Huda Beauty grows Klaviyo revenue 2x+ YoY with “simple segmentation”

Huda Beauty started with Huda Kattan, beauty blogger and makeup artist to the stars, reimagining false eyelashes. The market was flooded with low-quality, unnaturally-shaped styles—and Huda found a way to stack and customize them to flatter her clients’ eyes. So in 2013, she launched an eyelash line of her own.

In the decade since, Huda Beauty has expanded its array of products to include skincare, foundation, and all kinds of other makeup—all “tested on Huda, not on animals.”

The brand’s online following has grown, too, to a whopping 54M+ followers on Instagram. They communicate with their fans via email marketing, which they manage in Klaviyo.

Learn how Huda Beauty revived its ecommerce growth with Klaviyo

Challenge

Recently, Huda Beauty saw a YoY decline in overall performance. The brand needed to change its trajectory.

Phuong Ngo saw an opportunity to do just that by overhauling email marketing.

Ngo had just started in her role as CRM and loyalty manager, and she noticed that despite a subscriber list in the millions, the brand’s click-through rate was low, and subscribers churned often.

Their subscriber list needed cleaning, and they needed to send less frequently to their less engaged subscribers. They also had room to test and optimize new messaging in their welcome series and owned marketing campaigns.

Klaviyo made it easy to do all that in less than 3 months.

Solution

Ngo and her team crafted a turnaround plan with their Klaviyo customer success manager.

They scrubbed inactive contacts from their list, and started segmenting based on engagement.

Today, the brand only sends regular email campaigns to subscribers who have engaged within the last 120 days. The rest of Huda Beauty’s subscribers only hear from them during a major sale, like BFCM.

This channel-level overhaul, paired with content strategy optimization, helped change that year’s trendline.

“Everyone contributed, but CRM definitely drove a big piece of that pie,” Ngo says.

Strategy

Huda Beauty’s new email strategy—which has helped boost conversions and reduce promotion fatigue—has two prongs: a new, personalized sending cadence, and a messaging refresh.

The new send cadence

Huda Beauty implemented an engagement track strategy in which their most recently engaged segment gets the most frequent messages, and less recent engagers receive fewer sends.

“With simple Klaviyo segmentation, we were able to clean up a lot of the deliverability issues that we had previously,” says Ngo. “It was something small that created a really big lift.”

With simple Klaviyo segmentation, we were able to clean up a lot of the deliverability issues that we had previously. It was a small thing that created a really big lift.

The messaging refresh

Huda Beauty updated their content strategy, using Klaviyo’s A/B testing to evaluate how performance shifted when they showed a block of content vs. when they hid it.

Based on the results, they started sending longer emails, weaving in more education, user-generated content from customers, and storytelling about the brand’s well-known founder.

They’ve complemented those campaigns with relationship-building Klaviyo automations, like category-specific post-purchase flows for lips, skin, and skincare products. These flows thank customers for buying, and then recommend application techniques and complementary products.

“We’re making sure that customers are getting the information that they need from us—not just ‘Buy! Buy! Buy!’” Ngo explains.