How LensDirect.com used reviews to increase their CTR and improve their customer experience

LensDirect.com is a contact lens online retailer and one of the top eCommerce companies in the US. We spoke to Ryan Alovis, who has been the CEO since 2009, and Dale Kim, Paid Search Specialist, to learn more about LensDirect.com’s success and how Trustpilot has helped them.

LensDirect.com - committed to the customer

LensDirect.com has been around since 1992, originally selling contact lens via mail order. However, with the advent of the internet, LensDirect.com saw an opportunity, and became one of the first online contact lens retailers, growing tremendously since.

Ryan Alovis, CEO attributes this growth to their commitment to their customers. The company is highly dedicated to delivering exceptional service and providing valuable resources and features that makes customers lives easier. Their discount subscription program, AutoRefill, encourages customers to continuously shop at LensDirect.com.com by making purchasing easy. As a result of their growth, LensDirect.com has expanded their reach by selling glasses, sunglasses, accessories in addition to contact lenses.

“Any business can buy a customer, it takes a real company to keep a customer.“ - Ryan Alovis, CEO of LensDirect.com

However, LensDirect.com wanted to showcase its commitment to their customers in an authentic way. While marketing and advertising were important to LensDirect.com.com, they were looking for a reputable third-party review platform that could increase their visibility on multiple search engines, such as Bing. They needed the platform to collect its own reviews independently while also having a Licensed Google Partnership so the reviews LensDirect.com already collected could be incorporated.

After weighing out their options, LensDirect.com chose Trustpilot due to price, service, integration, and ease of use.

“Trustpilot was the best option for our business and continues to be.” Since using Trustpilot, they’ve found that reviews have been beneficial beyond marketing.

Finding success with reviews across the entire company

LensDirect.com uses reviews to supplement their main marketing and acquisition channels - SEO and paid search. However, reviews are also used onsite and socially to promote brand trust, third-party validation, and verification of LensDirect.com’s customer service.

Reviews also provide an opportunity to align messaging, branding, and communications with what matters most to customers. Using reviews, LensDirect.com can promote themselves via the word of their customers, which differentiates them better than traditional advertising and marketing can. Highlighting reviews in their marketing also allows them to focus on their customer care and service, two pillars that are highly important to the company.

This marketing method gives LensDirect.com the power to compete with much larger brands who have a much larger marketing and PR budget to use. By directly using their customer’s messaging, they’re able to save some time and costs on developing and creating ad copy.

By leveraging reviews socially and on paid acquisition channels, LensDirect.com is able to measure performance against their companies KPIs which include social engagement, click-through rate on search results, and conversions. They’ve already seen success with Google Seller Ratings that appear on paid search ads.

Customer Service

Reviews are used throughout the customer service department as well. Customer reviews are usually pointed and very specific in what’s working and what’s not and LensDirect.com has been able to improve their customer service and shipping department performance as a result.

Ryan Alovis, the CEO, is always excited to share reviews with the customer service department, offering monthly rewards and extending the sense of commitment to customers across the entire company.

“Our dedicated account representatives do an amazing job of keeping our customers happy and coming back for a level of care unmatched and overlooked by others. Trustpilot accurately represents our dedication.”

LensDirect.com collects reviews by sending an invitation after every purchase whether or not they have been a customer before just to ensure that their high standard of customer service is carried out throughout the lifetime of a customer. Trustpilot’s Automatic Feedback Service (AFS) feature automates the review invitation process and gives LensDirect.com control over the frequency of invitation reminders.

Success Spotlight - the benefits of Trustpilot

On the 16th of September 2019, Google changed the review Review Snippet guidelines which are outlined in this blog. Here's what you need to know:

• SEO Service Review TrustBoxes no longer display Review Snippet stars (this impacts service reviews from all providers, not just Trustpilot).

• Product Review SEO TrustBoxes and Google Seller Ratings (GSRs) aren't affected by this change.

• Business Profile pages on Trustpilot.com will still display Review Snippet stars. If you'd like to find out more, please read Trustpilot's explanatory blog post.

Since they started working with Trustpilot, LensDirect.com has an 9.0/10 rating and over 1,100 reviews, as of the time of this writing. Their implementation of TrustBoxes, widgets that display reviews onsite, have also improved their organic search traffic.

When potential consumers Google ‘buy contact lenses’, a high-traffic search query, LensDirect.com shows up as the second organic result, and is the only organic result on the SERP (search engine results page) that has rich snippet stars and a rating. They enjoy this benefit because they collect and display reviews with Trustpilot.

How effective was this?

A quick check of Google Analytics revealed that after implementing Trustboxes on their highest trafficked paged, their CTR increased from 4.58% to a whopping 6.65%, a 45% increase in CTR. More importantly, these were the results for their keywords with the highest impressions, ensuring that these impressions and CTRs weren’t only high, but relevant.

Fortunately, because TrustBoxes are easy to integrate, LensDirect.com can test and implement them on a wide variety of channels to optimize their results.

As LensDirect.com continues to use Trustpilot to collect, automate, and manage their reviews, they’ll use reviews to improve their customer service, demonstrate their value to potential consumers, and reap the business benefits reviews bring to them.

To learn more about how Trustpilot can help your company collect and manage your reviews, request a demo below.