NARS Cosmetics elevates its community of ambassadors and stimulates their engagement

François Nars’ fascination with color, purity and texture led to the creation in 1994 of the iconic NARS brand, a true celebration of individuality. Its 12 original lipsticks – and their immediate success at launch – continue to inspire creativity, self-expression, and boundless art. NARS embraces boldness at every turn, bringing to beauty a high-fashion, high-style, and avant-garde approach.

• Building an engaged community to strengthen brand attachment
• Organize various activities to boost community engagement between purchases
• Interact in a personalized way with its different customer segments

In the era where consumer trust is paramount, brands face a challenge: How can they establish credibility beyond their own promotional efforts? Bare Home confronted this dilemma by tapping into the potential of user-generated content through micro-influencers.

NARS is an iconic brand that inspires creativity, self-expression and boundless artistry and has built a passionate community of fans. While it’s relatively simple to attract fans of the brand to a community, you then need to make sure that they stay there and are active. With a community of 32,000 people, NARS wanted to keep members engaged through various challenges and activities.

This required an integrated platform that would facilitate this management and allow for actions tailored to the different profiles of the members of the NARS community: consumers, fans of the brand and professional makeup artists.

NARS also wanted to take advantage of this community of enthusiasts to obtain user-generated content (UGC) to enrich its website with authentic photos and videos that reinforce the brand identity. Relying on the community was also an opportunity to get constructive and detailed product reviews.

More than 1000 new members join the NARS community every month, managed on Skeepers’ Brand Communities platform. This is how the brand deployed all its animation capabilities to keep members engaged.

• Engage the community and boost participation through numerous activities
• Improve productivity and increase results by automating campaigns
• Create authentic content that improves the website and increases conversion rates

With Brand Communities by Skeepers NARS animates its 32,000 members with a complete community platform, including communication tools (email, chat, sms…). This platform includes community animation through missions and challenges that give benefits to members, management of events for the community, the ability to test products and generate UGC easily.

A special space is reserved for the publication of members’ beauty routines, which are highly regarded authentic content that also feeds the NARS website. Fans of the brand also exchange tips and tricks on beauty, makeup, and product usage.

For its community of professionals, NARS uses Brand Communities to create personalized, gamified experiences, such as exclusive discounts and virtual masterclasses. The platform automatically recognizes professional members through integration with NARS CRM. This automation is a real time saver that allows you to create more events that are eagerly awaited by members.

Targeting and campaign automation features also play an important role in selecting profiles, personalizing messages, and enabling automatic reminders. All of these activities create a community experience that is essential for strengthening the connection with the brand and driving engagement.

• Record engagement among community members and better customer value
• Authentic and impactful UGC, which triggers more sales on the site
• Better insight into purchasing behavior through member surveys and interactions

The best metric to measure the success of the Brand Communities platform is engagement. At NARS, it is very high, since the community has 30% of active members (compared to 18% on average in the beauty sector) and their interaction rate is 27%, which is 2.3 times more than the average!

NARS also sees an increase in Customer Lifetime Value: the 32,000 “NARSissists” now generate 5% of revenues. They consume more and their order frequency is 52% higher than that of other customers.

NARS also sees the success of its community through member satisfaction. Masterclasses are attracting more and more participants: their number has doubled and many come back month after month.
Finally, content created by community members has a positive impact on brand visibility and revenue. NARS organizes product test campaigns, which allow you to obtain authentic reviews that enrich your site and your customer knowledge. The beauty routines published on the site also act as conversion boosters, as customers stage the different products they use to create their look.

With Brand Communities, NARS has not only succeeded in maintaining strong engagement, but it has also strengthened its customer knowledge and recovered very valuable authentic content, which can now be used in paid media campaigns.