Aesop

Marketing Strategy Breakdown

There’s a lot to learn from Aesop ecommerce marketing strategy. Here, you can pick their marketing strategy, learn lessons, and take inspiration for your own eCommerce business.

Use creative incentives to attract more store visitors

Bringing more people to your stores will boost your sales, build trust and loyalty as in-store visits let customers see, touch, and try products. 

Aesop often uses emails and ads to drive store traffic with various tactics like these:

Provide in-store gifts or free personalized services

Aesop uses emails and ads to encourage store visits by promoting gifts. Their emails also feature in store free consultations with their experts, inviting customers to visit and learn more about their skincare needs.

Provide in-store consultations and tailored experiences for individuals and groups

Aesop uses emails to highlight the expertise of their in-store teams. They invite individuals and groups to visit for expert consultations and personalized experiences. 

By targeting also groups, they reach a wider audience that may include companies interested in offering skincare experiences to their employees or customers. This approach increases the chance of group members becoming loyal to Aesop’s products and services from a successful first experience with your brand.

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Promote Limited-Edition collaborative products in-store

Aesop’s stores are known to match the local architecture with creative interior designs, making the brand stand out. Aesop focuses on creating experiences rather than using aggressive sales tactics for immediate sales.

In the following example of email, Aesop aligned with their branding approach by highlighting a partnership with Bocci, a brand known for creating unique lights and participating in art-related projects.

So, selling Bocci’s amber glass 14p light in-store strengthens Aesop’s creative image and will drive foot traffic, especially from design-focused customers. This partnership encourages visits to see the product in person, meet Aesop's experts, and experience their unique store environment. The limited edition and availability just in some stores create exclusivity and urgency for shoppers.

Focus on education and experience over immediate selling

Many skincare brands rely on tactics like celebrity and influencer endorsements, but Aesop takes a different approach, as mentioned earlier. 

Aesop sends educational emails that educate about their ingredients. They also highlight their well-trained in-store teams, who offer free consultations for personalized recommendations. This approach helps customers make informed decisions and builds trust with the brand.

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Aesop’s emails and ads focus on offering a unique experience and sharing the story or philosophy behind their products. This helps create a real connection with customers and makes the brand memorable, encouraging strong word-of-mouth advertising.

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Use meaningful visuals instead of flashy ones

Aesop focuses on both the quality of their products and simplicity in their branding through maintaining a consistent approach in their visuals.

Their emails and ads use minimalist, high-quality designs that tell a story. The colors are simple, with neutral shades like brown, beige, black, and white. This gives their emails and ads a sophisticated look and they mainly use simple packaging, with bottles that resemble old pharmacy bottles.

They have a very solid email marketing strategy - as their Average Spam score is good since it's -1,8 (Spam score is a measure of how likely an email is to be considered spam by a spam filter. The higher the score, the more likely the email is to be considered spam.). Also, a point regarding to subject lines - Emails usually have a better open rate while keeping the subject lenght below 36. Here, as it's 27 characters, they're doing great, that's exactly where we see a good open rate correlation. Kudos to the Aesop team!

We display here a overview of Aesop email marketing strategy - along with other brands from the Personal Care industry. Amongst their last emails sent, two of them were 'Aromatic guidance' and 'A refreshing assembly'.

One interesting note as well, about their whole domain reputation and SEO - their Authority Domain Ranking is 76 on https://www.aesop.com/. This is excellent - and hard to achieve, as it takes time, consistent SEO work and a solid SEO strategy.

So you can now access all the available datapoints - and remember, always base youself on a deep understanding of what your customer needs and wants - and that is different for every brand and audience.