Always at the forefront of latest trends, Sephora’s unique shopping experience offers beauty clients across the world an unparalleled choice of skincare, makeup, fragrance and haircare from top brands. Sephora is present in 35 countries with over 2,600 stores, most recently expanding into the UK.

In October 2022, Sephora and Ometria worked together to pull off an incredibly successful rebrand which fully integrated Feelunique UK into Sephora; introducing Sephora to the UK market.

1. Worked with Ometria to carefully evaluate scope

Rebranding can come in many forms. For Sephora, it was much more than a simple logo change. There were many infrastructure changes that needed to happen in order for Feelunique UK to successfully absorb into the Sephora brand. Ometria’s technical and deliverability experts worked with Sephora to ensure all of the details were thought of. One of the largest considerations for Sephora’s marketing team would be building a new reputation at mailbox providers since domains and DNS records needed to be updated.

2. Established a timeline that allowed for thorough communication to customers and building sender reputation with mailbox providers

The timeline included contingencies that would be important based on the defined scope. While it can be tempting to skip the necessary steps required to build a positive sender reputation, Sephora didn’t take any shortcuts and spent over 3 weeks segmenting according to the tailored plans Ometria provided to optimize deliverability across their new domains.

3. Put customers at the center of the rebrand experience

There’s a lot of pressure when transitioning a well-loved brand like Feelunique into a household name like Sephora. The objectives defined early on were threaded into every step of the process, especially the content strategy. Sephora used concepts like surveys to understand how customers felt about the transition and then went a step further and translated those results into their content strategy. Check out the Customer Experience timeline below to see the sequence of Sephora’s email creatives nurturing customers through the rebrand.

4. Tracked, monitored and adjusted with every phase of the rebrand

Sephora relied heavily on Ometria’s dashboards to track customer’s reaction to the rebrand. Of course monitoring traditional KPIs is important, but looking at metrics such as open and click rate per mailbox provider becomes critical so that remediation efforts for any deliverability issues can be swift and targeted.

After months of planning and meticulous execution, Sephora UK’s first impression matched the excitement levels they saw at launch. While not always obvious or exciting, the single most important part of a rebrand is getting emails to inboxes. Sephora built a positive reputation across mailbox providers ensuring that existing, new and potential customers were able to not only hear about the rebrand, but become a part of it. The timeline below showcases the outcome of Sephora’s strategic preparation and ultimately what customers experienced through their highest revenue driving channel: email