The sunscreen category is growing. The number of brands competing in it is growing faster. And yet, most of them are running the same digital marketing playbook.
This is not a product problem. The formulations are better than ever: mineral, tinted, hybrid skincare-SPF, reef-safe, sweat-resistant. But strong products don't automatically produce strong businesses. That requires a different kind of work, such as understanding your audience at a deeper level, building creative that earns attention, and connecting every digital touchpoint into a coherent experience that converts and retains.
Here is how we think at RETLI GROUP about digital marketing for sunscreen brands, and what separates the ones that scale from the ones that stall.
Know Who You Are Actually Talking To
The single most common mistake in sunscreen digital marketing is treating the audience as one undifferentiated group. "People who need sun protection" is not a persona. It is a category. And marketing to a category, rather than to a person, produces creative and messaging that resonates with no one in particular.
The sunscreen buyer is actually several distinct people with different emotional relationships to SPF. The skincare-first consumer who arrived at SPF through their 10-step routine and sees it as a non-negotiable final step in a ritual they care about deeply. The outdoor-active buyer for whom performance, sweat resistance, invisible finish, all-day hold is the only thing that matters. The parent driven entirely by safety signals and trust, not aesthetics. The beauty-conscious buyer who has had too many bad experiences with white cast and greasiness and is highly sceptical, but loyal to the brand that finally gets the formula right.
These are not the same person, and they have different needs. They do not respond to the same creative, the same copy, the same offer, or the same channel strategy. The brands that understand this, and build accordingly, are the ones winning.
At RETLI GROUP, deep persona work happens before a single ad goes live, a single email campaign or an email flow is built. Not demographics, we focus on psychographics. The emotional motivations behind the purchase, their needs, how they approach skincare, their values, interests, personality, lifestyles.
Paid Ads: Stop Treating Ads Like A Product Page
The most common reason for failure in sunscreen advertising is what we call the features-first trap. White background, and product shot. "SPF 50+. Reef-safe. Dermatologist tested." This creative only communicates information. It does not build desire. And in a feed where ten other brands are saying the same thing with nearly identical visual language, your ad disappears and fails.
Sunscreen is tied to how someone feels about their skin, their summer, their everyday routine. The creative that performs is the creative that speaks to that emotional register.
What Actually Works in Sunscreen Advertising:
- Lead with aspiration: the skin, the feeling, the life
- Match the visual world of your specific buyer: the lifestyle aesthetic they already identify with
- Use seasonal and contextual relevance to make the ad feel timely and alive
- Inspire with your strong brand and creative direction
- Understand your audience
The algorithm exhausts high-intent buyers quickly. The brands that scale their paid spend without blowing out their CPA are those that have built creative and funnel structures for the wider audience, the people who are curious, comparing, and not yet ready to buy today. Ignoring them is the fastest way to hit a growth ceiling.
Email Marketing: The Relationship Channel
Email marketing is the highest-leverage digital channel for sunscreen brands, and the most underbuilt. What email marketing can actually do for a sunscreen brand, when built with intention, is to create the kind of ongoing relationship that drives Customer Lifetime Value. The customer who understands your brand, trusts your products, and feels educated rather than marketed at is the customer who repurchases without needing a discount to do it.
Emails That Build Loyalty in This Category:
- Skin-type education sequences that help new customers identify the right product for them
- Morning routine integration
- Post-purchase flows that are strategic
- Personalised upsell sequences based on what was bought
- Reengagement that leads with inspiration and genuine value
- Segmentation
The email marketing approach that drives real CLV in this category isn't the one that sends the most offers. It's the one that makes customers feel like they've found a brand that genuinely understands their skin.
For email marketing we use Klaviyo, and have been delivering outstanding results for our clients for over 5 years.
eCommerce: Where the Sale Is Won or Lost
A sunscreen brand can run excellent ads and build a genuinely strong email sequences and still lose the sale on its website. eCommerce activation is where everything either comes together or falls apart.
The specific challenge sunscreen brands face at the eCommerce level is purchase anxiety. Most buyers have had a bad experience: white cast, pilling under foundation, an unpleasant scent, a formula that broke them out. The fear of getting it wrong again means that even a buyer who arrives ready to purchase will stall if the page doesn't address that anxiety directly and confidently.
What a High-Converting Sunscreen Website Needs:
- Product categorisation
- Lifestyle photography that shows the product in real use, on real skin, in real light
- Sensory language in the copy: how it feels on application, how it sits under makeup, what a full day of wear looks like, what it smells like
- Social proof and review content that speaks to the website visitor
- Bundling logic that increases AOV, built by understanding the customer
Every one of these eCommerce decisions flows directly from understanding the target audience. The anxieties you address on the product page, the language you use in the copy, the photography you invest in, all of it is most effective when it is built around the specific person you are selling to, not a generic "skincare consumer."
Branded Creative Direction: The Thing That Makes Everything Work
Here is where most brands make the most consequential mistake of all: they treat their creative as a production task rather than a strategic asset.
Branded creative direction, a defined visual world, a deliberate photographic style, a consistent aesthetic language across every touchpoint is what makes a sunscreen brand recognisable before a customer reads a single word. It is what makes an ad feel like it belongs to a brand.
In the sunscreen and sun care category, the visual language you commit to communicates everything about who you are and who you are for. These are not aesthetic preferences. They are strategic decisions that shape who responds to your brand, and how they perceive it.
The brands leading and setting premium price points in SPF are not always the ones with the best formulations. They are consistently the ones with the most coherent, confident, and deliberate creative direction, applied across every channel without compromise. So without having the right content, it doesn't matter whether you have the best formulation.
How Creative Direction Elevates Each Channel:
- In paid ads: a visual system, where each ad is part of a cohesive world. The aesthetic compounds over time, building brand recognition that makes retargeting dramatically more efficient
- In email: helps with diverse content, photography style, and tone of voice that are all expressions of the same brand direction, so as a result every email builds brand equity, and welcomes the audience to your branded world
- In eCommerce: product photography, the colour story of the page, the lifestyle content; all aligned to the same visual language so the experience is seamless from the first ad impression to the order confirmation
Creative direction is not a branding exercise you do once and file away. It is the active, living framework through which every marketing decision is made. When it is strong and consistent, every channel becomes more efficient. When it is absent, every campaign is starting from zero.
The Integrated Approach: Why the Channels Have to Work Together
Sunscreen is a seasonal category. But the brands that scale sustainably in it treat it as a year-round relationship with their customer.
When strategy leads the way and shapes the ads and emails that define the eCommerce experience, all grounded in a confident, cohesive creative direction, the entire system performs more powerfully than any single channel could on its own.
This is the work we do at RETLI GROUP with the brands we partner with, like we did for LE RUB. Not one channel in isolation, but the full digital journey, built around who the customer actually is and what they need to feel at every stage of their relationship with your sunscreen brand.
Ready to build a digital marketing strategy for your sunscreen brand that works as hard as your formulation?
Get in touch at contact@retligroup.com and let's build something that actually scales.
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