Warby Parker’s Growth Marketing Strategy That Fueled Its $6.8 Billion Valuation

Today, I’ll be breaking down the growth marketing playbook of a DTC pioneer, Warby Parker (WP) - your friendly neighbourhood eyeglass brand, that disrupted the eyewear industry by offering stylish glasses for affordable prices.

This is what I’m covering in today’s breakdown:

• How a mobile-first customer experience has helped them convert more

• SEO strategy that drives millions of organic clicks to their online store

• Insights into their paid search and social campaigns

• A close look at how they used influencer marketing

• Genius, yet simple UGC marketing that got over 68k videos created for free

• A modern-day referral marketing strategy

• TLDR Summary

CASE STUDY
👓 Warby Parker

Context: Warby Parker’s direct-to-consumer (DTC) model is a key aspect of its business model. By cutting out middlemen like wholesalers and distributors, the company delivers its products straight to you, ensuring unbeatable prices and an exceptional customer journey. The magic behind this approach has pioneered a lot of popular DTC brands today. They’ve prioritised a better shopping experience that’s tailor-made and efficient, making customers the centre of everything (as it should be!).

CONVERSION RATE OPTIMISATION
Mobile-Led Customer Experience

Apps sit at the centre of their digital experience strategy that not only creates strong social proof but subtly moves people along the funnel, making it simple for customers to upload their info to get personalised glasses. Plus, it does influence a much higher conversion rate for Warby Parker, which was last reported to be around 7.7%.

• App 1: Allows customers to try on frames using an Augmented Reality (AR) lens, and has over 55k five-star reviews - further validating the experience on the app.

• App 2: Designed to do prescription checks through their mobile vision assessment technology, it removes a huge barrier to buying glasses online.

• Other benefits: Additionally, the app allows users to save favourite styles, track orders, and easily reorder contacts by scanning the last box of lenses.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION
SEO Saves Them About $691k Ad Spend Per Month

As much as paid media can fast-track your success, organic can underpin costs and be the foothold you need for sustainable sales. A more boring sibling to paid ads but it fricken delivers every time. WP gets about 779k in monthly SEO clicks on their targeted keywords, which they would’ve forked out of their paid ads budget. This is what makes up their SEO playbook:

• Content: WP has Deployed a simple but effective strategy leading with their blog covering topics like eyewear, eye health, how-to guides, fashion, and lifestyle. Articles average around 1,500 words with graphics, images and a sticky nav bar.

• Topical authority: By consistently adding content that helps users find eyewear and vision-related advice they’ve built an authority blog that customers can trust. This practice aligns them well with SEO best practices, helping rank for relevant search terms in the search engine.

• Performance SEO: Ranking highly for terms like “eyeglasses” and other high-traffic keywords helps them reach buyers and help make a buying decision.

• Targeting: All content produced is tactical. Their SEO campaigns focus on keyword research, content marketing and importantly link building.

• Backlinks: They have the basics covered that most brands miss. They address issues with bad backlinks, have optimised page titles, meta descriptions, and headings and looks like they have implemented a link-building strategy to continue improving their organic traffic and search engine rankings.

GOOGLE ADS
Paid Search

Reportedly WP spent about $492k on paid search to increase visibility, attract high-intent customers and defend their brand terms against competitors entering the marketplace.

They aggressively bid on all keywords that are relevant to both their brand and products, going after close to 19,254 paid keywords which is the same as their organic SEO campaigns. Paid drives roughly 200k clicks to their site.

Search ads: Most of their search ads go through an initial test period and a lot of copy changes, followed by extended runs of their winning ads (roughly 6 months). After testing, when they find something that works they aren’t afraid to stick with it until it stops producing results.

FACEBOOK AND INSTAGRAM ADS
Paid Social

They use Meta to tap into new audiences and to run more personalised and segmented remarketing campaigns.

Campaign: WP is interactive and uses a lot of polls, quizzes and challenges in their campaigns to keep things interesting for their audience - a two-fold approach that is focused on driving sales but also fostering a sense of community & increasing the brand’s engagement.

New audiences: To reach new audiences at the top of the funnel, they use carousel, video and image ads. These formats help them to cover three important angles: showcase multiple eyewear styles, highlight the brand’s story through video and cherry-pick images that attract customers through engaging hero images.

Remarketing: To make sure they have the highest odds of maximising their conversion they rely on dynamic product (DPA), abandoned carts and cross/upsell ads.

• Dynamic product ads retarget people who have checked out a specific product, showing exactly what they were browsing on their app or website.

• Abandoned cart remarketing ads target people who have added to cart but didn’t pull out their credit card to buy, they lead with incentives and offers to convince shoppers.

• Cross/Upsell shows products based on previous purchases designed to encourage another purchase, helping them increase their customer lifetime value.

INFLUENCER MARKETING
Storytelling Through Real Customers

Instead of relying on expensive influencers, WP focused on creating high-quality content with real customers, making the brand way more relatable to their ideal customers.

A two-fold approach that increases brand awareness and drives purchases at the same time. Rather than relying on vanity media metrics like CPMs and Impressions, they are freeing up cash flow by offering real people to take advantage of their ‘free home trial’ offer. This gets people to try on their glasses at home, and share it across socials, showing a personalised experience to their network.

Customer series: WP focuses on creating high-quality content that resonates with its audience by featuring real customers in their campaigns like the ‘Wearing Warby’ series. The goal is simple - focus on sharing average customer stories so a wider range of people see themselves represented by the brand.

CONTENT CREATION
User-Generated Content 50% More Likely to Drive Sales

WP asked all of its customers to make content promoting the brand, encouraging them to take pictures and videos of their different home try-on kit glasses as they tested them.

Why? Interestingly, they found that about 50% of customers who shared content were more likely to make a purchase. Their thinking was that people already have the desire to post stuff on social media so why not get them to share our stuff? And it worked!

The viral moment: People were encouraged to use the hashtag #WarbyHomeTryOn across Instagram and TikTok where the hashtag blew up with tens of thousands of customers around the world sharing their favourite frames! Talk about social proof 😅

WORD OF MOUTH
Getting Customers to Actually Refer Their Products

Using the human referral effect, Warby Parker has successfully driven multiple purchases from referred customers and grown their customer base.e

How? They encourage customers to refer family and friends by offering incentives like discounts, free products and loyalty points to customers who refer others. These incentives not only motivate customers to refer others but also give them a reason to make a purchase themselves.

Make it easy: No one is going to do anything if it feels time-consuming and complicated. WP provides clear, easy-to-action instructions supported by shareable referral links and codes.

WRAP UP
TL;DR

• Mobile apps with AR achieve a 7.7% conversion rate; personalized experiences through games build trust.

• Saves $691k monthly in ad spend through organic search with a blog covering eyewear, health, fashion, and lifestyle.

• Targets high-traffic keywords, prioritizes link-building, and uses aggressive bidding on 19,254 relevant keywords.

• Consistent testing and extended use of successful ad copies in Google Ads.

• Interactive social media campaigns and diverse ad formats, including dynamic product ads.

• Features real customer stories instead of costly influencers.

• Uses 'free home trial' offers to encourage user-generated content.

• Viral #WarbyHomeTryOn hashtag driven by user-generated content; customers sharing are 50% more likely to purchase.

• A referral program with incentives simplifies the process for customers, making it easier to recommend.

NEWS & RABBITHOLE READS

• In recent weeks, sponsored TikTok Shop listings began to pop up in Google Shopping – in particular with results for beauty and skincare products currently sold on TikTok Shop.

• TikTok creates a webinar series called TikTok Takeoff for SMBs, providing inspiration and guidance they need to help your business take off on TikTok

• Google launched a new approach to marketing mix modelling to help marketers make better use of marketing mix modelling (MMM) in order to more accurately measure the impact of their expanded marketing efforts across multiple channels.

• Brands are rethinking their out-of-home advertising strategies to focus less on awareness and more on conversion. Found this interesting article on how brands are evolving their media mix.

• Other newsletters that I’ve been finding useful:

  • Thumbstop: Deep dives into performance marketing ads

  • BookBub: Getting ebook deals for your next marketing read

  • Techpresso: Digital moves fast, and understanding tech is critical to stay ahead, a good newsletter to get the low down in a few minutes.

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