Victoria Katsarou is Vice President, eCommerce for M.A.C North America, part of The Estée Lauder Companies. She began her career in communications at YouTube and Google before working at both Chanel and Bloomingdale’s during her MBA program at Harvard Business School. From there, Victoria became a senior buyer at Zola before transitioning to ecommerce positions at Walmart and Cole Haan. Before her current role at The Estée Lauder Companies, she served as Vice President, eCommerce at both Casper and quip.
In our conversation, Victoria shares strategies to build customer loyalty and increase conversions, such as prioritizing mobile content, speed, and seamless checkout. She talks about a recent revamp in M.A.C’s loyalty program, as well as the key ingredients for creating a viral product.
This is my first role within beauty, though I have worked in a lot of different categories. While working at M.A.C has its unique considerations, just like in the other places that I’ve worked, there are a lot of universal truths.
First, having a simple, streamlined website experience is key. It needs to be conversion-optimized with a smooth checkout that doesn’t make the customer jump through hoops. Pricing needs to be clear, discounts have to be advertised and explained, and value should be highlighted. Make sure simple things like promo codes are working. Or, if they don’t apply to a certain item, explain why — don’t make users do guesswork as to why an item is excluded from a promotion.
Other universal truths in digital experience are having clear product images so people can understand sizing and proportion. Having the right specs, i.e., all the information users are looking for, is essential. PDPs have to be optimized both in terms of the bullet points and the free text to explain the function, size, and value that customers would be getting.
One big thing is around color matching, especially regarding face products (foundation, concealer, and powder), with skin-tone matching. Finding your shade online is actually a very difficult problem to solve. We instituted a tool — called Findation — to help solve this, and we’ve seen a lot of usage from it. Interestingly enough, even with this tool, we also have to create charts that show how skin tone shades vary from our old products to our new ones. We’re still seeing some confusion around that, so there’s still room for innovation in that category, especially as AI is getting smarter.
Another experience that’s really important to us is instructional how-to content. A lot of brands have started to bring that content on websites. Sometimes, they don’t have to create any new content — they can use influencers and get the rights to repost that content on their websites. A lot of times, the brand may want to create their own how-to content, but consumers expect that, so it feels more authentic coming from an influencer.
Also, beauty reviews are more important than ever. You may want to see people who are like you — in the same age group or with similar skin concerns — react to a product, so review summaries and filters are important. At M.A.C, we always try to drum up unbiased reviews with each product launch through seeding with existing customers.
Last but not least, ingredients are becoming more and more important, especially with the increasing focus on clean beauty. Outside of ensuring products are clean, some customers also look for specific active ingredients like hyaluronic acid or retinol for their skin, and something we’ve been toying with at M.A.C is how we can present these ingredients in a way that is comprehensive while also easy for the customer to understand. Listing out a bunch of chemical substances is not ideal for the average customer, so we have to find the right way to present that in a clear but compelling way.
Anytime we consider a website change or update, we review both versions of the UX side by side. If you lead with desktop, you’re going to get all your conversions with desktop. But as more traffic comes through mobile, increasing your mobile conversion by a little bit can bring a lot more revenue. That’s why I think a good practice is to always review the mobile UX first.
In terms of the specific features, the way you prioritize content becomes even more key for mobile because the mobile screen size is a lot smaller. Whether something is a little bit higher or lower on desktop may not matter, but on mobile, you have to be careful. It’s easy to just add something, but as soon as you have a new module on there, you have to be sure that it’s in the right spot. Is it above or below checkout? Are the buttons big enough for people to click on? These seem like simple choices, but they’re very important.
Lastly, speed is important. We pay attention to things like image, video, and file size so that things load quickly. Also, streamlined checkout is more important than ever.
One interesting change that we made at M.A.C, which was, in some ways, counterintuitive, is that we used to do a lot of gamified offers, such as spin-the-wheel experiences. It sounded fun, but customers were often disappointed that they didn’t get higher savings and that impacted our conversions. It was really bad for conversion. I’m not saying that there aren’t good gamified experiences, but some of them don’t end up functioning as they should.
Once we dropped some of those, we introduced more simple offers that were more successful, even though some of them were at a lower percent off than our gamified offerings. For example, a simple gift with a purchase on Black Friday. That helped with the conversion of our promotions. As a result, we were able to offer less discounts while achieving better results for the business.
I believe that the two can definitely live side by side. I don’t think you need to choose between aesthetics and brand, vision, and conversion. There’s a time and a place for everything in life, just like there’s a time and a place for everything in ecommerce.
What you need to think about is the customer journey. Places like the homepage or emails are where you want to experiment with creative templates, big splashy images, and longer videos. It’s also a bit of an awareness play. Even if customers may have the awareness from a marketing perspective, you want to reinforce who you are as a brand, what you stand for, and what you are pushing at the moment.
When you go to places like the PDP, checkout, or talking about transactions in an email, you have to be more careful. It’s like they’re already in the store — you already grabbed their attention. They told you they are interested in the brand, they love it, and they want a piece of it. This may not be the right time to sort of intrude about why your brand is great. Instead, it’s the time to provide the information they need at that moment to convert.
That can be easily addressed in UX. For instance, on the homepage, maybe you create hero modules with flexibility that can offer big editorial images or a large splash video. But then when you go to the PDP and the checkout, that’s where you have to be careful prioritizing certain elements like reviews, ingredients, etc. Of course, you still have to speak with your brand’s voice and tell that story without deprecating the experience.
The checkout needs to be simple — that’s just basic hygiene. You would be surprised how often I see promo codes not working for certain products because the brand doesn’t want them to apply. OK, but why? Make sure you remove barriers and confusion where possible. Another pet peeve of mine is when a brand says to sign up for emails to get, for example, 15 percent off, but if there’s another offer going on at the same time, sometimes the email offer applies and other times it doesn’t.
Clarifying these things is important because oftentimes the person would have checked out anyway, at times even without an offer, but because they see an advertised offer or program doesn’t apply to them and they don’t understand the reasoning, they get turned off. Now, assuming that you’ve worked through all these things, I find a variety of payment methods and pay later availability to increase conversion. Having said that, it is equally important to decide which vendor or payment method is suggested or prioritized to reduce decision fatigue.
Another easy message to reduce cart abandonment is email triggers telling people that they left something in their carts. Incentivizing them to complete checkout can be an obvious but highly effective method. Last is loyalty. For us, loyalty is critical. My team did a big relaunch of our loyalty program, which produced great results for us. Every company should be looking at its loyalty and thinking about what the customer expects from it and how to optimize it.
We implemented three main things. The first was introducing points for dollars. Before, customers could only redeem gifts for points, but now they can exchange them for dollars. That was a very highly requested feature.
Second, we allowed a rolling expiration date. Points used to expire at the end of the year because it was easier for us in terms of financial accounting. But that was tricky, because after shopping for the holidays, people wanted to keep their loyalty points.
Finally, we did a big refresh of brand gifts so they’d be current and in-line with the program.
One big question that we still have around loyalty and are testing is how to expose it during checkout. Should it be super prominent? We talked about how the checkout should be simple and streamlined, but loyalty in particular merits an inclusion, perhaps even for someone who’s a member of the program in order to drive sign ups.
I would say that it all starts with the product itself. Even though I work more on the selling side, I believe that there has to be something special about the product — either what it does for the customer, like a true innovation, or how it connects to the DNA of the brand. Even emotional value can be a component to virality. In essence, I don’t think that just any product can go viral.
With M.A.C, for instance, we recently re-introduced some of our most popular nude colors from the brand’s history, which went viral. Of course, we were very thoughtful about how we put those products up and how we marketed them. But it’s also about what the product itself stands for — that this brand, which started 40 years ago, is still preaching the same values around inclusivity that are more relevant than ever. We welcome all ages, all races, and all genders. And now, since 90s fashion is coming back, it just felt right.
We also reintroduced some of our Disney collection collaborations, which again, is something that diehard M.A.C fans have collected for years. When you think about these things, what they mean to people, and how they represent the brand, they all contribute to that aspect of virality.
Once you have a good candidate for a viral product, working with the right influencers is very important. I believe in the work of influencers, and M.A.C has been a pioneer in this area. There’s also an opportunity to think about who the right influencers are for each brand. It’s not just about follower counts — are they speaking to the right audience? Are they speaking to the people that are more likely to actually purchase and become advocates vs. briefly engage and move on to the next thing? More measurements around that would be welcome, and I think that’ll start happening more and more.
Aside from pure ecommerce, another important but challenging component is inventory management. It’s not easy to predict virality. However, as you stay with a brand for some time, you start seeing some patterns repeating themselves. For instance, in this case with M.A.C, bring-backs and re-introductions of iconic products from the brand’s past are super popular. Even though we’re in a time when brands are careful about their budgets, buying a little bit more inventory when you know a product has a special aura around it is worth it.
It sounds simple, but one way to kill the virality is running out of stock very quickly. Yes, it creates buzz to say “we sold out,” but ultimately, our world is so fast moving that there’s going to be another brand with another viral product. People are not going to keep coming knocking on your door for this product for months.
Last but not least is website positioning. When you have a viral product, you need to give up a lot of real estate for that product on your website. Not every Instagram post is going to correctly link to the PDP, so that product needs to be front and center. That way, customers have an easy way to find it. If people come to your website and they want to make this impulse purchase, you have to make it super easy for them.
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