L’Oréal links consumer spend uplift to CDP rollout

L’Oréal has seen a spending increase from more personalised marketing and media campaigns, using a customer data platform (CDP) to understand its consumer data in better detail.

Carla Piccione, L’Oréal’s CRM major programs manager, told a recent Tealium Digital Velocity 2025 conference that personalisation efforts using its first-party data “at scale” had created “uplifts across the board – not just on revenue, [but also] on engagement, on page views, [and] purchases per user.”

The cosmetics and beauty giant has stood up a Tealium CDP which it has integrated with its Salesforce CRM system and “scores” of other data sources.

“To start, we only onboarded 10 brands onto Tealium [but] now we are on a path to onboard many more,” Piccione said.

“We ended up making 40 different integrations [of other systems] into Tealium to get the customer centricity we needed to personalise at scale.”

It has since grown to 19 brands onboarded, with plans to bring in another 30 more brands this year.

In addition to setting up integrations and access to the CDP and CRM systems, Piccione said that “defining the ways of working” for different brands to make use of the systems in their day-to-day work had proven a key success factor.

The ultimate goal of adopting Tealium was to personalise at scale, and integrations, access and engagement all had a role to play.

“It’s about building personalisation beyond the scale of the human brain,” Piccione said.

“We can’t call every L’Oreal customer and say, ‘Hey, we think you might like [this].’ What we really needed to do was unlock personalisation at scale.”

A broad set of results have been achieved so far.

“We did lots of different tests on the website around different loyalty membership levels and being able to make bespoke recommendations,” Piccione said. “That led to an increase in purchases and revenue per user.”

The use of web browsing behavioural data also enabled the company to improve campaign click-through rates and purchases on a men’s product line.

One useful metric the company has tracked is the impact that Tealium has specifically brought to email and SMS marketing campaigns.

“We very clearly split [out] who we would’ve targeted if we were just using CRM data and then separately, who would’ve been incremental once we added the Tealium layer on top,” Piccione said.

The effect of layering Tealium into the martech stack wasn’t just having a bigger segmented customer base to target, but the ability to target engaged buyers, which drove higher click-through rates and increased spend and revenue per user.

AI use cases

L’Oreal sees several potential opportunities to use AI as part of its scaled personalisation efforts.

One way would be to vary content for different customer segments, with Piccione noting that “at the moment, this is something that is still very human-driven” at the company.

There may also be opportunities to use AI to “mine better insights” from the vast consumer data that L’Oreal has access to.

“It means we can layer really complex behavioural information and get very valuable insights,” Piccione said.

“It will hopefully enable us to make audience creation smarter.

“We want to go beyond what we’re already doing, and AI and machine learning is going to be the way forward.”

High data quality and strict governance processes will help ensure the organisation is AI ready, according to Piccione.

“L’Oreal takes privacy and data governance very seriously and that means that we’re going to be ready for when we need to use that data in very complex ways,” she said.