Takeaway from Scentbird CMO about Digital Marketing

I attended a breakfast talk with Rachel ten Brink, co-founder and CMO of Scentbird last week. A veteran in the beauty industry, she leveraged her personal and professional connections from her previous jobs at Elizabeth Arden and Estee Lauder to build an online perfume subscription business Scentbird. The e-commerce subscription company has raised a total of $28.4 million so far. 

She mentioned a couple of things that I found interesting: 

1. Traditional advertising used in the right way is still useful for online businesses. When asked about the ads in New York City subways, she says those ads actually helped boost Scentbird's status in the early days. When she went to meet with executives at those big beauty companies, they would say to her, "Oh, I saw your ads in the subways". Subway ads shown physically to viewers make them perceive the business/brand as more established and doing well. 

2. Take digital marketing into consideration when designing your product. Scentbird's products are perfume sample sprays from both designer brands and niche brands. It's harder for an influencer to market perfumes in a video than makeups because the perfumes are colorless and viewers cannot smell them through the screen. So Scentbird uses a colorful perfume case to hold the vial, which also makes opening a perfume more fun and visual to watch. 

3. Podcasts are on the rise but performance is uneven. It has been becoming more expensive to advertise on Facebook. Although Scentbird still has to advertise on the platform, they tried to find new ways to reach users. One way is podcasts. She found midroll ads especially effective because the messages sound more genuine and natural from a host whom the listeners already like. But it involves a lot of testing to find out which hosts or influencers are effective.