No-one could have realized the apocalyptic effect COVID-19 would have in our daily lives and the economy and in particular retail with the closure of many leading high street stores. It’s made brands, retailers, and consumers all rethink the future of retailing.
Beauty Matches Engine
Beauty Matches Engine™ (BME) is a solution for beauty specific retailers, e-tailers, supermarkets, hairdressers, and brands. BME is an innovative white-labeled AI-based personalization engine that predicts and personalizes the product choices customers are more likely to buy. As well as being able to recommend products BME personalizes all points of the customer’s online journey from up-sells through to landing pages.
As a tech entrepreneur, this is not founder Nidhima Kohli‘s first digital solution. Nidhima is also the founder of My Beauty Matches™ (MBM), founded in 2015 and has since become the world’s first personalized beauty product recommendation and price comparison site which is one of the largest beauty websites in the world with over 400,000 products.
MBM has partnered with some of the best beauty retailers and brands including Harrods, Harvey Nichols, Liberty, Look Fantastic, Clarins, Bobbi Brown, and more, allowing customers to shop them all from just one website and compare prices. Thanks to the learnings from MBM, Kohli was able to take five years of data, analyze consumer shopping habits and apply them to her new business model BME which is aimed at giving invaluable insights and behavioral tools to B2B’s.
How AI Personalization Drives Conversions
Beauty Matching Engine works both actively, by having consumers enter their information using the Virtual Assistant anywhere online to access interactive diagnostic style questions about their skin type, skin concerns, hair and body concerns, and product or scent preferences.
This data allows BME to utilize AI and data in order to recommend the right products instantly. It also works passively, by observing purchasing and browsing behavior. The real-time proprietary beautytech solution transforms the beauty customer experience by enabling unique, personalized engagement at each touchpoint on their online shopping journey from up-sells to landing pages and product recommendations.
With BME, consumers get a one-on-one, in-store sales assistant like experience online and from the comfort of their own home. As stores have now reopened, BME can also be implemented onto store touchpads in-store to create an effective omnichannel strategy. The higher the level of personalization and recommendations which gives retailers artificial intelligent capabilities without having to build it.
And, now more than ever when the transformation of retail is led by the new world post-COVID there is more of a need for the retail sector to implement the BME platform to ensure the success and most importantly the survival of their business in today’s volatile climate.
This is the first time ever, a personalization tool has been created specifically for the beauty industry and is powered by competitor data which is completely unheard of before.
So How Does BME Work?
By merging AI with beauty specific intelligence and also 5 years competitor intelligence, BME applies dynamic machine learning algorithms to identify nuanced patterns within consumer datasets. In other words, BME identifies preferred beauty products by age, skin concerns and buying patterns. The more consumers visit the online shop, the more information the tool learns and automatically optimizes.
The engine then narrows down customer choice, predicting which product the customer is most likely to buy, increasing sales, and loyalty. BME personalizes product recommendations, complementary products, emails, landing pages, and more so that consumers get a complete 360-degree personalized experience that contributes to optimizing sales conversions by 30 to 600%.
BME has effectively been implemented in the UK with The French Pharmacy who have already seen a 50% increase in AoV (Average Order Value) and a 400% increase in conversion rates to sales. BME has also partnered up with premium cosmetic brand By Terry and one of the biggest Beauty retailers Douglas.
Based on recent case studies, BME has made 18m beauty product recommendations so far. It has increased the average order value by an impressive 50% and increased conversion rates to sales by an incredibe 400%.
Beauty Matching Engine Unique Selling Proposition
BME adopts an effective omnichannel approach to retailing as it works across online, app, email, and in-store. Most importantly, BME is powered by competitor data and beauty intelligence data from cosmetic scientists making BME’s trademarked beauty matches™ more accurate, authentic, and trustworthy in terms of personalized results. And, these matches benefit the real needs of the consumer from the minute they sign up, unlike other platforms that take longer to learn the habits of the consumer.
From a business perspective the plugin takes clients just 1-2 hours to implement so doesn’t have a massive impact on the day-today running of their business and as it is an integrated platform that optimizes with AI automatically, clients can wave goodbye to time-consuming manual systems.
How is BME Different?
In comparison to other beauty personalizations platforms on the market, BME doesn’t offer just product recommendations based on a quiz but also predicts consumer behaviour and personalizes EVERY touchpoint for EVERY beauty category from hair to fragrances to skincare and body and nails. It is a unique beauty specific personalized platform that only recommends the right products and colors that work for every beauty category from skincare to hair and not just one category that is best suited to the customer. Also, as it is powered by 5 years of data, it creates an uplift for its clients and their customer experience from day 1.
Currently in the market there are many 360 degree personalization solutions which are not optimized for beauty as they are not beauty specific, so they do not give the same 400% uplift in sales like using a beauty specific solution or they take 3-6 months to really show an uplift and are quite manual.
Beauty Matching Engine has an innovative approach to personalizing the entire consumer shopping experience at every touchpoint to help customers find their Beauty Matches™ either via a Virtual Beauty Assistant feature or without in a post COVID world. We look forward to accelerating their development by bringing them our network and our expertise in the beauty industry.
Camille Kroely, Global Head of Open Innovation & Digital Services
The future is digital and the success of beauty retail….is Beauty Matching Engine™.
