March 18, 2022

Oriflame Built a Sales Funnel in a New Channel: Automatic Communications in the Chatbot Bring 545% ROI

GoalsIncrease direct marketing revenue by improving communications in messengers
Reach a new audience with emails
SolutionsLaunch a chatbot for Telegram and a social messenger
Integrate the product catalog in the chatbot, launch bulk campaigns and trigger campaigns
Results545% ROI in six months
TeamOriflame: Head of CRM, a MarTech expert, and a CRM specialist; Botmechanic: CEO and Customer Success Manager;
Mindbox: 2 Customer Success Managers
ITBotmechanic chatbot
Mindbox marketing automation platform
Business scale∼$1.5 bln in annual sales revenue
1,000+ different items for sale

Oriflameis a leader in direct sales among cosmetics companies. Oriflame has been highlighting people's beauty globally for 50 years. The company has representative offices in 60 countries and 3.6 million Brand Partners worldwide

Elena Evdokimova, Head of CRM, Oriflame Russia

Cosmetics company, Oriflame, has been using Mindbox to interact with its customer base since 2015. The platform enables Oriflame to enrich unified customer profiles, launch bulk campaigns and trigger workflows, and personalize offers in web stories and pop-ups. In 2021, the company introduced a new communication channel – a chatbot for Telegram – to reach a larger audience and increase direct marketing revenue. As a result, the chatbot simultaneously acts as a simplified website version, allowing customers to search for items with ease, as well as a channel for instant bulk campaigns and personal messages. Oriflame launched the first campaigns in just 4 weeks, and the chatbot was able to break even in 2 months.

The chatbot is mainly used by brand partners. They bring in the most revenue for Oriflame. Brand Partners order products at discounted prices and then resell them at catalog prices. They can also invite others to join Oriflame and build their own teams, while still retaining their commission.

Chatbot results

545% ROI

We made our performance-based calculations for 2021 based on figures from April 1–August 31 (inclusive). Oriflame asked us not to reveal the exact figures. The data uses last-click attribution and has been calculated by Oriflame using the following formula:

Botmechanic provides Oriflame with a 545% ROI. Every $1 invested in the platform brings a return of $5.5.

Oriflame reached a ROI in just 2 months following the launch of the chatbot and campaigns:

What was done	Start of project, launched bulk campaigns		Launched trigger campaigns for abandoned category browse	Launched trigger campaigns for abandoned carts		Launched the Wellness Marathon
Month	March	April	May	June	July	August
ROI	0	-4%	113%	344%	488%	545%

Since August, Oriflame has been working on the Wellness Marathon. We’ll be sharing its results in a separate post.

3.5%

average conversion rate for trigger campaigns sent through the chatbot

4weeks

spent fine-tuning scenarios for campaigns

2months

to achieve a positive ROI

Testimonial

Messengers are a much easier marketing channel to use than email. They're also cheaper than SMS and have great potential:

— increased coverage rate: today, people prefer messengers over social media;

— subscription and data collection: the chatbot is easier to subscribe to;

— open rate: around 80% of your subscribers are likely to read your messages.

When integrated with Mindbox, the chatbot makes it possible to:

— segment audiences and personalize messages;

— launch targeted and trigger-based communications;

— insert gameplay and polling wigdets;

— announce events and host free online beauty marathons (these include lessons, master classes, and live streams).

Ekaterina Piskun
CRM Manager, Oriflame

Messengers are a much easier marketing channel to use than email and they're cheaper than SMS

The challenges faced and the solutions found

When comparing Q3 2020 and Q3 2021, we found that the email channel was losing active subscribers, with its CTOR (click-to-open rate) falling from 14.15% to 9.94%, according to reports in Mindbox. This prompted Orliflame to find new ways of boosting campaign engagement.

One option was the creation of sales funnels in an additional communication channel (messengers and chatbots). This would give Brand Partners the choice of which channel suited them best. At the same time, it was important to evaluate the new channel's performance without increasing the amount of expenses for its maintenance. Mindbox's new tools for automating campaigns in messengers were able to provide Orilflame with a solution. The campaign preparation process decreased signiciantly as these campaigns are easier to design compared to emails. Also, unlike SMS campaigns, these messages are free.

As a result, Oriflame's chatbot supplemented its trigger and bulk email campaigns with an instant form of communication with brand partners. The chatbot has an embedded simplified product catalog and creates “on-the-spot” personal offers.

Testimonial

We already had the Mindbox platform up and running before we started this project, helping us to support all our communication channels and personalize content. When we noticed a decrease in our active subscribers, we reached out to our Customer Success Manager, who suggested we introduce the chatbot.

I am happy to say that Mindbox's Customer Success Managers are qualified experts that not only know how to resolve technical issues, but also how to suggest alternative ways for meeting our business goals.

Elena Evdokimova
Head of CRM, Oriflame

Goal	Solution
Create an additional channel for communication with brand partners that is cheaper to maintain than the email and SMS channels	Created a chatbot for Telegram and VK (a social messenger), which has a less costly design and allows to send messages for free
Make website navigation easier	Embedded a simplified product catalog in the chatbot for Telegram and VK and grouped the items into categories
Increase the coverage of marketing communications	Launched bulk and trigger campaigns via the chatbot
Increase conversion rate	Personalized communications sent by the chatbot: fine-tuned recommendations for the algorithms and triggers for category browses and abandoned carts
Encourage customers to share their personal data, shorten questionnaires and make them less intimidating	Developed scenarios for data collection through different entry points (Oriflame website, emails, Telegram) so that data could be merged into unified customer profiles. In each communication channel, customers are asked to leave a minimal amount of data
Collect and store unified data about customers and their actions in the chatbot and merge them with the data from the other channels	Customers are identified when they click on links in emails. This avoids repeated requests for their personal data, e.g. their phone number. We integrated the chatbot with Mindbox to merge the data from Telegram and VK into the unified customer profiles. We set up the data transfer through webhooks

Testimonial

As a user, I’ve come across chatbots many times. However, this was my first time creating a chatbot. Fortunately, the Botmechanic team came just at the right time to lend a helping hand!

Strong points

—User-friendly interface.

—You can create your chatbot without having to write a single line of code.

—You can managw the chatbot yourself and promptly make any changes.

—The platform enables chatbot users to switch to a support center specialist.

What to improve

—The functionality lacks certain fine details. For example, we would like to have a search bar.

—It’s not possible to delete a trigger or bulk campaign. For example, if you no longer need a test trigger you created you won't be able to delete it.

—I wish the developers would be more eager to consider the users' suggestions or to launch some kind of cool update. Typically, when having to deal with an issue, the project manager suggests getting by with a limited range of features instead of making changes to the platform and upgrading it.

Anna Kotlova
MarTech expert, Oriflame

Testimonial

It is crucial to specify the key outcomes before starting the development process so that once you’ve created a chatbot, it continues to make a permanent and sustainable impact. Focusing your efforts on campaigns that you only need to fine-tune once and can easily maintain going forward really helps. For Oriflame, this refers to the weekly automated messages sent by the chatbot.

Oriflame's team reported that they could not remove a trigger or a campaign that they no longer needed from the chatbot. We resolved this issue, now making it possible to remove triggers and bulk campaigns.

Karina Kavarnali
Customer Success Manager, Botmechanic

Campaigns launched via the chatbot

We created user scenarios in order to launch the chatbot. These scenarios included a large number of functions: from making a purchase to providing campaigns with recommendations and tips on how to promote the products. We used the Botmechanic service to set up campaigns for two free channels simultaneously (Telegram and VK). In the future, we plan to add WhatsApp communications.

We integrated the chatbot with the CDP. This not only allows us to merge brand partner contact data into the CDP for communications in messengers, but also to store the data regarding their actions in Telegram and VK. All the bulk and trigger communications are configured in the CDP as well.

More on the campaigns that were launched:

Our new Brand Partners receive a link to the chatbot in their welcome email. The homepage offers several different scenarios of info messages: from item digests to tips on how to build your career as a brand partner:

Main menu

List of item categories

The chatbot contains links to the main website pages. Links are grouped into categories to facilitate navigation.

Once the user clicks on a category, they get a recommendation message in 2 hours with the products from the category they viewed. Trigger campaigns are created and set up on the Mindbox platform and use ML-driven product recommendations. This enables the company to have a deeper insight into the audience's preferences and help the customers choose what to purchase.

Chatbot subscribers receive messages with promotions:

Development plans: Launching chatbots in all regional offices

Oriflame decided to apply the experience of the Russian office to other divisions around the world. To implement the initiative, we will be creating separate projects where we’ll transfer the existing campaigns. The local marketers will only have to translate the texts to their local languages.

In the meantime, we are in the process of launching a new scenario to mark Oriflame's 55th anniversary.