Kristy Alexander, Founder & Chief Big Heart at Apple Rose Beauty, likes to say that her company is more than just a skincare company, “we challenge and inspire world changers. And we celebrate and encourage the beauty in all of us that is more than skin deep.”
After a successful career in engineering and business management, Kristy was on the C suite track when she decided to embark on an 11-month, 11-country journey around the world. “I just felt there was something more for me, and when I travel, I really love being immersed in the culture and understanding the way that people live,” says Kristy.
During her travels, Kristy volunteered with local organizations, which instilled a deep understanding of the cultures by experiencing firsthand how they lived. While working with an organization in Thailand that helped rescue women from human trafficking, Kristy was inspired to start Apple Rose Beauty after meeting two victims of human trafficking, Apple and Rose.
“Our mission at Apple Rose Beauty is to employ survivors of human trafficking and donate to organizations involved in their rescue and rehabilitation. And our products have ingredients that harken back to my upbringing in the Caribbean: Ingredients that I grew up with and things I saw during my travels from different beauty regimens,” Kristy added.
Founded in 2015, Apple Rose Beauty has developed a loyal following from in-person events, markets, and wholesale customers, and even launched a line of products at Macy’s in 2019.
Before ActiveCampaign, Apple Rose Beauty’s greatest challenge was having the flexibility to customize automations the way they wanted to. At the time, most automations from competitors were canned automations or very limited in terms of the ability to create and test different if-then-else-if scenarios.
“Emailing individually with each customer to learn their preferences is certainly not feasible, but using email automation through ActiveCampaign allowed us to deliver that personalized experience at scale,” says Kristy.
Building 1:1 Customer Relationships
Apple Rose Beauty was able to keep a few of their wholesale customers when the pandemic hit in 2020 but lost roughly 60% of their business overnight. They needed to create a strategy that enabled them to keep that personalized experience that their brand was synonymous with.
Up to this point, only about 30% of Apple Rose Beauty’s business came from online sales. Most of their revenue came from live events, where they were able to get immediate, direct feedback from customers that helped them stay connected with their base. “When you’re standing in front of a customer,” Kristy commented, “you can get instant feedback. You understand what they’re looking for, what their pain points and needs are.”
To mimic that live in-person experience, they pivoted their email marketing to be more conversational, and “actually invite customers to reply to us and let us know what you’re doing, what they thought of their purchases to gather feedback.” This allowed Apple Rose Beauty to stay in touch with their customers during lockdown, even when they couldn’t come out to their favorite store or pop-up shop to buy their products.
That two-way communication created connections with their customers that were genuine and felt very one-to-one. One client shared with Kristy that her son had recently passed away, and “she just asked me to keep her in my prayers. I think this type of communication has created that space for my customers where they feel they know me and they feel like they can communicate back and forth.”
Prior to the COVID shutdowns, email only accounted for 12-15% of Apple Rose Beauty’s total revenue. Today it consistently accounts for 30-35% of their total revenue. “A huge part of our overall growth can be traced back to our growth with email marketing,” said Kristy.
“ActiveCampaign enabled us to create that in-person conversational experience, allowing us to make a more direct connection with our customers. They recognize and appreciate that we care about them and their feedback, and they feel a bit of investment in our brand.”
Customer Experience, Automated
For Apple Rose Beauty, it starts with their welcome series: they ask their customers to tell them what their biggest skincare challenges are. Then they follow up by sending quizzes based on that response, tagging the contact into different segments with each new bit of information. This allows Apple Rose Beauty to create personalized experiences based on data they gather in a way that feels organic, but the automation makes it feasible for their small team to accomplish.
Creating an automation strategy that includes genuine, personalized two-way communication with their customers has served Apple Rose Beauty very well. “Because we kept our customers engaged,” said Kristy, “even if it wasn’t for the sole purpose to make a sale, they felt connected to our brand, enabling us to grow our online sales 300%.”
“Using ActiveCampaign to automate marketing campaigns,” Kristy continued, “even the smallest brands can connect with the largest audience on a massive scale to drive sales and future brand loyalty.”
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