1.

Introduction

1.1 About the Industry Guided Project:

The Industry Guided Project was undertaken with “Ethiko:Luxe Night skincare”,
Mumbai, Maharashtra. The project aims at gaining hands-on industry experience
and learning the process of being a part of an industry project. The main focus is
looking at an industry brief through the lens of research.

The students must take up the role of an intern and collaborate closely with the
Industry to support a project and document it.

1.2 About the Company

Sonia is a graduate of the IIT-Kharagpur and the IE Business School in Spain, and
she has more than 15 years of experience in corporate and investment banking.
She's also held positions with GE Capital and ABN Amro.

Ethiko, a Mumbai-based company that sells serums for various skin types, was
founded by Sonia Sahni.

While a student in Spain, Sonia Sahni struggled with a skin issue. The medical
professionals suggested using topical steroids. But as soon as she had enough of
that, she began looking into organic skin care formulation, and in 2017 she started to
make her own serums. She made the serums herself and started using them. The
transformation in her skin was so apparent that her family and friends began to
inquire about the goods she was bringing. They started placing orders, and that is
how the business began. When Sonia returned to India in 2018, she found that there
were few high-quality night skincare products available. This led to the development
of Ethiko.

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The process of setting up the manufacturing and operations started in January 2019,
and in August of the same year, a group of three persons from Mumbai founded the
company.

The products are free of chemical preservatives, PETA-certified, and do not include
animal testing. Every formulation is effective and anhydrous (do not contain any
water). The shelf life of the serums is two years.

At night, when our skin is healing, it need high-quality skincare products that can
deliver "skin food" deep within its layers. While other companies offer multiple
products for various skin types, they only offer one "night cream" that is suitable for
all skin types. Because the product is general and does not suit their skin type,
people are not entirely satisfied with it. This is the issue that Ethiko attempts to solve,
according to Sonia.

"The goods are presented in distinctive, invisible-light-blocking Miron violet bottles.

This enables our products to function well even when no stabilisers or preservatives
are used, according to Sonia.

The approach of Ethiko :

Ms. Sonia Sahni ants to establish brand identity of Ethiko as a Night skincare brand
which incorporates beauty secrets from ancient cultures.

Core Values :

• Purity-

Purity and reverence for nature are Ethiko's key ideals, which permeate every
formulation, item, and procedure. All our formulations are unique and are made
using high quality organic ingredients, sourced from around the world. All
products are entirely natural. They use premium organic ingredients that are
sourced from all over the world to create each of our one-of-a-kind formulations.
Each and every ingredient is all-natural.
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 • Sustainability-

Ethiko wants to develop environmentally friendly items that work with nature and
improve the earth for future generations. We package our products in premium
Miron glass bottles in keeping with this philosophy rather than coated glass or
plastic bottles. The products are kept fresh for a long time thanks to Miron Glass,
which blocks out visible light. In addition, Miron Glass packaging ensures that no
colours, dyes, or plastics contaminate any of our products, enabling us to provide
utterly pure and delicate skin care that your skin will adore.

• Respect for Life-

Ethiko values all life and supports the coexistence of the planet's many species.
We don't test any of our goods on animals. We are proud to use exclusively plant-
based oils and to not use any butters or oils that come from animals.

• Inspiration-

We think that the best makeup is healthy, happy skin. Ethiko draws inspiration
from international beauty secrets. Bringing the best of the world to those who
adhere to ethical principles.

1.3 SWOT analysis of company

Strengths:

• Large potential due to the growing awareness of the value of skincare

regimens.

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 • Ethiko being organic and cruelty free
• Great customer support to solve any queries.

Weakness:

• Since the company is new, it can take some time for it to establish itself,
become well-known, and get customers.
• Less number of employees

Opportunity:

• Scalable and global business

• Indian skincare products are becoming more popular

Threat:

• Emerging competition in skincare Industry

• Tough to win over customers trust
• Entry barriers into the beauty sector are either very low or nonexistent.

2. Synopsis

Designing Email marketing campaign for Ethiko

2.1 Project description

The founder "Sonia Sahni" wanted to increase reach of Ethiko via Email marketing to
increase recall value of the brand and familiarize people with the identity of Ethiko.
Ethiko is a start-up, with so many competitors’ emerging in the skincare industry it is
essential for the brand to stand out from the crowd

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Getting consumers' attention in the realm of advertising is crucial. Your customers
can be informed with the use of emails. Customers have the option of checking their
email whenever it suits them. They may get the impression that you are thinking of
them as a result.

Email has been a medium of communication for a very long time—more than 40
years, in fact. As the years have passed, email has quickly risen to the top of our list
of preferred methods of communication. Every one of us has been trained in some
way to respond to emails. Whether it is to comment, forward, delete, click through to
another embedded link, purchase something, or sign up. With emails, we often take
action. With this knowledge, you may use email to encourage people to visit your
website, call you, or respond to any other call to action. In actuality, email marketing
was responsible for nearly 25% of sales last year.

90% of the content provided by a brand via email marketing to its subscribers is
ignored or ends up in the spam folder of the recipient. For this information to engage
readers and hold their interest, it must provide some sort of value. To make these
emails more appealing and to design them so that they stand out and maintain the
brand identity, a new approach had to be developed. This entire procedure is carried
out in stages.

2.2 Identification of need

With the correct digital marketing strategy, an Indian organic skincare firm has a lot
of room to expand in the present. People might be reminded of the advantages of
bedtime skin care by this brand. Your skin unwinds at night from the stress and
pollutants it experienced during the day. Our skin breathes and heals during the
night. Because of this, it's critical to provide the proper nutrients to our skin during
this time. As everyone is aware, the epidemic brought great fame to the skincare
sector. During this time, a large number of brands as well as influencers in the
skincare industry developed. The majority of skincare companies use Instagram
influencers to promote their goods by partnering with affiliates.

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Many people attempt to adhere to minor skincare recommendations. In order to
enhance email opening rates, we made use of this fact. Due to Covid-19, consumer
interest in already declining categories like makeup further decreased as they
participated in fewer social activities. As people looked for methods of stress relief,
some aspects of beauty, such as skincare, came into emphasis.

Email marketing is crucial for a start-up firm like Ethiko to stay relevant and develop
in the post-pandemic period.

2.3 Objective

• Increasing brand's recall value

• Converting Emails into sales through discount codes
• Establishing a visual style for the company
• spreading advice on how to use Ethiko products for best results

2.4 Competitor analysis

Competitors-

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Analyzing competitor’s Email marketing strategy-

A marketing campaign email is essentially an email newsletter. It includes crucial

information as well as important news updates to inform your audience about
your company's name or products. It is an economical tool used to increase
business.

In order to analyze how the competitor brands were utilizing Email marketing, I
subscribed to newsletter of various brands like sublime life, Juicy chemistry, Plum
goodness, Nykaa, etc. This helped me understand frequency of the mails, kind of
content other brands were publishing, what kind of subject lines which were used
in the Emails and what was the key content.

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Fig 1
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 Key observations derived from Competitor’s Email newsletters-

• Most of the Emails highlighted sales and discounts.

• The creative were quite long which took seconds to scroll. The attention
span of a reader is lesser than a mini second depending on rhe time and
situation they are in. Short creative with crisp content might work better in
this case.
• Nykaa used a subject line which said "Fixing that crown on your head" for
promoting a hair care product, which is quite catchy subject line. These
kinds of subject lines compel viewer to open up the Email and see what's
inside.
• There is too much content in each creative which might confuse the viewer
as where to look.
• Their discount codes need to be highlighted.
• Humans have inherent tendency to procrastinate. The creative did not
create a sense of urgency in viewer's mind which would lead them to use
the information the Email newsletter and take an action.

2.5 Research methodology

Unstructured user interviews:

A extremely open-ended set of questions is used instead of an outline or guidance

while conducting an unstructured interview. By doing this, the user can control the
interaction. Unstructured interviews are the most effective technique to learn about
the user persona since they let the researcher collect a lot of qualitative data. Now is
the moment to pay attention for any problems or pain areas that need to be fixed
with the product. Unstructured interviews help at the start of a project, during initial
brainstorming and domain research.

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2.6 Target user

By figuring out who your target market is, your company can concentrate its
marketing efforts and budget on the demographics that are most likely to become
customers. In order define who this Marketing campaign addresses I created a user
persona for clear understanding.

Fig 2

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2.7 Key activities

Fig 3

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2.8 Visual elements

In 2019, 41.9% of emails were opened on mobile devices, compared to only 18.2%
on desktop. The percentage of iPhone-driven email opens was the greatest, at
28.4%, compared to PCs, where the majority of mobile email opens occur on iOS
devices.

This is the reason why these email creatives are designed in a vertical manner with
minimal content.

Visual anatomy:

Fig 4

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Fig 5

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Email creative calendar:

Fig 6

2.9 Implementation

These Emails were sent out via Mailchimp were company’s Email contact list as
loaded. There were total five parts in the email, first one was the creative itself,
second was clickable shop now button, followed by a tagline “Follow us on
Instagram”. And hen clickable icons which were linked to Ethiko website and
Instagram handle.

Fig 7

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 3. Other project

Apart from working on Email marketing campaign I also worked on other tasks such
as designing social media posts for Instagram and facebook, automating them in
Hootsuite, product photography, etc.

3.1 Social media posts

There were two sets o social media posts that I designed. First set had all the festive
posts such as Rakshabandhan, Friendship day, Independence day, etc.

Set 1 : Festive posts

Fig 8

Set 2 : Skincare tips

Fig 9

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Hashtag strategy:

Instagram allows users to add a maximum of 30 hashtags while posting. Hashtags

increase reach of our content. It pops your content to user with similar interest. In
order to make that possible we need to add the hashtags mindfully. Those with
millions of posts and more likely to be lost in the ocean of content online.The
strategy used was as follows-

5 hashtags- Those with more than a Million posts

5 hashtags- Those with 500k to 1 Milion posts.

5 hashtags- Those with 100k-500k posts.

10 hashtags- Those with 50k-100k posts

5 hashtags- Those with 10k-50k posts

5 hashtags- Company keywords

Fig 10

3.2 Product Photography

The product photography done in this assignment was going to be used for social
media posts. The products were sent to us for this assignment. The theme of these
photoshoot was earthy pictures with the product bottle as centre of attention.

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Fig 11

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Fig 12

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Fig 13

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3.3 Research on social media influencers (Data sheet)
Viral fads emerge in today's creator economy faster than a zit under a face mask.
And skincare companies are the best-positioned group to benefit from the constant
social media activity. A social media content producer known as a "skin influencer"
publishes articles about skincare and skincare goods. This datasheet included social
media links of s skin influencer, their name and contact details. This datasheet is
going to be used for future collaborations with social media influencers. Doctors, and
other qualified professionals rank among the most well-liked. Other reliable
influencers are merely skincare fans who are enthusiastic about offering advice and
objective reviews to their followers. However, skin influencers have a lot of impact
over audiences when it comes to trends and product suggestions, independent of
their specialisation.

3.4 Research on competitor's Instagram affiliate partners and how

much percentage they offer to the influencer influencers
This task helped understand how much discount customer’s get after using discount
codes given by affiliate partners of different brands on Instagram. It was found that
the average discount as 11-15% with some exception.

Fig 14

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3.5 PPT for collaboration with skincare influencers.
This task included designing a creative document for sending out to skin influencers
for collaboration, giving them a brief about what is expected from them by the brand,
payment details etc.

Fig 15

4. Learning Outcomes

• Exposure to new skills such as scheduling and designing emails,

automating social media posts and promotinal emails.
• Having knowledge of experience design helped me understand
how to strategically design content which can actually get
converted into sales.
• Learning how to schedule content gave me an insight of how big
brands manage their content
• Visual hierarchy can make or break a design. The wrong hierarchy
might throw off user's attention and your content might end up in
the trash folder, whereas having the right hierarchy and focal
points can convert email content into sales.

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5. Conclusion
During this internship I learned that Research is main key step to successful
complete any task. Research helps us think in various perspectives and instead of
mindlessly following certain ways, we now understand our whole decision making
process and what impact it is going to have on people consuming our work. In this
Email marketing campaign research helped me to make effective creative which
actually compelled audience to read and then they also turned into sales. Without
understanding the purpose and studying existing works one would have made a
creative similar to all paper sent out by competitor brand. But research helped me
take decision wise, pick up the good aspects and eliminate the unnecessary ones.
This internship helped me gain professional etiquettes. This included working
with deadlines and delivering the best outputs, Understanding the requirements and
expectations of the client, which also helped me maintain good work relationships
with the industry mentor, which might lead to growing more connections in the
industry.

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