How an Analytics Makeover Saved a Beauty Subscription Service $200K/Year

Insight/Action/Outcome: A beauty subscription service was struggling with in-house analytics solutions that were difficult, slow, and expensive. Inspired by the data-driven approach they took to personalizing recommendations for their customers, they switched to Amplitude. Thanks to more efficient insights and more trustworthy data, they’ve boosted subscriptions, increased revenue, and saved $200K per year on analytics work.

Editor's note: The original author of this story wished to remain anonymous.

Beauty isn’t one-size-fits-all—it’s expressive, inclusive, and utterly unique.

I’m Director of Analytics at a leading beauty subscription service. We inspire individuals around the world to discover their unique beauty by delivering monthly collections of personalized beauty products. In fact, we’re one of the most personalized beauty subscriptions on the market.

That personalization is only possible because of data. To recommend a customer’s new go-to nail polish or give them a surprise eye cream they’ll absolutely love, we synthesize preferences, order history, review feedback, and more from across our customer base and platform.

And to keep providing our personalized beauty collections and grow our business, our digital experiences also need to be optimized with data-driven insights. But before we switched to Amplitude, we were struggling to deliver those insights.

Our routine just wasn’t working

Before Amplitude, my analytics team had a manual, in-house process to analyze event data. Even for web analytics, an analyst would have to run a query and add the raw data to a custom dashboard. And because the process was so manual, it was hard to enforce data governance, so we’d often have to spend extra time double-checking our work.

My team wanted to fuel curiosity, and our non-data teams, all the way up to the C-suite, had an appetite for being data-driven. But our solution took too much time and budget, and at the end of the day, we weren’t getting the insights we needed.

Seeing Amplitude in action for the first time was almost like finding a foundation that finally matches your skin tone. You try so many options that you start to doubt if you’ll ever find the right solution, and then suddenly, a product just clicks. Amplitude was the democratized, single source of truth we’d been looking for to support the analytics team, save on operational costs, and power our data-centric mentality.

An analytics make-over with Amplitude

I evangelized Amplitude to the rest of the organization as the solution we needed for better insights. After getting everyone on board, we started seeing the data benefits almost immediately.

The first impacts were on our data quality. We now had a way to enforce governance over event naming and deployment, and we quickly implemented unified traffic channel definitions company-wide. Amplitude’s anomaly detection reduced false alarms across our site.

Greater trust in our data was also paired with greater visibility. Some of our website flows now have tracking for the first time ever. We enabled real-time conversion tracking in our email service provider (ESP). And Amplitude’s Slack integration lets us provide weekly summaries to relevant channels, reducing strain on the analytics team.

Giving our business a $200K glow-up

These insight improvements soon delivered clear business impacts, too. My team has saved an estimated $200K per year by eliminating in-house calculations of event data. Amplitude’s consolidated tech stack and the time we’ve saved with it have been huge for our operational efficiency.

Working with the product and merchandising teams, better insights have also led to increased revenue. We’ve been able to drive more subscriptions, improve subscriber retention, and boost customer LTV. Our head of marketing used Ask Amplitude to answer “Which day of the week has the most traffic?” when planning out a campaign.

Conclusion

The cost savings from implementing Amplitude have been significant. And just as significant is how our culture of curiosity has really blossomed. Amplitude’s self-serve access has helped teams across the company become more insight-driven, from marketing to finance to engineering. Even our CEO is now asking for an Amplitude login (we’re getting the entire C-suite onboarded soon).

Our business was founded on the idea that people deserve beauty products that let their unique beauty shine through. The power of data has always been key to the unparalleled personalization we offer. It’s been incredible to unlock that same power for our business thanks to Amplitude, and we’re excited for how our data-driven insights will fuel the future of beauty.