Warby Parker's Brian Magida on Optimizing for Conversions

Warby Parker's Brian Magida on Optimizing Your Site for Conversions

Whether you’re focused on optimizing landing pages or site load times, growth marketers everywhere are obsessed with leveling up their storefronts for stronger conversions. 

The demand for expert-level CRO insights is immense. That’s why the Nostra team sat down with Brian Magida: a prolific angel investor and growth advisor, once the VP of Performance Marketing at Warby Parker. 

In Part 1 of this two-part series, Brian breaks down how Warby optimized their eCommerce site for conversions as the brand scaled and diversified their product offerings. 

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Let's dive in. 

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“Everything you do as a brand should be rooted in what you’re trying to solve for the customer as well as what you’re trying to solve for your business. Sometimes those two can oppose each other, so you just have to find the right balance.” 

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Brian’s 5-Step Playbook for Conversion Rate Optimization

Warby Parker hired Brian as their fourth employee in 2010. Over the following 13 years, he built out their performance marketing and growth team from scratch, including: 

• Managing digital paid media channels such as Meta, Google, Affiliates, and many other long tail digital platforms
• Managing offline marketing channels like Linear & Streaming TV, podcasts, influencer, and direct mail 
• Directing one-to-one marketing, which included email, SMS, and mobile push notifications
• Marketing data and analytics

In addition, Warby’s tech team built and managed their own CMS, which required them to consult leaders like Brian when new features or content needed to be developed. 

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Here are the five steps Brian and his teams took to optimize their eCom site for conversions: 

Step 1: Assess the current and near-term status of the company

What are the goals and objectives for the entire year? How would the update fall within this roadmap? It's important to consider whether a new project will require additional, unplanned resources. 

Step 2: Evaluate consumer insights and UI/UX feedback

This was critical for the Warby team to locate any deficiencies across their website. 

Step 3: Appraise the tools already at your disposal

Does Warby already have what they need to address newly noticed deficiencies, such as existing media assets for updating copy or images? If not, the team needs to work cross-functionally to address these challenges. 

Step 4: Collaborate with every team on the site update

From visuals to micro-copy, every team had to ensure their respective components were in place, even if they only implemented minor changes. 

Step 5: Run rigorous testing

The Warby team had to implement the correct analytics infrastructure for whatever questions they were asking. 

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Landing Pages Are the New Homepages. Here Are Two Ways to Optimize Them for Conversions

When a shopper discovers your brand through an ad and clicks over to your website for the first time, there’s a strong chance they’ll be sent to a landing page. So, make sure to optimize your landing pages for conversion through continuous, rigorous testing over time. 

For instance, when selecting the ideal content and hero imagery for a landing page, you have your entire product range to choose from. In Warby’s case, they found highlighting their free Home Try-On program tested exceptionally well — time and time again. 

When testing your landing pages, Brian recommends two tactics: 

Tip #1: Test your UGC vs. your high-production-value content

With hundreds of eyeglass and sunglass frames and colors, the Warby team has countless potential SKUs to spotlight. Another variable to test is whether to feature those frames through user-generated content or more polished, high-production-value photos. 

UGC comes with built-in social proof but is far less editorial. Meanwhile, high-production-value content beautifully displays the glasses but can seem overproduced. It’s entirely possible that UGC style content may perform better when users are arriving from paid social channels such as Meta or TikTok whereas high-production-value content may perform better from sources such as Google non-brand search. 

Tip #2: Even as you diversify your products, it’s okay to stick to basics

Even as Warby expanded to services like contact lenses and eye exams, they found people still wanted to learn about their free Home Try-On program on landing pages. To this day, it remains the ideal jumping-off point for all other Warby offerings. 

"The core value prop for your website is creating the easiest, most painless way for customers to get started. So, you need to keep testing to see what resonates best on your landing page." 

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No matter what your brand’s selling, site speed is always critical for growth and your bottom line. Book a demo with us today to see how Nostra can elevate your website’s performance, revenue, traffic, and conversions!