How Tarte Cosmetics More Than Doubled Their Conversion Rate with Customer Stories and Reviews

The Challenge

When it was founded in 2000, Tarte Cosmetics quickly established a new paradigm for beauty companies with a product line that combined glamourous makeup & good-for-you ingredients such as Amazonian clay and plant extracts. Beauty shoppers embraced Tarte’s eco-friendly and cruelty-free approach, and those shoppers quickly became loyal to the brand—and spread the word. Today, the company ships its cosmetics and skincare goods to more than 190 countries.

Tarte knew that an excellent Customer-Generated Content (CGC) strategy, like Ratings & Reviews, would be an anchor of its customer-centric selling strategy. The company recognized that quality reviews were a solid driver of conversions, in no small part because they gave shoppers solid product information from a highly trusted source—other shoppers.

Tarte had been using a homegrown Customer-Generated Content tool that delivered a high level of customer engagement, but the company felt like its approach wasn’t as fruitful as it could be.

Tarte cast a wide net when searching for new vendors, but quickly settled on TurnTo for Ratings & Reviews and Pixlee for user-generated content curation after assessing the competition. 

Visual Reviews

The implementation of Pixlee and TurnTo has proven to be a winning combo for Tarte. For example, Tarte’s customers are able to hover over user-generated visual content collected by Pixlee and see a customer review gathered by TurnTo.

Tarte has specific products that benefit from the blending of shopper-supplied visual content with text reviews. That includes products that have a powerful before-and-after effect, or that really need to be seen on a model for their effects to be understood.

“The ease of use offered by TurnTo and Pixlee to—not just to our clients, but to our marketing team as well—was a big differentiator in terms of what we could do and how fast we could do it. They work very well together in terms of connecting reviews with the user-generated content collected by Pixlee. Now we’re making that relationship even more powerful by surfacing reviews collected by TurnTo across the Pixlee ecosystem as well.”

Checkout Comments

For Tarte, perhaps no other strategy embodies the benefits of their TurnTo/Pixlee integration than Tarte Talk, a white-labeled TurnTo product called Checkout Comments that asks customers a simple question right after they make a purchase: Why did you buy this item?

“The customer can basically write a review before they’ve received the product. They might say, my mother told me about this lipstick and I had to try it. Or, I’m buying this as a gift for my best friend. All of those comments are aggregated into one single-site experience.” 

Fitzgerald and her team have been drawing on the deep insights offered by TarteTalk to power their Pixlee strategy.

“With Tarte Talk, we can discover which products are on the rise that we might want to start soliciting user-generated content for. Or we can use the Checkout Comments alongside user-generated content we’ve garnered from Pixlee to create social proof marketing that we push out in other channels.” 

The Bottom Line

Tarte cosmetics had been using a homegrown method to collect its Customer-Generated Content but knew that better software solutions would aid its guided selling approach.

With TurnTo and Pixlee, the brand was able to collect more Customer-Generated Content to simplify the customer journey and aid its guided selling approach. It also allowed Tarte to pack a one-two punch by combing visual user-generated content with text reviews and to generate product and merchandising insights from TurnTo’s reporting tools.

That all helped Tarte improve its guided selling strategy, increase engagement with its site, and—at the end of the day—drive conversions.