cloud nine

Hailing from Yorkshire, Cloud Nine is a global hair & beauty brand that offers award-winning professional styling products for all types and styles of hair.

From innovation in tech to a commitment to create a greener cycle, Cloud Nine intends to change the future of hair care for the better (and we’re all here for it).

The highlights

• We teamed-up with global hair and beauty brand Cloud Nine, to untangle their CRM process and make their email marketing shine.
• Through immersion sessions and an email audit, including mapping out the full customer journey and data touchpoints, we uncovered several key insights, noting low conversion-rates across previous campaigns.
• Informed by the insights unearthed in our discovery phase, we defined a new email strategy, prioritising activity based on greatest impact.
• We delivered the creative roll-out, producing 40+ email templates extending across all customer touchpoints.
• We also took a number of proactive measures to improve data quality, engagement and conversion rates.
• Results include a 546% ROI (and rising), with 945,000+ email opens and 11,000+ click-throughs.

The Brief

In 2022, the hair and beauty industry in the UK generated £4.4 billion. This represented a growth rate of 35%, and this industry growth is expected to continue over the next five years.

To stay a cut above the competition — within such a fiercely contested and quickly growing marketplace — in early 2023, CLOUD NINE initiated a glow-up of their own; rebranding to make their visuals shine and their USP’s and proposition easier to understand.

With this process complete, they were seeking an agency to help them roll-out their new brand, develop their CRM processes and optimise their email marketing performance — an element of their marketing mix which was long overdue a makeover.

They chose to team up with Enjoy, and we quickly set to work — the sky was the limit for this new partnership.

Our work

It all started with discovery

To do something better than before, first, it’s key to discover what’s been done previously, what worked and what didn’t. And importantly, why.

So, after a series of immersion sessions — where we learnt all about CLOUD NINE, their business, marketplace, and customers — we conducted an email and data touchpoints audit.

For this, we combined analysis from usability reviews with reports from our attention mapping tech, allowing us to uncover a number of key insights:

• Brand consistency: The branding across previous email campaigns was inconsistent. By brushing away these inconsistencies and ensuring greater cohesion across future campaigns, there was a real opportunity for Cloud Nine to increase recognition, trust and loyalty.
• Content hierarchy: The hierarchy of content made some email campaigns difficult to digest. By breaking content into logical sections and creating clearly defined call-to-actions, Cloud Nine could drive engagement and inspire more action.
• Accessibility: Accessibility issues were evident across previous campaigns, featuring fonts that weren’t web safe, sometimes layered over imagery, making text difficult to read. To build trust and engagement on a greater scale, it was key that accessibility best practice was built into future campaigns. After all, good accessibility is good usability, and our philosophy is; why wouldn’t you want a wider audience to benefit from your content?

After reviewing previous email campaigns, we also analysed email performance, and noted that, while engagement rates were strong, there was a huge disparity in terms of conversions, which were low across the board.

We also reviewed Cloud Nine’s CRM infrastructure and workflows. While they had some existing automation in place, it was clear the workflows could be more sophisticated and more tailored to customers at each stage of the buyer journey - to really drive conversions home.

To create a slicker, streamlined and more interactive customer journey, we’d need to map out what this looked like, before creating a brand new suite of email templates that addressed previous challenges around brand consistency, content hierarchy and accessibility.

Finally, we identified that Cloud Nine’s database included a high-level of lapsed, disengaged and inactive customers. This could be solved in-part through the development of a comprehensive post purchase customer journey map. But also through data management best practice.

Mapping out the customer journey

Customer journey mapping is a valuable practice; helping us to put ourselves in the shoes of the customer, and learn how, when, where and why they interact with a brand.

With this in mind, we hosted a series of workshops with Cloud Nine, to explore each of these touchpoints and identify opportunities to elevate the overall customer experience.

From ‘welcome’ emails when customers first create an account and cart abandonment emails nudges, to post-purchase emails that spread excitement and joy, we created an all-encompassing customer journey map — aligned with client personas and content opportunities — that would help Cloud Nine nurture their customers, taking them from prospects to customers, and advocates to evangelists. We wanted to deliver a digital experience that, at every touchpoint, would make customers feel…well, on cloud nine.

With our customer journey map at the ready, the next task was to create a suite of email templates to help them roll it out.

Rolling-out the template suite

It goes without saying, email campaigns for a hair and beauty brand need to look beautiful. And they need to read beautifully, too.

Our team of copywriters and digital designers teamed up to make this happen, producing 40+ email templates aligned with the brand refresh, covering each touchpoint across the customer journey, and using Cloud Nine’s new brand guidelines to steer the look and feel.

Beyond aesthetics, it was about ensuring the emails were functional and carefully crafted. That meant mapping out a logical structure for each email variant; using Cloud Nine’s colour palette to compartmentalise the templates, creating clear and concise headlines, and well-considered body copy.

It also meant ensuring brand consistency across the template suite, in terms of assets, imagery and tone-of-voice. It meant making call-to-actions prominent within each template and establishing a clear purpose. And it meant incorporating accessibility best practice, testing the campaigns across different devices and browsers, and using tools such as screen readers to make sure the content was accessible to everyone.

The results

If a perfect client partnership exists, then our one with Cloud Nine really shines out.

Since we teamed up, we’ve worked from their offices, hosted several immersion sessions and workshops, and even attended their summer party (spoiler: it was wilder than David Beckham’s mohawk at the 2002 World Cup).

Quips aside, our relationship with Cloud Nine is one based on shared values, with honesty, trust and collaboration at the forefront. What’s more, they’re always open to new ideas and often reach out to us with their own. This willingness to be brave, to try new things, and to fully invest in our relationship, strategy and approach, has all contributed to their continued growth.

Since working with Cloud Nine (and making their email marketing shine), we’ve delivered some incredible results:

• 546% project ROI (and rising)
• Avg. 44.5% open rate (vs industry average of 17.1%)
• Avg. 2.2% click-through rate (vs industry average of 0.7%)
• 1m+ email opens
• 12,000+ click-throughs

*Results measured from September 23’ - January ‘24

Next up, we’ll be implementing A/B testing measures and exploring how we can make the content even more personalised and dynamic — going above and beyond for Cloud Nine and their customers.

But the best part? Cloud Nine have been so thrilled with the results that they’re now extending the scope of our work to include other performance marketing activity. We simply can’t wait to get started (and to share the results)!

"Over the last year we’ve built a great partnership with Enjoy Digital. Their ideas and innovations have really helped us to push the Cloud Nine email strategy to the next level, with successful commercial results. And we hope to have a long-term ongoing relationship, to further improve our digital comms experience over the coming months and years. Thank you for your great work Enjoy Digital."

Emily Bentham​​​​, eCRM & Loyalty Manager

Sell more, spend less

Enjoy is an award-winning digital experience and performance agency. And it’s  our mission to transform and grow brands digitally, ethically and sustainably, and to forever challenge expectations about what digital can deliver.

At Enjoy, we place long-term strategic partnerships and shared success over short-term gains. And we always spend our client’s money as if it was our own.

So, when you work with us, we’ll crunch the data across every channel, platform and initiative; to help you make your budget work harder, optimise your marketing performance and deliver truly transformational results.

Find out more about our performance marketing services and get in touch today!