YouTube beauty guru Emily Noel shared her experience of one of Walmart’s omnichannel initiatives: the Walmart Beauty Box.
Beauty boxes are a popular trend. Users subscribe to a service and are sent a box or bag of beauty products, often a mix of samples and full size products, on a regular schedule, often every month. Birch Box, for example, sends out a monthly box for $10 a month or $110 a year.
Walmart shoppers might be happy to spend $10 a month, but what happens when they fall in love with the $42.00 hair spray or the $19.00 eyeliner? The service becomes an exercise in frustration for women who don’t choose to spend on pricey products.
Walmart’s beauty box costs $5.00 for shipping and comes out four times a year — an affordable price, and clearly much less than the price of the products subscribers receive. Users sign up online, get the opportunity to participate in the huge social media trend of sharing the beauty box experience, and end up with affordable options in the products they sample.
The sign-up page looks more like other beauty websites than like the standard Walmart.com page, and the sign-up form asks for age info in order to personalize the experience — and presumably to gather more data.
This isn’t precisely innovation, but it’s a new approach for Walmart. By moving into the popular beauty box space, Walmart gets some real benefits:
- Greater connection with Millennials, a difficult group for Walmart to reach.
- Greater connection with online shoppers, a high priority for Walmart at present.
- Increased exposure in social media, possibly to new audiences.
- Social listening opportunities for Walmart and the suppliers participating in the beauty box.
- Opportunities to affect perception of Walmart among people who are not currently Walmart shoppers.
- Opportunity to bring both current and potential shoppers into the brick and mortar stores.
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