The year 2018 will be voice-driven for beauty retailers & brands as more gadgets from Google & Amazon are popping up. Soon Facebook will be joining the race too. More countries globally are being covered every month by the different platforms and the natural dialogue capabilities are getting much better to create actually engaging experiences via voice.
But how about Beauty & Voice?
We haven't yet seen many solutions around beauty but the potential of voice-driven beauty personalization is huge. With devices with screens and connecting voice seamlessly to your mobile - we will start to see more solutions to provide personalized recommendations and guidance - further driving sales directly through voice as well.
One of the first players in the market has been Coty with their Alexa Skill. From us at Revieve you will be seeing few voice solutions during 2018 around beauty & skincare. Not only from brands but also from retailers who have much to gain through voice experiences.
So what are the use cases with beauty & voice?
Driving personalized content (such as quick tips or more comprehensive beauty podcasts) via voice still remains the main Apps that you find within beauty but more comprehensive solutions like Skin Analysis -driven product recommendations or dialogues to find the best matching makeup products for your unique skin will be something we will see more this year.
The hardest part in voice is to lure the consumer back to your voice app. Offering experiences that continue across channels (from chatbots to voice and from ecommerce to voice etc.) helps to continue the dialogue with your loyal consumers but isn't something that can be built overnight. Identification, payments over voice and replenishment orders in general are features that will take big leaps during 2018 to allow great customer experiences via voice for the consumers to drive the engagement.
Also, discovery still remains one of the biggest problems within different voice Apps - Google doing a bit better work in terms of having Apps part of the general voice search. Rather large marketing budgets still will be needed to get people to your voice App. Just building one is not enough.
-Miikka
Revieve Digital Beauty Advisor
