Smart Sampling for Charlotte Tilbury

Smart Sampling functionality

In May 2013, Charlotte Tilbury approached us to build a brand new website on the Magento Enterprise platform. Since the launch we have continued to work with Charlotte Tilbury on a monthly basis developing the brand further. Developments include expanding their online offerings internationally and adding additional functionalities to the site such as the foundation finder and more recently, smart sampling.

The customer journey:

Like other cosmetic brands, Charlotte Tilbury offer a ‘free sample’ rule for customers making a product order online. Originally the Charlotte Tilbury team used a third party Magento module to randomly add two samples to each user’s order. This process was successful, however the team expressed that they would like to offer a more effective incentive to their customers; allowing customers to choose to sample the products they are most interested in, rather than randomly selected ones.

The Charlotte Tilbury team approached Space 48 and asked us to come up with a few creative ideas.

The Smart Sampling concept:

Our internal Creative Director, Anna designed a ‘Smart sampling’ concept; a page that is shown once the user has entered the checkout process. This allows Charlotte Tilbury to add a number of different sample products to the page, that are not for sale elsewhere on the site. It also allows the team to add products under different categories/headers to match the product category structure on the site. On this page the user can select two sample products of their choice to add to their order, or if they do not want any samples they can simply skip to checkout.

The implementation:

The smart sampling page was created using a master category ‘sampling’, we then created several sub-categories to add the products too. The name of the sub-category is pulled through to the front end of the site to act as a heading for that section of samples e.g. ‘SKINCARE’. We then added a ‘drag and drop’ Magento functionality to the category admin to enable the Charlotte Tilbury team to configure the ordering of products in the categories on the front end.

To allow the Charlotte Tilbury team to configure the feature, we created a ‘Smart sampling’ admin module. These configurations include; entering the master category ID that needs to be pulled through to the page, enabling/disabling the module, setting how many samples are allowed per user and changing the page text.

Since implementation, the team have received some excellent feedback surrounding the functionality. Smart sampling sets the cosmetics brand aside from its competitors and allows a better user experience.