About one and half decades ago Specs were not considered to be fashionable at all. In 2010, Peyush Bansal and co-founders Amit Chowdhry, and Sumeet Kapahi introduced a revolutionary change into the Eyewear industry. From Digital marketing to Campaigning to Physical stores to door-to-door service, the trio had worked diligently to make Lenskart a premium eyewear brand. For their effort, the current market size has crossed 3000cr in FY-23. Now, the company has more than 2000 physical stores in 1100
plus cities in India and stores in Singapore, UAE, and the US.
An Intro To The Man Behind The Massive Success Of Lenskart:
Peyush Bansal, a valedictorian of Don Bosco School, NewDelhi, and IIM Bangalore, left his high-paying job at Microsoft in the USA in 2007 and returned to India to start his entrepreneurial journey. Lenskart is not his first company. He had gone through a lot of hardships to reach this enormous success. The first company he started was Searchmycampus.com, an all-in-one online solution portal for college students. Then the 2nd company was Flyrr.com, mainly focused on the US market. The company was selling sunglasses, spectacles, and contact lenses, but transport was a big issue that led to the company’s closure. Then, Peyush, Sumeet, and Amit, the trio alumni from IIM Bangalore started “Valyoo technology” under which they started selling branded watches, bags, jewelry, and lenses under the name of WatchKart.com, BagsKart.com, and Jewelskart.com, and Lenskart.com. Due to operational costs, all other Karts are closed except Lenskart.
Marketing Strategy:
Peyush Bansal and the team worked on the 4As- “Affordability, Availability, Appearance, and Advertisement”. These are the 4 pillars of their massive success. In this highly competitive industry, these pillars help them reach out to the most user engagement and enable the company as most trusted eyewear brand in India. Let’s delve into these 4 cornerstones of Lenskart Profoundly.
1. Affordability:
In developing countries like India, people are very much concerned about good quality but at a low cost. Generally, local brand specs are costly. Keeping this fact in mind, Lenskart has come up with different strategies to make the product affordable for its customers.
Always promoting Value for money, the company has followed several lucrative approaches that include discount policies, first purchase offers, Bu1 and Get 1 offers, Kid’s protection specs, Cashback offers, Festive offers, get your 1st frame-free, lenses and other eyewear products starting from 499 Rs. and many more.
Image Source: oneindia
The company has created the above offers considering the needs of every age group people’s demands across India. For instance, customers aged 18 -24( millennials) are popularly called fashionistas, always searching for multiple trendy frame designs and really don’t care about the price, they may choose high-range specs for their good appearances.
Similarly, 25-40 aged customers are always conscious about prices and mostly work in corporate sectors preferring comfort over styles, and users aged 50 plus prefer good lenses aside from designed frames. Everyone can get eyewear as per their required value, styles, and preferences.
2. Availability:
For a product to be usable in the market, it is important to make it available to customers. Lenskart has kept all sources ready to be available for its products. From millennials who love to shop online to GenZ who love offline shopping, the company has created several platforms like a website, app, and physical store locators across many parts of India.
This is the 1st company that initiated a “free home trial” on its website Lenskart.com. By logging in to its website, one can book an appointment for a free home trial, and then a Lenskart employee will come to your house with multiple frames and lenses. You can take an eye test and choose suitable frame designs before final purchase.
PC: Lenskart blog
For its online purchases, it has created an advanced logistics department team. The team helps both customers as well as the company profitable by providing quick delivery services, customer feedback tools, supplier teams, return policies, customer engagement services, refund policies, etc.
In its physical stores also several designs are made available to its customers. Apart from this, the company has implied its work ethic to its employees to always behave kindly with customers. This work ethic helps in recurrent purchasing and returning customer engagement, and helps in profitability.
3. Appearance:
Whatever we try in ourselves, one thing that comes for sure is how it will look on us? From clothing to jewelry to accessories to eyewear, appearance matters a lot. Lenskart worked not only on good-quality lenses but also on customers’ style preferences.
In the eyewear industry, people generally first try it physically on themselves and then purchase it. For this issue, the company has opened several stores across the state. But what about the customers who have no time to go out shopping and want to buy the specs?
Well, Lenskart has solved this problem by implementing AR in its app. This Augmented Reality helps the customers to virtually try the frames and glasses in 3D. Due to this application, the company has attracted lots of user engagement, which helps in boosting the revenue.
Customers can try more than 1,000 varieties of frames, sunglasses, contact lenses, and power lenses considering the different age groups of people’s choices. Also, additionally, it has facilitated kids’ eyeglasses, computer glasses, and many branded eyewear products.
4. Advertisement:
Here comes the lead that brings most of its success and provides brand awareness to people through both offline and online platforms. For offline advertisement, it uses poster advertising methods. Out of various advertisement methods, the company follows Digital Marketing strategies to boost its economy thus thriving in the market industry. Let’s discuss these advertisement strategies below:
Video Campaigning:
Currently, Lenskart has 237k subscribers on YouTube. Through its channel, the company advertises all upcoming as well as new products available on its website through small video campaigning. To collect more views on its videos, the company often hires celebrities. These short videos are also broadcast on Facebook, Instagram, and Televisions to get more user attention.
Some of the most viewed campaigns are “Get 100% accurate lense-38mn views, ” Katrina Says# IAMHOOKED-25mn views”, “KARAN vs PEYUSH-Thali Sajake Rakhna-19mn views”, #Halka Rakh Yaar, ft. Bhuban Bam-19mn views.”, etc.
Social Media Marketing:
Lenskart is active on almost every social media platform such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Linked In, WhatsApp, etc. The company has invested most of its time advertising its products on several platforms. This attracted millions of customers to the brand and thus boosted brand awareness.
Through these platforms, the company does influencer marketing by collaborating with celebrities, posting digital posters on its channel, and using current features like Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, etc.
SEO Marketing:
Lenskart optimizes effective SEO strategy for a larger organic valuable audience engagement to its website. It has implied features like mobile-friendly approaches, a user-friendly interface, easy navigation, and faster loading features for larger customer drives.
It uses Google search engine-friendly page titles and descriptions so that CPC will increase automatically. For its technical SEO, it uses schema code that helps in understanding its website better in search engines. It uses keywords like contact lenses, sunglasses, and eyeglasses for more customer engagement.
Google ADs Strategy:
Lenskart follows different Google ad strategies to attract users. It pays Google for paid traffic keyword searches like eyeglasses, sunglasses, and contact lenses. Also, it uses video ads, display ads, and universal app download ads to captivate users.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, Lenskart’s success can be attributed to its innovative marketing strategy, which effectively leverages digital platforms, personalized experiences, and disruptive business models. By prioritizing customer convenience, offering a wide range of products, and investing in technological advancements like virtual try-ons, Lenskart has transformed the eyewear industry. Its relentless focus on customer satisfaction, coupled with a data-driven marketing approach, has propelled Lenskart to become a market leader, setting new standards for online retail and redefining the eyewear shopping experience.