Sally Beauty Brushes up eCommerce with SFCC & Salesforce Order Management

When it’s time to get your hair done – whether it’s your regular treatment or you’re fancying a fresh style – the beauty supplies are quite likely to come from Sally Beauty, the world’s largest retailer of all things beauty from hair color to nails and salon supplies.

The global beauty brand brings in yearly revenue of $3.8 billion, and like all businesses in the last year, had to adapt to the shifting environment caused by the pandemic. And they did this by moving its ecommerce to Salesforce Commerce Cloud to accelerate their online sales and improve their digital customer experiences.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud

In their own words, Sally saw in the tech of SFCC the ability to build and manage “contactless beauty experiences” in addition to working on key services for its customers no matter whether they’re private citizens or salon professionals.

When beauty salons shut their doors almost one year ago, there was a surge in demand for their products – haircare products, hair coloring, naircare, etc. This is where ecommerce took on a greater role.

“With Salesforce, Sally Beauty was able to quickly move its business online,” said Sally Beauty in a statement, “launching new digital shopping options, educational experiences to help prevent DIY disasters and support for its professional stylist community.”

In the third quarter of the fiscal year of 2020, the company’s VP Mary Beth Edwards, recounted that at the peak of the pandemic, the retailer witnessed “a strong ecommerce growth of 278% stemming from an unprecedented demand for DIY beauty products as everyone learned to do more from home.”

Then they expanded their digital strategy by unifying Commerce Cloud with other Salesforce cloud solutions. “We expanded our omnichannel shopping options and implemented Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud to better target Sally Beauty customers based on their interests and purchase behavior,” added Mary, “and provide them with applicable DIY-focused content.

“In addition, Salesforce’s Service Cloud has enabled us to improve our customer service team’s response time by implementing service bots on our website.” 

But back to the headliner. With their use of Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Sally and company managed to scale, at rapid pace, its ecommerce shop, in order “to accommodate the surge in demand from both consumers and its professional stylist community,” added Mary. But not only was SFCC used to strengthen the product side of business but also its services. Sally Beauty also used the platform to help train their sales consultants in virtual consulting. 

Salesforce Order Management

With product purchases confined to the digital space, Sally had to improve its logistics, but they didn’t have to look far for the ideal solution. They tapped into the complex powers of Salesforce Order Management so that it could offer customers real-time updates on product stock as well as visibility regarding their orders.

Salesforce Order Management allows better and faster communication between the warehouse, website, and store, and between store associates and warehouse workers, making sure that there is no delay between what a customer sees online and its corresponding levels of stock.

Marketing Cloud

Unifying a brand’s online presence provides continuity across digital channels, so that whether a customer is connecting with a brand on Facebook or Instagram, the brand is able to share all of its data on a customer so there is little guesswork involved in solving customer queries.

Sally also connected with Salesforce Marketing Cloud during its digital shift to keep “connected with their customers through social media and email to provide updates around store statuses, curbside offerings, alternative shopping options and inventory,” said Mary.

This Salesforce integration of Commerce Cloud, Order Management, and Marketing Cloud, gives Sally Beauty a much improved, comprehensive view of their customers by knocking down potential barriers of communication across channels, and better enables them to communicate with customers on a more personal level, so that, as one example, customers receive specific emails based on their interests and purchasing history.

Ohh… did I mention that Sally Beauty went all in on Salesforce? It also leveraged Salesforce Service Cloud to scale its ability to react to customer service issues and requests on its website using SF’s clever chatbots. “Service Cloud fielded customer inquiries,” added Mary, “and improved the customer service team’s email response time significantly.”

PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Demandware) specialists. Contact us to see how we can work together.