Rare Beauty Marketing Strategy (2026)

Rare Beauty has grown into a multibillion-dollar cosmetics brand by combining Selena Gomez’s visibility with authentic community building, accessible products, creator-led content, and a measurable commitment to youth mental health. Founded in 2020, the brand shows how purpose-driven marketing and strong beauty personalization can support long-term growth. Its success also offers a useful lesson for ecommerce brands: creative campaigns perform better when they are supported by reliable identity resolution, addressable audiences, and clean customer data. Opensend strengthens this invisible marketing layer by helping brands identify more visitors, reconnect customer activity across sessions, enrich first-party profiles, and activate better audiences across marketing channels.

Key Takeaways

• Community-first can precede advertising-first: Rare Beauty spent nearly five years building its community before launching its first major global advertising campaign.
• Creator content supports the customer journey: Rare Beauty reports that creator-led TikTok content produces longer watch times and helps deepen community connections.
• AI-supported advertising improves relevance: Rare Beauty has used Google’s AI-powered Search and YouTube tools to respond to how younger shoppers discover and evaluate products.
• Purpose must be measurable: Rare Beauty donates 1% of eligible sales to the Rare Impact Fund, which supports youth mental health organizations.
• Strong data improves every channel: Identity resolution, match rates, audience addressability, and signal quality determine how effectively brands can retarget visitors and optimize marketing.

Building a Strong Digital Foundation for Rare Beauty

Rare Beauty’s growth is often discussed as a social media success story, but social reach alone does not create sustainable performance. Brands also need systems that connect customer activity across their websites, advertising platforms, email programs, and ecommerce tools.

This is where first-party data becomes important. Product views, quiz responses, shade preferences, purchases, email engagement, and repeat visits can help a beauty brand understand customer intent. However, those signals are less useful when they remain disconnected across devices, browsers, and channels.

Why Anonymous Visitor Identification Matters

Many ecommerce visitors leave without logging in, completing a form, or making a purchase. That creates a gap between the traffic a brand attracts and the people it can reach again.

Beauty brands can reduce this gap through value-based interactions such as:

• Shade-matching tools that help shoppers find suitable products
• Virtual try-on experiences that improve purchase confidence
• Product quizzes that collect preferences
• Back-in-stock alerts and personalized recommendations
• Educational content based on skin type or product goals

These interactions help brands build stronger first-party profiles. Consumer identity resolution can further increase the portion of website traffic that becomes addressable, allowing high-intent visitors to enter relevant email, advertising, or retention workflows.

The goal is not simply to collect more email addresses. It is to improve the identity and signal foundation used by every marketing channel.

Maintaining Customer Identity Across Devices

A shopper may discover a Rare Beauty product on TikTok, research shades on a phone, read reviews on a laptop, and purchase later through an email link. Without cross-device tracking, those actions may appear to belong to separate visitors.

Cross-device identity resolution helps brands:

• Connect fragmented sessions to more complete customer profiles
• Avoid sending duplicate welcome or abandonment sequences
• Improve customer journey reporting
• Build more accurate retargeting audiences
• Send stronger identity signals to advertising platforms

This improves audience quality and measurement without requiring the brand to solve every performance problem through additional advertising spend.

Leveraging Social Media to Amplify Brand Voice

Rare Beauty has built large communities on Instagram and TikTok by emphasizing product education, relatable demonstrations, customer participation, and mental health advocacy.

Rather than relying entirely on polished celebrity advertising, the brand frequently uses content that feels native to each platform.

Platform-Specific Content Approaches

Rare Beauty’s social content commonly includes:

• Tutorials showing how much product to apply
• Close-up shade demonstrations
• Behind-the-scenes brand content
• Customer and creator videos
• Mental health resources and community stories
• Founder-led product demonstrations

The Soft Pinch Liquid Blush became one of the brand’s best-known products through highly visual creator content. TIME reported that the product generated approximately $70 million in sales during 2023. However, the available reporting does not establish that it sold exactly 3 million units or that organic content alone produced those sales.

Community Building Beyond Transactions

Rare Beauty spent nearly five years developing its community before launching its first major global advertising campaign. The campaign, called “Every Side of You,” expanded the brand’s reach while continuing its focus on individuality and authentic self-expression.

Its community-building efforts have included:

• Rare Chats held through Zoom during the COVID-19 period
• Community events centered on mental health and self-acceptance
• Creator gatherings designed to build relationships
• Educational summits and advocacy initiatives
• Opportunities for customers to share personal experiences

The lesson for ecommerce brands is that community should not be treated as a temporary campaign. It should influence content, product development, customer support, retention, and brand partnerships.

Creator Marketing: Why Relatability Supports Performance

Selena Gomez gives Rare Beauty extraordinary reach, but the brand also relies on creators who demonstrate products in everyday settings.

This distinction matters because founder content and creator content can serve different purposes. Celebrity posts may create broad awareness, while creator demonstrations can answer practical questions about shade, texture, application, and product fit.

The Evidence Behind Creator Content

Rare Beauty’s published TikTok case study reports that creator highlights generate an average of 16% longer watch time. The brand described creator-led content as valuable throughout the customer journey because it entertains viewers, builds connection, and makes product education easier to consume.

However, longer watch time should not automatically be described as proof that micro-creators generate most Rare Beauty conversions. Publicly available evidence does not establish that exact conversion split.

A more accurate conclusion is that Rare Beauty uses founder, customer, and creator content together:

• Selena Gomez creates reach and founder credibility.
• Established influencers introduce products to broader audiences.
• Smaller creators provide relatable demonstrations.
• Customers create social proof through reviews and tutorials.
• The brand amplifies content that answers common product questions.

Building Authentic Creator Partnerships

Rare Beauty’s creator strategy emphasizes values alignment and genuine product use rather than relying exclusively on scripted endorsements.

Useful principles include:

• Select creators whose audiences fit the product.
• Allow creators to demonstrate products in their normal style.
• Build relationships beyond individual sponsored posts.
• Use product seeding to encourage genuine experimentation.
• Track content quality, watch time, saves, comments, and downstream sales.
• Repurpose strong educational content across paid and organic channels.

This approach can support customer retention because customers receive practical guidance before and after purchasing.

AI-Powered Advertising and Search

Rare Beauty has worked with Google to adjust its advertising strategy for Gen Z shoppers, who often move between Search, video, reviews, social media, and visual discovery before buying.

Responding to Conversational Searches

A broad search such as “blush” provides limited information. A longer search such as “best liquid blush for dry skin” reveals a specific problem and stronger product intent.

Google’s case study explains that Rare Beauty used AI-supported Search and YouTube advertising to respond to changing discovery behavior and reach younger consumers across different decision points. However, Google’s public summary does not provide a specific verified return-on-ad-spend figure, so the campaign should not be described as producing a particular ROAS without additional documentation.

Beauty brands can apply the same principle by organizing campaigns around:

• Customer questions
• Skin types and product concerns
• Shade selection
• Application techniques
• Product comparisons
• Occasion-based searches
• Reviews and visual discovery

Why Signal Quality Matters

AI-powered advertising depends on the data a platform receives. Incomplete customer identities, missing conversion events, weak match rates, and disconnected sessions can limit optimization.

This is the invisible marketing layer underneath advertising:

• Identity resolution determines who can be recognized.
• Event quality determines what behavior platforms can observe.
• Match rates determine how many profiles and conversions become addressable.
• Attribution depends on those identity and event inputs.
• Audience quality affects retargeting and lookalike performance.

Brands should audit both browser-based and server-side event collection, implement proper event deduplication, and send accurate identifiers through approved integrations. No tracking method should be described as completely bypassing privacy controls, and the exact amount of recovered data varies by browser, implementation, consent status, and platform.

Purpose-Driven Marketing as Brand Infrastructure

Mental health advocacy is central to Rare Beauty’s positioning rather than being a separate seasonal campaign.

A Measurable Commitment

Rare Beauty contributes 1% of eligible product sales to the Rare Impact Fund. The fund’s long-term mission is to mobilize $100 million for organizations working to expand youth mental health services and education.

The Rare Impact Fund reports that it has mobilized approximately $30 million with philanthropic partners and supports 30 nonprofit organizations across five continents. Its Giving Circle states that these partners reach more than 3.5 million young people annually.

This corrects earlier figures suggesting that the fund had raised only $20 million and reached approximately 2 million people annually.

Why Purpose Supports the Brand

Rare Beauty connects its mission to:

• Product packaging and messaging
• Educational mental health resources
• Community events
• Nonprofit partnerships
• Social media content
• Employee and creator participation
• Annual fundraising campaigns

Purpose-driven marketing is more credible when customers can see how commitments are funded, measured, and maintained.

For DTC beauty brands, the lesson is not to imitate Rare Beauty’s cause. It is to choose commitments that genuinely fit the company and support them with transparent actions.

Real-Time Optimization Through Social Listening

Rare Beauty uses community feedback as an ongoing source of product and campaign intelligence.

Comment patterns can reveal:

• Questions about shades or undertones
• Confusion about product application
• Requests for demonstrations
• Concerns about availability or pricing
• Interest in specific product combinations
• Reactions to campaign language

Brands can use these insights to revise creator briefs, produce better tutorials, improve product pages, and adjust advertising while a campaign is active.

Measuring Experiential Marketing

Rare Beauty also uses physical experiences to generate digital engagement. One 2025 pop-up reportedly generated 697 social posts, approximately $3.1 million in earned media value, 3.84 million impressions, and more than 31,000 engagements. These results belong to a specific activation and should not be generalized to every Rare Beauty pop-up.

Measuring Rare Beauty’s Business Growth

Rare Beauty is privately held, so current revenue and valuation figures are estimates rather than audited public-company disclosures.

Reliable reporting placed Rare Beauty’s valuation at approximately $2 billion in 2024. Public claims of a $2.7 billion valuation appeared later, but they should be labeled as estimates rather than confirmed transaction values. The company was reportedly considering strategic options, but a completed sale establishing that valuation was not announced.

Reported sales figures also vary. Rare Beauty generated approximately $370 million in revenue in 2023, while other reporting placed net sales above $400 million for the 12 months ending in February 2024. Therefore, describing revenue as increasing from $350 million in 2023 to more than $500 million in calendar 2024 with exactly 50% growth is not sufficiently supported by consistent public data.

A more defensible summary is:

• 2023 sales were reported at approximately $370 million.
• Sales exceeded $400 million during the 12 months ending in early 2024.
• The Soft Pinch Liquid Blush generated about $70 million in 2023.
• Rare Beauty was valued at approximately $2 billion in 2024.
• Later estimates have placed the brand above $2 billion.

These numbers still demonstrate substantial growth without presenting uncertain estimates as confirmed financial results.

How Opensend Supports the Invisible Marketing Layer

Rare Beauty’s strategy shows that creative, community, and purpose perform best when customer data can be used across channels. Opensend supports the foundational identity and signal layer that helps ecommerce brands make more of the traffic they already have.

Improving Identity and Addressability

Opensend’s identity resolution platform helps brands identify a larger share of anonymous visitors using a proprietary network of opt-in consumer profiles.

Its published network metrics include:

• 180 million U.S. shopper profiles
• A 73% U.S. shopper match rate across its network
• More than 7 billion events processed daily
• Traffic coverage across more than 100,000 U.S.-based websites
• Typical identification of 25% to 35% of anonymous visitors

These figures describe Opensend’s network and typical platform performance. They should not be interpreted as guaranteed results for every website. Actual identification depends on traffic geography, visitor quality, consent, match availability, and implementation.

Connecting Opensend’s Products to the Data Layer

Opensend’s product suite supports different parts of customer identity and audience activation:

• Connect identifies high-intent anonymous visitors and syncs usable profiles into marketing workflows.
• Reconnect recognizes returning customers across devices, browsers, and sessions.
• Revive replaces outdated or bounced email addresses with active addresses associated with the same customer.
• Personas uses purchase and behavioral data to build audience cohorts for more precise targeting.

Together, these capabilities can help brands improve:

• Identification rates
• First-party profile completeness
• Audience addressability
• Cross-device recognition
• Retargeting reach
• Platform match quality
• Customer segmentation
• Measurement inputs

Opensend should not be positioned only as an email capture application. Its broader role is to improve the identity and audience data that advertising, email, retention, and attribution systems depend on.

Strengthen Ecommerce Growth With Opensend

Rare Beauty’s growth cannot be reduced to a single tactic. Its success comes from combining useful products, founder visibility, creator education, community participation, mental health advocacy, and increasingly sophisticated advertising.

For other ecommerce brands, the transferable lesson is to improve both layers of marketing:

The visible layer includes creative, paid media, email, SMS, landing pages, and customer experiences. The invisible layer includes identity resolution, cross-device recognition, audience addressability, event quality, match rates, and measurement inputs.

Opensend helps strengthen that invisible layer by turning more anonymous activity into usable customer profiles and audiences. Instead of relying only on more ad spend or constant creative testing, brands can improve the data foundation that every channel uses.

Explore Opensend success stories to see how ecommerce brands use stronger identity and audience data to improve their marketing performance.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does Opensend help beauty brands identify anonymous visitors?

Opensend matches eligible anonymous visitors against its network of opt-in consumer profiles. When a match is available, the brand can activate that profile through approved email, advertising, SMS, or other marketing workflows. Typical identification rates range from 25% to 35%, but results vary by website and traffic source.

Is Opensend only an email capture platform?

No. Email identification is one capability, but Opensend’s updated role is broader. It supports the identity and signal layer behind ecommerce growth by improving profile resolution, cross-device recognition, audience addressability, match rates, and activation across marketing platforms.

How can Opensend improve advertising performance?

Opensend can increase the number of website visitors and customer profiles that become addressable. Better-resolved audiences can support broader retargeting, stronger customer segments, improved platform matching, and more useful optimization signals. Advertising results still depend on creative offers, traffic quality, campaign setup, and other factors.

How does Opensend support customer identity across devices?

Opensend Reconnect helps recognize returning customers across browsers, devices, and sessions. This can reduce fragmented customer profiles and give marketing systems a more complete view of the customer journey.

Is Opensend’s identity data consent-based?

Opensend states that it works with opt-in consumer profiles and complies with applicable U.S. laws, including CAN-SPAM and CCPA. It also uses encryption and supports opt-out processes. Brands remain responsible for ensuring that their own collection and activation practices meet applicable legal and platform requirements.