How Jones Road Beauty Makes 7 Figures with TikTok Ads and a Quiz

Jones Road Beauty was founded by makeup artist Bobbi Brown on the philosophy that the world doesn’t need more beauty products. It needs better beauty products. 

With clean, strategic, high-grade formulations that work on every skin type and tone, Jones Road Beauty is helping women achieve a natural, no-makeup makeup look without sacrificing their health. The brand follows guidelines even more stringent than those of the E.U. to eliminate over 2,700 potentially harmful ingredients from their formulas. 

But this growing 8-figure brand is all about innovating on all fronts, not just on clean makeup formulas. 

Jones Road Beauty Director of Ecommerce, Cody Plofker, created its own growth formula for customer acquisition and retention: TikTok ads + Octane AI Quiz funnels + Klaviyo personalized email flows. 

And he told us all about it, so let’s dive in!

The Challenge: Crack the Code on How to Acquire New Customers Via TikTok 

Jones Road Beauty was looking to expand media buying onto another platform to diminish its heavy reliance on Facebook. With the recent changes in data privacy, Facebook advertising became more expensive and way less effective for most DTC brands, including Jones Road. 

With TikTok surpassing Google as the most popular website of the year, Cody decided TikTok was worth a shot – despite being initially skeptical about its users not being a match for Jones Road Beauty’s target customers.  

He found out that a quiz was the missing element he needed to crack the TikTok code.

The Solution: All Roads Lead to a Quiz 😉

As of February 2022, Jones Road Beauty is spending $8,000 on Tiktok ads per day and all of that traffic is ultimately directed to their Octane AI quiz. But there’s more to that strategy than meets the eye and it revolves around Cody’s belief that TikTok is not a social platform, it’s an entertainment platform.

“Most TikTok users are not there to shop, they are there for entertainment purposes. TikTok is a top-of-funnel discovery platform where users simply want to learn new things and let the algorithm work for them. If you can find a way to capture these users' information and follow up with them on a different platform when they're in a different state of mind, that’s where the magic happens.” 

 

Cody Plofker, Director of Ecommerce of Jones Road Beauty

Instead of dropping people into a product page and trying to immediately convert them, Jones Road Beauty directs all of their TikTok traffic to an advertorial “​​Here Are 5 Amazing Reasons Why You Will Love Bobbi Brown's New Clean Beauty Line Jones Road Beauty.”

With the advertorial, Cody aims to educate users about Jones Road Beauty and then lead them into the “find my shade” quiz, which increased their AOV from $60 to $90 dollars and has a conversion rate of 16%.

“I believe that acquiring customers quickly is sometimes the worst thing that you can do. And you actually want to lengthen the funnel, so you can get more information, more education, and more storytelling to prospects. I’m not trying to use ads to get fast sales, I’m trying to acquire customers who are then going to become very loyal to our brand long-term. I don't want them just buying products, I want them buying our brand.”

 

Cody Plofker, Director of Ecommerce of Jones Road Beauty

Once prospects click the quiz link in the advertorial they are taken to the quiz start page where they’ll provide an email opt-in along with zero-party data about their skin and beauty pain points and preferences. Prospects immediately receive value in form of personalized product recommendations in exchange for sharing their personal information.

In January alone, Jones Road Beauty’s TikTok and Octane AI quiz funnel drove 50,000 new emails, with 36,000 of them being net new email signups. “If you think about and analyze the incremental impact Octane AI can have on your business long-term, it is pretty amazing” Cody said.  

Using Triple Whale, Jones Road Beauty determined the cost per email signup of its TikTok and quiz funnel is only $7 dollars – and they are not just getting an email. With the quiz, Jones Road collects email AND zero-party data points for each quiz taker, which allows them to build their email list, build their own customer datasets, and send personalized email and SMS flows to customers. 

If you want a deep dive on zero-party data, you can also check out our zero-party data marketing playbook.

Results

In 3 months (Dec 2021- Feb 2022), Jones Road Beauty has achieved jaw-dropping results:

-    2,500,000 zero-party data points collected

-    82% of site visitors who start the quiz, complete it

-    15% of quiz-takers make a purchase

-    50% increase in AOV 

-    124,000 emails captured

-    7 figures in profit 

-    3x ROAS on ad spend 

In a nutshell, Jones Road Beauty’s winning growth and retention strategy revolve around:

1. Showing ads to a broad audience on TikTok.
2. Dropping the audience into an educational advertorial that leads to the Octane AI quiz.
3. Acquiring zero-party data and email opt-in of quiz takers.
4. Recommending the best products after prospects take the quiz —and converting them! 
5. Sending prospects and customers personalized email flows through Klaviyo.
6. Continue to nurture them with personalized content, offers and product recommendations.
   
   

Want more? Watch Cody share his full TikTok + Quiz strategy on Youtube.