Ulta Beauty is laser-focused on its loyalty members.
According to the company’s CMO, Michelle Crossan-Matos, over 96% of Ulta’s sales come from its millions of loyalty members. It stands to reason that “when we grow our loyalty membership, we grow our sales,” she said.
On November 13, Crossan-Matos spoke at the Glossy Beauty and Wellness Summit about Ulta’s loyalty membership, its approach to measuring success and its most recent campaign, the Joy Project.
Ulta’s loyalty membership has one of the highest penetration rates in beauty, with 70% retention. And it’s on track to reach 50 million loyalty members by 2028, a significant boost from its current 44 million. For comparison, Sephora’s Beauty Insider program counts over 40 million members. Ulta has 1,400 stores and more than 55,000 associates who are key to its focus on cross-generational shopping.
“Kids are starting to get into skin care and wellness at a younger age,” Crossan-Matos said, citing Ulta’s own research showing the youngest consumers start at eight years old. Seventy percent of parents with Gen-Alpha children said they consider shopping for skin care and beauty together to be a bonding experience.
“We see it in the stores,” she said. “Mothers and daughters, dads and sons, several generations all shopping together. Not only are we a destination for parents, but now we’re also for whole families.”
Crossan-Matos said one of the most valuable things Ulta has done in recent years is pay close attention to what its most loyal customers — those in the loyalty program — are asking for.
“Our members told us for a long time that they wanted to choose their birthday gift that they receive each year, so we made that happen,” she said. “They told us they wanted Charlotte Tilbury on Ulta, so we did it. It’s something that we will keep working on, but it adds a lot of value to the membership.”
Ulta’s next big area of focus will be “hyper-personalization,” Crossan-Matos said. As of October, the company has begun partnering with Adobe on a series of automated tools that will personalize its loyalty members’ experience. They’ll include product email reminders when a customer is running low on a certain product, based on their shopping history.
“Hyper-personalization is going to help us drive more relevancy by using every touchpoint we have,” Crossan-Matos said.
