Glossier Launches 24 New Shopping Experiences in 8 Months, Achieving Up to a 65% ROAS Lift with FERMÀT Targeted Post-Click Experiments

Learn how DTC beauty pioneer Glossier leverages FERMÀT to maximize marketing efficiency, achieve product launch revenue goals, and unlock their creative investments' full potential with targeted post-click shopping experiences.

ABOUT

Launched in 2014 by Emily Weiss, Glossier has transformed into a digital-first powerhouse that has revolutionized the direct-to-consumer beauty landscape. Starting with just four essential products, Glossier has expanded into a omnichannel beauty brand offering skincare, makeup, body care, and fragrance. After acquiring over one million customers in its first four years, Glossier has continued to evolve, launching in major retailers like Sephora in 2023 while maintaining its strong direct-to-consumer presence.

CHALLENGE

The Glossier team sought to enhance their post-click performance marketing efficiency while maintaining their distinctive brand identity. They needed a hands-on strategic technology partner who could enable experimentation and custom experiences rapidly without requiring the development of new creative assets. 

While Glossier's creative-driven approach had built a powerful brand, their product detail pages had to serve too many use cases at once - they needed a way to enable custom experiences specific to the campaign.

The team needed a solution that would: improve marketing efficiency without sacrificing brand integrity, enable rapid experimentation without requiring additional creative resources, and provide strategic support for post-click experience optimization. Given their efficiency goals, one key objective was to leverage Glossier’s existing creative assets more effectively. 

“Working with FERMÀT has given our growth team the ability to cohesively align our ad-level creative and full-funnel experiences, bridging the gap between our brand vision and performance marketing capabilities.” - Madeline Kutner, Director of Performance Marketing at Glossier

STRATEGY

FERMÀT empowered Glossier to optimize their post-click experiences through strategic merchandising experiments, targeted product promotion, and frictionless payment testing. 

Using FERMÀT, Glossier has launched an impressive 24 new shopping experiences in just about 8 months. Their post-click experiments have ranged from bigger swings to more granular optimizations, all to maximize performance marketing efficiency and specificity to particular objectives for a campaign. 

Here are some of the strategies Glossier has implemented in their FERMÀT experimentation:

1. Optimizing Product Detail Pages for Conversion: Glossier’s core ecommerce site is a highly branded, aesthetically pleasing masterpiece. Because of their commitment to upholding their brand presence, their on-site Product Detail Pages (PDPs) are highly creative and less conversion-optimized. By leveraging FERMÀT funnels - microsites that live outside of the core Shopify instance - Glossier can combine the best of both worlds, blending their delightful branding with CRO best practices to offer shoppers more informative and detail-rich product pages. Glossier’s embedded PDPs within FERMÀT funnels include educational infographics from their Sephora listings, streamlined product descriptions for maximum clarity and impact, preset defaults to best-selling shade variants, and a curated mix of genuine customer reviews.
2. Payment Method Experimentation: Through FERMÀT experimentation, Glossier discovered the significant impact of Apple Pay integration on the PDP level. Before the BFCM sales period, Glossier offered Apple Pay at checkout, but not directly on PDPs. In preparation for BFCM, they added Apple Pay checkout buttons directly to FERMÀT funnel embedded PDPs – and the results were significant, with nearly 50% of purchases processed via Apple Pay (prior to hitting the core Shopify checkout).
3. Strategic Product Merchandising: Heading into the Black Friday Cyber Monday sales period, the Glossier team shared with their FERMÀT growth manager that they were interested in increasing the sales volume of a particular fragrance SKU. Funnel optimizations that led to this outcome included: featuring the product prominently above the fold, highlighting the product’s generous discount through strategic pricing display on both the ad and post-click levels, and ultimately positioning this perfume as the hero product in their fragrance shopping experience. 
4. Enhanced Funnels for New Product Launches: In partnership with their FERMÀT Growth Manager, the Glossier team developed dedicated funnels for the launch of new product collections and even new shade variants of existing products. These shopping experiences were strategically designed to ensure a cohesive experience from ad to purchase. For example, to promote the launch of Glossier’s new Black Cherry collection, funnels contained video shop landing pages to showcase the complete looks using the Black Cherry collection, pre-selected Black Cherry shade variants across all relevant products, and consistent Black Cherry collection messaging and creative from ad click to purchase

RESULTS

Using FERMÀT, Glossier continues to optimize their post-click experiences in order to maximize performance marketing efficiency, all while uncovering valuable insights for their broader ecommerce strategy. 

Since implementing FERMÀT, Glossier has: 

• Launched 24 funnels in just 8 months, with 6 of those experiences identified as high-performers
• Seen up to a 65% lift in ROAS with personalized post-click experiences built on FERMÀT
• Achieved a 25% reduction in CPA across FERMÀT funnels
• And uncovered a variety of valuable insights to inform broader ecommerce operations. 

The Glossier team continues to leverage FERMÀT for rapid experimentation and optimization, highlighting the value of blending brand and creative identity with conversion-optimized shopping experiences to maximize the value of ad dollars spent.