6 Fragrance Buying Trends to Guide Perfume Advertising and Budget Allocation
In order to run effective perfume advertising campaigns, you need a deep understanding of the buyers journey as well as the macro trends in perfume buying behavior. Knowing how people spend money in this category will help guide a better marketing strategy that prioritizes revenue. A fundamental principle of marketing is to never go against your target audience’s consumer behavior (in aggregate) unless you have a very good reason to. It is an uphill battle from the start and has the potential to needlessly waste your money and time. Optimally, you want your messaging, product offerings, pricing strategy, and brand marketing to align with consumer expectations and buying behavior.
This information was gathered from Metrilo, Statista, Cosmetic Design USA, and running our own independent poll composed of 778 perfume enthusiasts.
Average Retention Rate for Perfume
Retention rate for perfume
Perfume has a retention rate of 16.7% meaning 16.7% of purchases will make a repurchase.
This poll of US and European beauty product brands confirms our own survey of online perfume connoisseurs which indicated that of 778 people polled, only 12.8% of people have repurchased a scent. Of these 778 people polled, 81% were reluctant to finish a bottle of perfume. Subjectively speaking, the overall feedback from other fragrance enthusiasts is that many people enjoy collecting new perfumes.
Two reasons always stand out:
People like the act of collecting perfume bottles much like any other hobbyist collector. Photos of display stands full of uniquely designed bottles displayed on people's dressers are a hallmark of all of the online fragrance forums.
More consumer reports are reaffirming the fact that the majority of people choose to wear certain fragrances based on their current mood. Having a larger collection of perfumes to choose from gives them more options on what to wear to match their mood.
Average Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
Customer lifetime value for perfumes indicates how much total money a consumer will spend with your brand.
Perfume has the lowest average lifetime value of all of the beauty product categories.
Average Number of Orders Per Customer
Orders per customer differs from retention rate in that retention rate looks at IF the customer repurchases, without factoring the number of repurchases.
Average Time Between Orders (Days)
Time interval between each order
Fragrance purchases have the longest interval between orders out of every beauty product category.
Average Conversion Rate
Average conversion rate of customers in beauty product industry
Perfume products have the HIGHEST conversion rate when compared to other beauty product categories.
Consumers Want Discovery Sets and Perfume Samples
This trend in consumers wanting sample sets of multiple perfumes from a perfume brand has resulted in perfume brands offering discovery sets. As always, the market responds to consumer demands. This topic is covered in depth in our article, The Rise of Discovery Sets and Samples in the Perfume Industry.
Analysis of Consumer Data for Perfume Buyers
The number one takeaway that any perfume brand should get from this data is that you need to prioritize brand impressions and increase brand awareness for NEW users who are not previous customers. This should be priority number one for any marketing team at a perfume brand.
Perfume has one of the lowest retention rates and repurchase rates out of every beauty product category. This tells us that statistically speaking, someone is unlikely to repurchase the perfume they ordered. This does not mean that retargeting campaigns are a waste of money. In fact, they are very important to any life-cycle perfume advertising campaign, however, with a limited marketing budget, your money will likely get a higher return from email marketing.
Out of all of the beauty categories, fragrance has the lowest LTV. This data point reinforces the idea that retargeting previous customers should only be done with various audience segments in place.
A low LTV for customers once again indicates the need to acquire NEW customers. Otherwise, you are trying to squeeze juice from a stone by trying to get repeat purchases from customers who are unlikely to purchase again.
The average perfume customer buys perfume every 123 days according to the average Time Between Order data, which also does not take into account the brand that the consumer buys from. This means that the average consumer buys perfume 3 times per year. Statistically speaking, those 3 purchases are all likely to be from different brands. This data all points to the need to find NEW customers.
Lastly, and maybe one of the most important data points is that perfume has the HIGHEST conversion rate out of all of the categories at an 11.6% conversion rate. To be fair, I do not know exactly how this metric was defined. What I can assume is that this metric was applied evenly across all product categories. This high of a conversion rate further emphasizes the need to get in front of NEW people. Why? Because it is much easier to get first-time conversions than all other beauty product categories.
All of this data translates to one thing: Increasing brand reach.
Any perfume brand that is capable of generating the most amount of brand impressions at the lowest cost will be optimally positioned to bring in more revenue. We discuss how short-form video is the best way to grow a perfume brand here.