive quarters of net sales growth.

The e.l.f. brand’s success can be attributed to several factors, including a nimble digital marketing strategy and an emphasis on community building. Their CRM marketing team—in partnership with their engineering and digital teams—is constantly pushing the envelope to deliver engaging experiences to their customers. To help them achieve their goals today and tomorrow, they leverage Braze and Braze Alloys partnerStitch to deliver standout digital experiences to their customers.

Additionally, e.l.f.’s loyalty program, Beauty Squad, is an important aspect of the brand’s strategy. With over5.3 million members, they continue to invest heavily in their loyalty program across the business, particularly in driving digital engagement and digital sales, which have risen 40% YoY between 2023 and 2024.

In 2023, they increased their monthly mobile app usage by 125% over 6 months (from March to September), primarily by unlocking new mobile channels like push notifications to pull customers back into the app, and by leveraging Braze to engage Beauty Squad members through key experiences such as scavenger hunts and a personalized year-in-review campaign.

Let’s take a closer look at how e.l.f. drives success with their customer engagement program.

Harnessing the power of Braze

A key part of e.l.f.’s strategy focuses on forging new paths, taking bold stances, and pushing beyond the limits of what’s been done before. Their CRM team is always looking for ways to unlock new channels, improve existing campaigns, and streamline processes.

Since turning to Braze and Stitch, e.l.f. has:

• Unlocked new channels: The e.l.f. team recently launched a strategic push primer campaign to increase the number of app users who are opted into push notifications. They trigger IAMs to highly engaged app users, explaining the benefits of their push notifications and encouraging them to opt in—which boasted up to a 23% conversion rate. Push notifications are a great way to pull users to the app for high-value actions such as back-in-stock notifications, order updates, and product reviews. e.l.f. app users who are push-eligible average 500% more sessions per day.

• Reimagined key touchpoints: In addition to unlocking new channels, the e.l.f. team continuously refreshes and optimizes existing touchpoints to maximize conversions and drive more engagement with their customers. One notable example is their monthly recap email for eligible Beauty Squad members, encouraging them to redeem unique monthly rewards once they’ve earned the necessary points. As e.l.f. Beauty Squad continues to grow, they needed to migrate to a more scalable solution that could handle the volume of data being used to power the campaign. They turned this monthly touchpoint into a cross-channel journey for US-based Beauty Squad members, sending a push notification a couple of days after the initial email to up engagement and remind users to redeem their time-sensitive offers. Since implementing push, Since adding push to loyalty journeys, among other support through Braze, has helped contribute to a 58% increase (YoY 2024 calendar year compared to 2023 calendar year) in loyalty offer redemptions. It’s also saved their team several hours a month from the manual work previously needed to deploy this campaign from their loyalty platform.
• Optimized team efficiency: Implementing efficiencies for how the team brings their big ideas to life has been another goal for the team this year. One example is their post-purchase journey, a key touchpoint to help drive new customer acquisition and upsells. Depending on the purchase, e.l.f. offers a series of emails educating users on their new products and showcasing related products. Previously, this email series supported four product lines and leveraged nearly 100 email templates. By leveraging Braze features likeCatalogs andLiquid, the Stitch team rebuilt this campaign with only six email templates while also increasing the number of product lines supported to 16. The simplicity of the new solution offers the e.l.f. team the ability to experiment and optimize this campaign with agility while also being able to incorporate new product launches into the campaign with ease.

• Creating unique experiences with Braze: One example of how the e.l.f. team set the standard for creative customer engagement was their in-app scavenger hunt, which usedin-app messages andpush notifications to lead customers through a Canvas-orchestrated journey.

Through a series of five push notifications, e.l.f. encouraged their app users to explore the app (and its many features) by offering clues to pages where they could earn points to redeem for products.

• Expanded key lifecycle moments:Birthdays are a key opportunity for brands to engage with their customers and offer perks to celebrate the occasion. The e.l.f. team takes advantage of this opportunity to connect with their customers to drive redemption of birthday rewards and other loyalty challenges with email, SMS, in-app messages (IAM), and Braze Content Cards™ across web and mobile. By incorporating Content Cards as another key engagement opportunity, they’ve expanded their abilities to offer personalized experiences and reach customers where they are.

• Brought new, innovative campaigns to life: The e.l.f. team saw an opportunity to create a year-in-review experience for their Beauty Squad members with their Beauty Squad Replay campaign. Beauty Squad Replay is a highly personalized IAM and Content Card experience (supported by push and email to bring members into the app) that showcases Beauty Squad members’ milestones in 2024. In 2024, e.l.f. wanted to build on the successes of its previous Replay experience by adding a personalized IAM to increase engagement and add features like social share to the Content Card landing page. e.l.f. partnered with Stitch to bring this vision to life. Stitch helped to build their 28-screen IAM concept using custom HTML, Javascript, and Liquid to ensure each user received content relevant to their year with e.l.f. Next, users were driven to an in-app landing page that hosted 21 unique Content Cards reflecting the data shown in their IAM experience. Users could access this Content Card-powered page at any time and easily share their individual cards to their social media pages. The campaign was a smashing success: 25% of those who engaged with the campaign shared it on their social media pages — a huge win for building brand love with their most loyal Beauty Squad members, while also getting important brand exposure to lay the foundation for continued growth of Beauty Squad.

Partnership with Stitch

e.l.f. partnered with Stitch, a Braze partner, in the spring of 2023 as a way to maximize their investment in Braze. Within three weeks of launching the partnership, the Stitch team had already successfully helped e.l.f. launch a new cross-channel journey for a key touchpoint in their customer lifecycle and incorporate push messaging into several existing campaigns. One campaign resulted in an initial 102% increase in engagement. Stitch also proposed an experimentation strategy in Canvas and helped them establish a longer-term roadmap for unlocking new features of Braze and optimizing what they had in place.

In fall 2024, e.l.f. and Stitch won aBraze Torchie Award for “Partner Campaign of the Year,” highlighting their work with Beauty Squad.

“By partnering with Stitch and Braze, we’re able to bring all of our most creative ideas to life and create meaningful connections with our consumers. These strategies drive growth in customer lifetime value and long-term loyalty amongst our e.l.f. Beauty Squad members.”

Brigitte Barron

Senior Director, Global CRM & Customer Growth, Elf

Key takeaways

• Get creative! There are so many ways to engage your customers creatively. From scavenger hunts to personalized recap campaigns to in-app games, Braze offers endless opportunities to find and implement new ways to be creative and make lasting impressions on your customers.
• Explore ways to do more with Braze.Use a crawl-walk-run approach to unlock incremental value out of Braze—whether it’s adding new channels to your mix, setting up new integrations, or enhancing data collection—it’s important to have a plan to ensure you’re driving the most value out of Braze.
• Work with a Braze partner to accelerate how you use Braze.Solutions partners like Stitch can become an extension of your team to help you unlock more value from Braze faster.
  

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