Avon Morocco: 50% more sales representative activations thanks to Infobip’s SMS

The origin of Avon Products, Inc. dates back to 1886, and over the years, they have become known for enabling women to earn independent incomes through the direct sales of cosmetics, perfume, and jewelry. One of the markets they operate in is Morocco, where Avon Maroc launched operations in 2001.  

Avon pioneered a direct selling model via local representatives, which has grown into a network of 5 million women across more than 50 markets. The company recruits and develops door-to-door salespeople (also referred to as “Avon ladies” or “Avon men”) to sell skin care products, jewelry, accessories, and clothing. 

But in an ever-digitalizing world, Avon was pressured to adapt their sales model to continue expanding their business. They also struggled to attract younger representatives and customers.  

Avon Maroc was not exempt from these challenges and needed to address the following: 

Avon Maroc’s first step to address these challenges was to launch an internal application, Avon Grow, to digitalize its entire recruitment process. The next challenge was to drive traffic to the application, and they opted for SMS to promote Avon Grow. 

While Avon already had an SMS service provider, they lacked personalization and tracking capabilities. Avon chose Infobip’s SMS as a replacement, which they could easily integrate into their existing platform thanks to our API.  

Infobip’s SMS service also has tagging and customization capabilities with real-time reporting, which further enabled them to customize and send targeted messages to drive registrations on Avon Grow. 

Infobip’s SMS service efficiently segments profiles into groups, enabling tailored communication. Avon leveraged real-time reporting to gain valuable insights and improve targeting through factors like duration of activity, driving more registrations. 

Security is not neglected throughout this process either. Once prospects have registered on Avon Grow, group leaders manually process their information to prevent fake recruitment. In addition to manual security measures, authentication links are also shared via SMS to verify identities and complete the registration process.  

Once representatives are registered, they receive further SMS messages to onboard them with information about the brand, processes, and other digital tools at their disposal. 

Avon Maroc uses bulk SMS to send automated messages and time-sensitive information to drive sales of specific products. And thanks to data gathered by their internal CRM system, they send tactical, personalized SMSes to individual representatives to drive sales. The tracking functionality also enables Avon to target and incentivize inactive representatives.  

For example, suppose a representative missed or stopped selling a specific product. In that case, they will send a personalized SMS with a special offer to incentivize them to include the product in their stock. 

SMS through Infobip has helped Avon efficiently reach all its representatives. 

Thanks to Infobip’s SMS service, Avon Maroc can target their campaigns more effectively and drive more sales through tactical, personalized messaging. As a result, they reactivated more than 50% representatives. Up to 10% of these activations were based on personalized offers.

The tracking and customization capabilities of Infobip’s SMS solution also enabled the company to better target and attract a younger age base. Representatives between 20 and 29 make up 30% of their network, while those between 30 and 39 make up 32%.  

Our SMS solution allows Avon to send over one million messages each year.