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As Sephora, beauty retailer, looked for new ways to manage time and recruit fabulous partners, they needed a new foundation. impact.com's technology provided Sephora with the right tools and skills to build a more diversified partner mix and streamline workflows. 

In this blog, you'll learn how Sephora accomplished: 

• $7.4M in revenue from 293 partners
• 3x revenue growth after partnering with impact.com
• 101% increase in partner growth

Read time: 5 mins

Solution

Sephora’s glow up with the right partnership management platform 

By switching to impact.com, Sephora found the perfect partnership platform. The team brought all its partners and affiliates together, building a consistent foundation and workflow on impact.com's platÿorm. With impact.com's expert support team and software solutions, Sephora could focus on addressing its core goals: 

Managing partners across different regions 

The purpose-built partnership platform from impact.com Gave the Sephora team a consolidated view of partnerships across different countries and regions. Additionally, the platform helped streamline previously manual processes like partner approval and contract set-up —saving time and resources. Sephora could also efficiently track and share partner performance. New opportunities for diverse partnerships rose, no longer requiring separate oversight or management. The unified partnership platform made expansion and growth more sustainable going forward. 

Partner recruitment 

Sephora's performance marketing team expanded its partner mix through impact.com's discovery portal. Integrated communication features like the ease of contacting partners directly through the partner profile allowed the team to speed up the recruitment process. Every step works seamlessly through impact.com's platform (instead of requiring separate tools). The platform's search options helped Sephora directly recruit non-traditional affiliates — creating a diversified range of influencers, affiliates, and content creators. With a wider range of partners across different demographics and social groups, Sephora connected with more potential customers than with its previous efforts. 

Contracting partners

After joining impact.com, Sephora's team could customize and finely tune each contract. Flexible contracting tools helped Sephora make the most out of each partnership by finding the best options for both parties, like SKU-level contracting and offering personalized insertion orders (IO) for each partner. Sephora also streamlined the process for time-sensitive contracts, making seasonal or short-term promotions effortless. Fast and flexible contracting empowered the team to make intuitive decisions, test innovative marketing strategies, and keep up with changing trends. 

In-depth reporting 

Before working with impact.com, Sephora found tracking exposure challenging and needed more detailed metrics from all its partners. The impact.com platform's reporting tools introduced the team to in-depth reports and data to optimize partner and different segment performance. Granular customer reports helped direct and drive Sephora's plans — identifying revenue-generating partners and SKUs. With impact.com, Sephora's team could focus on top-perÿorming partners and target their efforts carefully. Driving customer acquisition and partner collaboration became easier. 

About

Sephora

Sephora is a French visionary beauty-retail concept founded in 1970 by Dominique Mandonnaud. Sephora's unique, open-sell environment features an ever-increasing amount of classic and emerging brands across a broad range of product categories. These include skincare, makeup, fragrance, body, and hair care — in addition to its own private label. Today, the brand has a powerful global beauty presence. Sephora trailblazed the beauty industry, owned by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton. The brand achieved this status thanks to its assortment of prestige products, unbiased expert services, interactive shopping environment, disruptive spirit, and constant innovation. Sephora operates approximately 1,900 stores in 29 countries worldwide, with an expanding base of over 200 stores across the Asia Pacific region, including Australia, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and India.

Situation

Needing a new foundation for time management and recruiting 

Founded in France in 1970, Sephora aimed higher than simply selling cosmetics to a narrow target audience. With sights set on building a healthy global beauty community, the company offers high-quality skincare products and cosmetics brands along with expert in-store support and guides for product use. Sephora's performance marketing team relied on paid search advertising, social media promotions, and a fragmented affiliate channel across various countries and regions. The team lost time and resources due to lack of customization, payment confusion, and overlapping affiliates. They needed a unified partnership management solution. The big picture became fuzzier with data siloed away and split between different account managers. Sephora knew the team needed to improve current affiliate relationships and smoothly bring on new partnerships. As its affiliate network and beauty community kept expanding, Sephora faced four specific challenges:

Outcome

Blending diverse partnerships with impact.com  

After consolidating partner management onto impact.com's platform, Sephora saw significant time and cost savings. The team accessed new marketplaces, sped up recruitment, improved contracting, and took full advantage of impact.com's automation and reporting software. 

After joining impact.com, Sephora expanded its partnership with Shopback (a customer loyalty site) and boosted revenue by increasing engagement and reach in several markets. 

Sephora used impact.com's reporting tools to successfully optimize partner performance with Unidays (a student discount portal), resulting in a significant uptick in the target student demographic and expanding to other markets simultaneously. 

The Sephora team relies on impact.com's automation and support tools to connect with more content partners and influencers — not just traditional affiliates.

1. Sephora aimed to find fresh ways to manage partners across different regions. Their team wanted robust tracking and reporting tools to optimize global partner performance through one platform. 

2. A more streamlined partner recruitment process could open up new doors for Sephora. The right partners would make regional growth and success far more likely because the company could tap into local or niche audiences. However, its affiliate program made direct communication or non-traditional partnership discovery difficult. The team relied on manual research and knowledge of the market to discover and recruit new partners. 

3. Sephora sought different options for contracting partners. Since each partner managed the contract set-up process, the team missed out on any edit access or control. Effective contracting was impossible without transparency and customization options. 

4. Without in-depth reporting tools, Sephora's team only had access to basic metrics like clicks and revenue. Optimization, especially across different regions and partners, required clearer tracking and reporting across the board. 

With the partnership model trending upwards, impact.com forms the foundation for its recruitment and collaboration efforts. 

Find out more about impact.com’s partnership platform to glow and grow your partnerships.