February 2024 Bonfire Marketer of the Month: Sephora’s Aubrey Jackson

Each month, Braze selects one individual as our Marketer of the Month in order to celebrate the exceptional work being done by members of our Braze Bonfire community. Whether it's providing support for their fellow marketers or going above and beyond by sharing their innovative ideas and strategies, these individuals are making essential contributions to their companies, their users, and the customer engagement space as a whole.

This month, we’re recognizing Aubrey Jackson, Sr. Marketing Manager, Mobile Marketing at Sephora. As the leading global prestige omni-retailer, Sephora is a powerful beauty presence thanks to their unparalleled product assortment in every category, unbiased service from beauty experts, interactive shopping environment, and relentless innovation.

We spoke with Aubrey about building effective customer journeys, mobile messaging, and teamwork. Let’s dive in.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your career path?

My career journey started at a mid-size mobile messaging company in 2018, interning during my final year at university and then transitioning into a full-time time role post-graduation. There, I was a part of the Customer Success team, where I partnered with various brands on how to grow and optimize their SMS programs. The brands I was able to work with had a significant impact in my experiences, especially getting to learn about how they approached their customer retention and engagement strategies.

After three years there, this opportunity at Sephora popped up. It was perfect timing—I joined in June 2021 and got to relaunch our marketing SMS program by October. Since then, our SMS program has flourished, consisting of five different programs across various aspects of our business. Braze has really allowed me to elevate our mobile messaging programs. I’m able to handle cross-channel orchestration directly within the platform and build out some pretty cool user journeys. One of the things that I love about my role is seeing first-hand the impact that our programs have on our customers and the types of experiences that are most valuable to them.

What is your favorite part of your job?

My favorite part of my job is being able to experiment and bring new ideas to life. We often have these big ideas that are hard to put down on paper. Being able to see how these ideas are executed is a very rewarding thing. Sometimes the big idea doesn’t turn out the way we thought it would and other times it exceeds all expectations. I love that I work for a company that empowers me to have a strong POV and is OK learning if something isn’t the right fit. Sephora champions the entrepreneurial spirit, and we’re continuously challenged to bring new ideas to improve the customer and employee experiences.

I feel so fortunate that I get to work with some of the best and brightest in the business. One rewarding part about working at Sephora is how cross-functional our projects are. Even with constant differing opinions, everyone is always focused on finding the best solution that is right for the customer and for the business.

How do you see Braze as a career accelerant?

Braze was new to me when I started at Sephora, and looking back, the Braze platform played a significant role in contributing to my technical knowledge. The role of the marketer has drastically changed, even within the past three years. It’s now a requirement that marketers have a deep understanding of their tool and what it can power.

Braze has allowed us to stand up five different SMS programs over the course of 2.5 years. We’re able to seamlessly orchestrate between our mobile messaging channels and optimize a number of campaigns into customer journeys based on which action is most meaningful and valuable to the customer. Braze capabilities have also allowed us to come up with out-of-the-box, no-code solutions that would have otherwise been added as a new project request to our technology backlog. I am all about how we can scale new ideas and solutions quickly, and Braze has allowed us to do that via Connected Content, Liquid, webhooks, and Canvas Audience Paths.

What is one campaign or initiative that you’re most proud of?

We recently launched our optimized abandon cart journey flow. Over the past few years, we’ve added a variety of use cases where a customer could potentially receive an abandoned cart message. Additionally, we were orchestrating abandoned cart messages within two channels—mobile push and SMS. This posed a particular challenge as we wanted to move away from manual waterfall logic and better orchestrate between push and SMS. At first, we didn’t know if this would be possible or not, but our Braze partners were able to come up with a solution for us to bring this to life. Since launch, we’ve seen great results in terms of lower opt-out rates and higher conversion all while ensuring that clients are receiving the right message, at the right time, and on the channel of their choice.

What has your experience been like working with the Braze team and community so far?

I often say that we have one of the best account teams at Braze. The past 2.5 years, I have been really focused on data cleanup, campaign optimizations, and partner integrations. Each brings their own sets of challenges, but our account team really has made all the difference. From advising on best practices to fielding questions from a variety of our cross-functional partners, the team has been instrumental in getting us across the finish line for these projects. They continue to help us ideate on how we can elevate our programs and tie those recommendations back to our larger strategic goals and priorities.

Additionally, our Braze account team continually advocates for us and our needs. This has been a critical part to our relationship as our feedback is taken into consideration when it comes to developing new features or enhancing existing ones.

Interested in collaborating to build the future of customer engagement? Join a collective of experts to forge connections, share ideas, and accelerate your career at the Braze Bonfire Community.