One question that often comes up when marketers are creating a campaign based on customer data is "what do we send if we don't have any data on a customer?" Some might default to a generic message, or not include those consumers in the mailing at all. Sephora takes a different approach.

 

In this campaign, Sephora is promoting personalized product recommendations based on skin type, coloring and fragrance preferences. For this message alone, Sephora deserves kudos for actually using customer preferences to send a personalized, targeted and highly-relevant e-mail.

However, it's what they sent to customers who didn't have preferences on file that is really impressive. Each product category is grayed-out and when you click on one, you're taken to Sephora's web site where you can see the choices for each and save your preferences to your profile. Using this tactic, Sephora is able to reach parts of their list that don't have as much data and encourage them to add data for use in future e-mail marketing.