Inside Ilia’s customer acquisition strategy

Cherene Aubert is the VP of e-commerce and digital at clean beauty brand Ilia Beauty, where she said she’s focused on “setting the foundation for the next stage of growth” for the brand, which Famille C Venture acquired in 2022. But navigating the e-commerce landscape and acquiring new customers hasn’t been easy, especially as competition has increased and consumer expectations have grown. To discuss Ilia’s drivers to success, we caught up with Aubert at a virtual Retail Brew event. Watch the full conversation with Aubert here.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What are some of the challenges that you’re seeing in the e-commerce space and the customer acquisition space?

It’s not as cheap as it was to acquire customers, back in the day, maybe five years ago, 10 years ago…The playbook has changed. Privacy laws have changed, the way that consumers shop and behave. The amount of choice and competition that’s out there has changed in the e-commerce space. Amazon has grown considerably, and retail businesses are investing a lot more in their dot-com side of the house, so there’s just a lot more competition in general. And I would say social ads are just not enough for continued, long-term scale the way that they were, so brands have to start to invest in brand building and establishing their moat from Day 1, and what that means at different sizes and scales is different…It’s important for brands to focus on how they’re driving traffic from non-paid channels and how they’re building an audience…Brands need to think about where is their consumer going to be. How can they show up, and how can they do it in a way that’s scalable without having to pay for every net new customer?

How do you differentiate between and establish short-term versus long-term customer acquisition goals?

We have recently this year started investing more in a full-funnel media strategy. Much of the business’s growth has been through conversion, driving media. That’s totally natural for so many businesses, up until a certain size and scale of business, as they’re just trying to get as many direct response conversions as they can through paid social channels. We’re trying to drive not only sales for today, but sales for tomorrow. So if anything were to happen—you hear all these stories, what if TikTok shuts down tomorrow? What if Meta performance falls off a cliff? We don’t want our business to be beholden to this short-term growth acquisition strategy that everyone’s been employing. So we set out this year to run media full funnel, and that means not only running on things that we would consider more top of funnel—like CTV or out-of-home or even YouTube, we consider to be top of funnel—but we’re taking our existing direct response paid media channels like Instagram, Facebook, and even TikTok, and running different campaign types. So we’re not just running conversion campaigns; we’re trying to run reach or traffic campaigns, or these different campaigns that are designed to get in front of new people. We’re also working a lot harder to drive more awareness through partnerships, and really trying to get the brand awareness number that we’re now measuring very closely to go up through the activities that we’re doing.

How do you build a team in Ilia that has helped you carry out these e-commerce strategies successfully?

I look at the team building in terms of, there’s our acquisition team, there’s our conversion and site operations team, and then there’s our life cycle and retention team, and our customer experience team, and break out the team into the growth funnel and have the people on the team focus on those different areas of the funnel and collaborate together…It’s about, “How can we resource the opportunities at hand? What is the opportunity? What are we trying to go after? And can we justify investing in people, contractors, resources, or agencies to help us achieve the goal that we’re after?” It comes back [to] the forecasting model we have, the KPIs we have. We break those out into OKRs, and those OKRs roll back up to our financials, and then everybody has a goal with their name next to it, and it really helps us assess the volume of work that’s happening, the impact of the work that’s happening. And then do we need to add resourcing to continue to fuel the work? Right now, we have a hybrid model of people that we’ve brought in house and people that we still work with on a contract basis or in an agency capacity, and there’s a point at which the contractor spend and costs and the value of having someone in house to do more work than what a contractor can do tips in the favor of bringing someone in house.