All brands and retailers want to ascertain a dialogue with their customers — but Sephora wants to advertise one amongst themselves.

Today will see the launch of a latest platform, the Beauty Insider Community, with which Sephora encourages communication between its fans. The digital experience is now continue to exist Sephora’s app and sephora.com, with additional features rolling out Aug. 22.

The retailer already has maintained several community platforms on sephora.com to this point — from BeautyTalk to Beauty Board and rankings and reviews — but that is the primary time community-centric initiatives might be aggregated in a single place, in accordance with Mary Beth Laughton, Sephora’s senior vp of digital. Additional features include Beauty Matches, which filters photos and reviews by users and connects those that share similar beauty traits, and a Live Community Chat that may enable real-time input on products.

“We all know our clients crave outlets and experiences that give her the deeper personal connections, they usually need to be next to people they feel are like them and share their passion for beauty. We all know they’re increasingly trying to their peers and other people like them and this just plays into that,” Laughton said.

She explained that the Beauty Insider Community is designed to fuel engagement via five features: the Live Community Chat mentioned above, Profile, Groups, Gallery and Conversations. User profiles contain all relevant details about a customer, past purchases and a beauty profile; Groups are destinations (there are greater than 40 groups to date) where clients can join to find content tailored to a particular top from Sensitive Skin to Makeup is Life; the Gallery is crammed with photos and videos posted by users that could be tagged so others can buy and a general Conversations area aggregates messages from groups.

“All of them encourage engagement but in alternative ways, and there are connection points between a number of the elements. It’s easy to navigate backwards and forwards between them so that they don’t feel like silos,” Laughton said, adding that Fueling conversation amongst consumers — each in real time and thru messaging — is on the core of this program.

She identified that the platform is simply accessible to members of the retailer’s loyalty Beauty Insiders program. She declined to say what number of members this system has, but she’s hopeful that the notion of a cohesive community online will encourage additional clients to enroll.

The community is just the most recent in an ongoing stream of digital programs introduced by Sephora. On March 30, the retailer opened its largest store in North America on 34th Street in New York, an 11,300-square-foot space serving up a handful of digital innovations. These include a Moisture Meter that measures the moisture in a single’s skin to make for higher skin-care recommendations, and “Tap and Try,” which lets customers “try on” any lipstick shade virtually in-store. On July 6, the augmented reality app, Sephora Virtual Artist, saw the addition of False Lash Try-On, and on July 21, Sephora opened its most digitally enhanced store to this point, Sephora Studio, on Newbury Street in Boston.

“One in all the predominant reasons we’re doing that is to drive emotional connections with clients and private connections with them in the long run. Nevertheless it does allow us to learn quite a bit about our clients and help higher personalize their experience. We are able to then tailor our services to her in the longer term because we all know her higher. That’s one piece,” Laughton said.

One other piece is culling the feedback from the real-time dialogue so the retailer can react to what clients want at a faster pace.

Of all of the features, Laughton called the soon-to-launch community chat probably the most progressive because it’s going to allow for a chat between consumers right on the product page. Every product page has the choice to ask questions and get quick responses from peers, and next 12 months, input from sales associates might be integrated.

“We really need their engagement and their product recommendations for clients — they’re such an incredible source of information. We might love for them to be interacting with our clients as they might in-store,” Laughton said. “We would like them to be involved within the conversations…and be an lively member of the community. People will recognize them as our forged members [sales associates].”

This element also has the potential to have the best impact on conversion. For a client who could be unsure a few product, getting a final push from a fellow beauty consumer might be the deciding factor that gets them to purchase.

Within the month for the reason that Beauty Insider Community soft launched, Laughton said the conversation section — where users can “talk” backwards and forwards — has turn out to be the most well-liked (Skincare Aware is the number-one group). For her, it speaks to a broader idea that individuals are looking for personal connections — and wish to do greater than just shop after they interact with a brand.

“We at all times take into consideration an omnichannel experience once we design anything. We all know that she’s consistently bouncing backwards and forwards between physical and digital. If she’s starting online with this community — perhaps she desires to learn the way to get a smoky eye and she will ask her community and get suggestions — but perhaps she desires to physically try it on. It’s a natural progression into store — and we encourage that,” Laughton said.