Executive Summary
Essential Beauty & Piercing is a national beauty salon franchise with over 35 years of presence across Australia which has built a loyal customer following across 67 locations by specialising in piercing, waxing, eyebrow services, tinting, lash lifts, and body jewellery. Operating as a franchise model with a lean head-office marketing team of just three people, the brand competes in a dynamic personal-care market while simultaneously managing both in-salon services and a growing e-commerce store launched in 2023.
Since implementing Mailchimp and leveraging its automation and segmentation capabilities, the team has transformed how it builds customer relationships—turning email into one of its most consistent and measurable revenue drivers.
- Location: National — 67 salons across Australia
- Marketing team: 3 persons
- Founded: 1990
- Industry: Beauty & personal care — franchise
- Services: Piercing, waxing, eyebrows, tinting, lash lifts, body jewellery
The Challenge: A Growing Brand, a Lean Team, and Disconnected Data
Running marketing across 67 franchise locations—each with its own customer base, events, and local promotions—while also driving an online store is no small task for a three-person team.
Before embedding Mailchimp more deeply into their workflow, the business faced a set of compounding challenges:
- Manual, time-consuming workflows: Creating and sending email campaigns largely from scratch each time, with limited ability to automate repeat communications or reuse templates efficiently.
- Minimal database growth: The team had a basic pop-up form that was generating only modest subscriber growth.
- Limited customer retention tools: There was no win-back series, no post-purchase follow-up, and only a rudimentary abandoned cart flow.
- Complex audience needs: With services ranging from piercing aftercare (requiring weeks-long education journeys) to location-specific salon promotions, the team needed segmentation capabilities that could keep communications relevant without adding to their workload.
"We were always wanting to grow but also keep our loyal customer base. It's definitely both—but before automations, it was hard to do both at the same time." — Digital Marketing lead
The Solution: Smart Segmentation and Always-On Automation
Working closely with their Mailchimp team, the marketers built out a suite of automations and segmentation strategies that now run largely in the background—keeping customers engaged without demanding constant hands-on effort.
Turning Email Into a Members Club
Working with Mailchimp, the team moved from a basic, easily ignored pop-up to a full-screen, attention-commanding sign-up experience—designed with conversion best practices built in.
The new pop-up frames email sign-up as joining an exclusive club: subscribers receive a welcome discount, birthday offers, and early sale access. The transparent background overlay keeps visitors reassured they're still on the brand's website—a small design detail that meaningfully improves trust and opt-in rates. The result: 52% contact growth in 365 days.
“The pop-up forms have significantly grown our database. It’s helped us turn website visitors into subscribers and build what feels like an exclusive customer club.” — Digital Marketing lead
Always-On Automation Journeys
The team built a suite of automations that now run in the background continuously:
- Welcome series with 15% discount to drive a first e-commerce purchase
- Post-purchase two-part series with 10% off and dynamic product recommendations, addressing the challenge of one-time buyers not returning
- Three-stage win-back series at 12 weeks of inactivity, with escalating discounts—open and click rates increase with each email in the sequence
- Abandoned cart flow dynamically surfacing the exact products a visitor left behind
- Piercing aftercare journeys up to 7 emails long, running 8–12 weeks per customer, building trust and driving product sales
"Before we implemented that [post-purchase journey], we were struggling to get repeat buyers—once they bought, we were a little bit forgettable. As soon as we implemented it, we found a big increase in revenue from that journey alone. You could see customers were returning." — Digital Marketing lead
Aftercare Journeys That Build Real Relationships
For a piercing business, the customer relationship doesn't end at the appointment. Every piercing type has its own dedicated email journey—up to seven steps long, running over 8–12 weeks—that walks customers through their aftercare process. This positions the brand not just as a service provider but as a trusted guide through a personal experience.
These journeys also drive e-commerce outcomes: customers who are already engaged in a post-piercing sequence receive relevant product recommendations for aftercare products, naturally extending their lifetime value.
Location-Level Segmentation for a Franchise Network
For a franchise business, relevance is everything. The team uses Mailchimp's segmentation to target customers based on the salon they're loyal to—sending localised promotions for events like salon refurbishments, reopenings, or two-for-one deals directly to the customers most likely to care.
"That good segmentation—it's going straight to the customer and it's relevant to them. They know what's happening with their local salon." — Digital Marketing lead
Key Results and Business Impact
The shift from manual, ad hoc email to a structured automation strategy has produced measurable, compounding results:
- 45% of total e-commerce email revenue now comes from automation flows—journeys including post-purchase and win-back automations that run continuously without requiring manual effort from the team.
- 52% growth in subscribers (contacts) from the redesigned Mailchimp pop-up sign-up form in the last year.
- ~3 hours saved per week for the marketing lead, through template replication, and automation flows replacing manual sends.
"Having those automations means we don't have to send out as many monthly emails. It does save us that time in making that contact with our customers."
"The Win Back series was actually recommended to us by the application itself. It wasn't like 'oh, we have this'—it was 'we've seen this would be useful for you.'
Reporting to head office, the team tracks open rates, click rates, and email-attributed revenue as their primary KPIs. All three have consistently trended upward since implementing the new automation stack—with email now one of the most stable and reliable channels in their marketing mix.
Conclusion
For a franchise business managing 67 locations with a three-person marketing team, scalability is everything. Mailchimp has become the engine that lets this brand deliver personalised, timely, and relevant communications—from suburb-level salon promotions to 12-week piercing aftercare journeys—without requiring headcount growth.
"Mailchimp is very straightforward—drag, drop, done. It's intuitive, easy to use, and the platform even recommends what would benefit us. We really benefit from that." — Digital Marketing lead
By treating email as a personalised, automated relationship engine, this Australian beauty franchise has built a programme that keeps customers informed, engaged, and returning—one journey at a time.