Company: Avon
Entry submitted by: Rene Calvey (eCommerce Community Lead )
Community: Avon Beauty Connects
Lithy category: Social ROI Titan
About Avon Products, Inc.
Avon is the Company that for 130 years has proudly stood for beauty, innovation, optimism and, above all, women. Avon products include well-recognized and beloved brands such as ANEW, Avon Colour, Avon Care, Skin-So-Soft, and Advance Techniques. Sold through nearly 6 million active independent Avon Sales Representatives, Avon products delight consumers in approximately 70 countries worldwide. Learn more about Avon and its products at www.avoncompany.com.
Avon now reaches one in three women in the UK, with six million women seeing an Avon brochure every three weeks.
In 2015, 22,000 shoppers voted Avon as the UK’s Best Health and Beauty Retailer 2015 in Verdict’s Customer Satisfaction Awards.
As the company for women, Avon is committed to supporting the causes that matter most to women; breast cancer and domestic violence. To the end of 2015, Avon and the Avon Foundation for Women donated more than $1billion in 50 countries to women’s causes. In the UK £16.8 million has been donated to breast cancer charities through the Avon breast cancer crusade and £1.6 million to domestic violence charities through its Speak Out programme.
Goals for our Lithium-powered community
We wanted to create a community for both B2C and B2B members both for very different purposes. We wanted to engage customers with relevant content, enabling them to quickly find looks/products and conversations that would enable them to engage with one another and Avon.
For our Representatives we wanted to create a seamless journey from their ordering page using SSO and again present relevant business content and information while encouraging conversation.
Overall we wanted to a fun, engaging and supportive community that would serve Representatives and Customers one and the same.
Our focus areas and tactics to meet these goals
We wanted to focus on creating the right content for both areas of the community, by focusing on working with the wider business on B2B content and working with a content agency to supply blogger and beauty content we felt we had the right strategy for success. Traffic driving was also a big goal, we had to ensure that for the B2B area we could drive traffic internally through our eMail, newsletters and links from our ordering sites as SEO would not reach us! We also ensured that we had strong links with our social team and everything public facing we did had SEO in mind.
Social shopping and selling is also a huge part of our strategy, so by engaging our users with our ‘Reward beauty, receive beauty’ scheme we are able to send them a product in return for a nice piece of user generated content which left them feeling engaged and valued.
Our results
We recently undertook research that looked at Representatives that have NEVER logged into the community vs those that have logged on at least three times in a certain period. We found that those Representatives that are regularly using Avon Beauty Connects had a 137% higher rate of retention with the business, had a 47% higher order value and 83% higher average earnings per campaign. Representatives regularly using Avon Beauty Connects also had a 43% increase in Customers.
So the value of community in their engagement and support in running their own businesses is truly working!
We have also recently launched Knowledge Base which is creating a great collection of business guides and UGC for tips and tricks to run an Avon business.
Overall we have proved that we retain and engage our audience and provide an fun and friendly and business oriented community for the Avon Representative and his or her Customers.