Decoding Nykaa's omnichannel content strategy

Guided selling, education and tight curation have been the hallmark of Nykaa’s online content strategy given that more than half of all shoppers spend 75% of their total shopping time on online research. Educating customers on the USPs of products available online, recommending specific products based on their unique needs and providing adequate information to instil confidence about the selected products have been the key differentiators for Nykaa.

Content properties — via stores and buying guides that cherry-pick from thousands of products available online — have been built into the purchase funnel right from discovery to purchase via various tools. The idea is to bring the offline shopping experience online and provide a store-like shopping experience to digital customers.

Madhavi Irani

Madhavi Irani, Chief Officer, Content, Nykaa.com, said, “As one of Nykaa’s six pillars, content has always been the key differentiator between our brand and many others in the e-com space. And that’s because we have made a concerted, 360-degree effort to integrate advice in a way that it forms the very DNA of our website, with a content touchpoint no matter where you are in the Nykaa universe. Our content strategy has always rested on education, curation and personalisation, seeking to transform the traditional buying experience through new-age technology and narratives.”

She said, “We curate and customise content in the form of beauty book articles, editor’s choice widgets, IT lists, buying guides, stores product reviews and the routine finder. Some of these then lead to finely curated listing pages, which help narrow down the customer’s search, helping them make more informed product choices.”

Tools such as the monthly buying guides and seasonal/festival specific stores for guided selling such as summer store, monsoon store, Diwali store, eyeliner and kajal store, foundation finder, lipstick finder, skincare by age are created for the convenience and benefit of customers. Buying guides contribute to 3% of GMV in a year.

For an online retailer like Nykaa, customer experience is a key component of a robust customer retention strategy.  Content contributes 2.5% to the GMV of Nykaa, with the average order value of content consumers being 15% higher than non-consumers. The latest omnichannel leadership report by Newstore suggests that companies investing in omnichannel strategies have a 91% average higher year-on-year customer retention rate than companies that do not.  The foundation finder was the first omnichannel initiative with 14 participating brands and 18 skin shades that was simultaneously rolled out online and in 45 stores across India. This was followed by the lipstick finder and eyeliner finder omnichannel initiatives.

Another initiative, Nykaa’s routine finder, is a comprehensive skin, hair and wellness tool allows customers to build their perfect beauty regimen with recommended products best suited for their skin, hair and wellness concerns and needs. It helps customers understand what products work together, what their benefits are and the order in which they need to be used for optimal results. On an average, the routine finder garners nearly 15,000 visits per day across all platforms, of which 90% are through the app and 10% from the website. The average AOV is Rs 1,400 across platforms.

Beauty Book, Nykaa’s in-house digital magazine, was revamped earlier this year as a brand-agnostic, editorial entity, focusing on ‘expert advice’, trends and tutorials through a variety of different formats, including articles, web series, FB Lives, educative brand collaborations and YouTube master classes with makeup experts. Moving away from hard sell and focusing on education helps create stickiness, loyalty and engagement. The Beauty Book gets 7.5 million page views and four lakh unique visits per month. Articles are translated in multiple regional languages and rest on other publications.

Nykaa’s YouTube channel Nykaa TV has more than five lakh subscribers with 121 million video views. More than 45 videos with 80 industry experts and influencers are created every month, which are also streamed at all Nykaa offline stores. Hindi tutorial videos targeting tier-II and tier-III cities average over 200,000 views per video. Niche differentiated content has found wide appeal among the YouTube audience, with Nykaa’s comedy web series Tinderella garnering over 1.4 million views. Meanwhile, Nykaa’s infomercials reach out to regional audiences from tier-II and tier-III cities just starting out on their beauty journeys with differentiated content offerings and step-by-step product demos.

The brand’s biggest launch last year, Nykaa Network, powered entirely by crowd-sourced content, is the country’s first online beauty community of shoppers that not only shop but also interact with and influence other customers. It is India’s largest beauty UGC platform and crossed one million members in a year with zero promotion.

“One of our key objectives has always been to create a self-sustaining content ecosystem that can support the consumer in order to create meaningful engagement that drives conversions and replicates the in-store experience online. Over time, with the expansion of our brick-and-mortar model, this integration has become two-way, offering the ease and convenience of online content discovery in our stores as well,” added Irani.