Integrating reviews across your company - How Instapage finds success

Monday, March 19, 2018
Case+Study+-+Instapage

Instapage is the leading post-click optimization platform for marketing teams and agencies, enabling them to create, optimize, and personalize landing pages at scale to maximize conversions.

In this case study, we spoke to Stefano Mazzalai, Head of Marketing Operations at Instapage, to learn how this San Francisco-based company uses Trustpilot and reviews to great success.

Find out how Instapage was able to achieve a 275% increase in CTR and an 18% increase in email marketing CTR using Trustpilot reviews.

Instapage key achievements

The Challenge

In 2015, Instapage was looking for a way to build its credibility and brand name. While Instapage is now a household name to advertisers and marketers, it didn’t always have the same reputation. To help build its brand, Instapage quickly identified reviews as a way to learn from their customers and get the word out to potential new customers.

Why Trustpilot?

“As a bootstrapped company, we were looking for ways to establish our credibility and increase our reputation. It was very easy to go with Trustpilot, knowing they were a leader in the space.” - Stefano Mazzalai, Head of Marketing Operations

Instapage saw Trustpilot as the clear leader in the review management and collection industry. Trustpilot’s popularity with consumers and their high volume of website traffic gave Instapage confidence that it could successfully build its reputation and showcase it via a trusted third-party.

Additionally, Trustpilot had a lot of features and benefits that Instapage would be able to leverage.

This included:

  • Seller Rating Extensions for their Google Ads that increase search ad CTR.

  • Tagging functionality allowing Instapage to automate review categorization based on personas and different product offerings.

  • Webhooks and Zapier integration, allowing them to easily integrate Trustpilot into their marketing automation processes.

  • Slack integration, allowing the company to learn about new reviews instantly.

  • Various plug-ins and widgets giving Instapage the ability to integrate reviews in their email marketing and derive valuable insights.

Given these features and benefits, Instapage knew that Trustpilot would not only give them a way to build their reputation, but also utilize reviews across the entire company.

Making reviews a core aspect of the business

After receiving a review, Instapage uses their marketing automation platform to better identify the customer and leverage existing data for improved insights. By taking into account additional customer data, they’re able to, for example, see how retention rates vary when looking at customers who left a review compared to those who haven’t.

From a marketing lifecycle perspective, reviews provide a quantitative view of what features are used and valued throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

However, because Trustpilot has so many integrations, Instapage is also able to use reviews in their marketing to increase engagement, reduce CAC, and increase their customer base. The following sections cover how Instapage leverages reviews as social proof across a number of channels.

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Difference in retention rates comparing customers who left a review and customers who didn’t leave a review.

Using reviews as valuable social proof

Instapage takes advantage of their reviews by using them across a wide number of channels. They’re very active socially and use the Facebook integration to display their best reviews on their Facebook page. By consistently checking their analytics, Instapage knows that visitors land on their Facebook pages through organic search so having reviews displayed prominently gives these visitors a close look into how previous customers feel about Instapage.

Instapage also shares their best reviews on LinkedIn and Twitter in order to build brand goodwill and reinforce positive social proof.

Giving followers a glimpse into other users’ interaction with Instapage can help build a positive brand image
Stefano Mazzalai, Head of Marketing Operations at Instapage

Their attention to social platforms gives Instapage a flexibility many companies don't have. For example, after a change in their pricing structure, a small minority shared their discontent and their comments were showing up on timelines first. To more accurately reflect the majority of their customers' sentiments, Instapage launched a 6-week campaign to promote their positive reviews and to elevate their brand sentiment.

By consistently collecting reviews, Instapage is able to learn from customer reviews in a way few companies can.

Improving Instapage with reviews

However, the marketing team isn’t the only department leveraging reviews to great success. The product team uses reviews, both positive and negative, to learn from and build out better features and products. It’s an iterative process that allows the product team to continuously improve. The Sales team also use reviews in their email signatures to improve their prospecting success.

Reviews are so integral to Instapage that they are part of and contribute to a number of KPIs across various teams including operations, paid acquisition, lead generation (via content/SEO & social), sales, and CSM.

Instapage relies on Trustpilot reviews to:

  • Increase subscriber rates

  • Increase LTV (lifetime value) of a customer

  • Increase SEO rankings and search CTR for key pages

  • Increase brand sentiment across social channels

  • Increase click-through rates, retention, and reactivation via email marketing

  • Decrease CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)

  • Hit review targets defined by persona

  • Hit monthly reactivation goals

By taking advantage of Trustpilot’s key features, such as its analytics, tagging, Trustscore trends, monthly recap emails, and its various integrations, Instapage is able to implement reviews across their entire company to great success.

Now, let’s get into the gritty details. How reviews are making a measurable impact.

The results - how reviews are moving the needle

Instapage uses reviews on a number of their web pages and marketing emails, including their landing pages, geo-targeted by location, and on the footer of their guides that drive the most organic traffic to ensure that their most valuable pages highlight their reputation.

An A/B test showed that their customer acquisition increased by 2% when testing a page with reviews and without reviews, showing the power of social proof as part of the customer journey.

However, their use of the MicroCombo TrustBox on the footer of their guide pages, led to even more impressive results.

Results

  • In one month since the TrustBox went live, organic CTR for the keyword ‘ppc landing page templates’ increased from 8.5% to 31.9%, a 275% increase.

  • After 3 months, the average CTR has risen from 5.4% to 17.1%, a 216% increase.

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In their email marketing and lead nurturing campaigns, Instapage has experienced an 18% increase in clicks per unique opens for their onboarding emails which have led to an 8% increase in offer uptakes. This success can partly be attributed to the fact that they have been leveraging tagging to differentiate reviews by personas, allowing them to target personas with specified reviews.

See the example below for a comparison between the new email vs the old email.

Leveraging Trustpilot in the future

“Most of our upper management and even our CEO are actively involved in seeing our reviews, so they are at the very core of our business”

Instapage provides a great example of how reviews can be used, holistically, in a company to improve all areas of a business. Even their upper management and CEO are actively involved and frequent Slack in order to see the most recent reviews, posting the best ones on its ‘General’ or ‘Winning’ channels. By making reviews a core aspect of the business, Instapage is able to see major success.

The post-click optimization world is a relatively new marketing segment, and as the recognized market leader, Instapage needs to maintain that position and believes that building trust with their customers is how they can stay ahead of their competitors. By using Trustpilot, they’re able to collect and leverage social proof across multiple channels at scale and are able to tailor their messaging, marketing, and even their products to their most important customers.

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