Ecommerce & Online Shops – Getting Reviews

Getting Reviews And Utilising Them

Business Builder and Growth Stimulus

Best practices for reviews

Potential customers consider a lot of factors before making a purchase, from the visual appeal of a product to its cost to your store’s shipping speed and fees. And if they’ve never purchased from you before, they probably also read reviews — both about you and the item they’re considering.

Roughly 88% of shoppers make their purchasing decision based, in part, on reviews:

Both positive and negative reviews can help someone make a decision, with positive feedback making a slightly bigger dent (90% vs 86%).

What does this mean for you?

Reviews can make a serious impact on your sales.

The more you have, the better a shopper can evaluate a product. And better evaluations mean more purchases and less returns.

Collecting feedback is crucial for your shop.

There are some optimal ways to do it. And once you have the reviews, there are some great ways to use them, some of which go well beyond the product page.

Why add these ratings in, anyway?

• They can tell shoppers what the overall opinion of a product is before they even view the page.
• They allow shoppers to see what a reviewer’s opinion is at a glance — especially helpful if there are a lot of individual reviews.
• Stores with ratings are preferred over those without

Give some serious thought to adding stars, numbers, percentages, or some other way for shoppers to visualize ratings — they can have a big impact.

Another idea is to allow customers to do more than simply add a rating or written review. We all learn differently — you’ve heard the phrase “seeing is believing?” — and some potential customers may trust a photo more than text.

You may wish to add this extra functionality to your shop in the future.

It would look like this or similar.

Highlight your best or most recent reviews

Every now and then you might get a glowing review of one of your products or the service you provided and that you want to emphasis.

It’s great feedback, your customer is delighted, and this is a great opportunity to promote the feedback.

Is it worth it? BrightLocal back in 2014 did a short report. They found that 72% of consumers will take action after reading just one positive review, whether that means visiting your on line shop, viewing your products, or contacting you.

So if you get an incredible review, the idea is to emphasise it.  

This can be done in a few different ways:

• By adding it to your homepage —in a widgeted footer area, or in the form of a graphic.
• Adding it to another widgeted area like a sidebar, or as a graphic, so it shows up as shoppers browse the site.
• Quote it on social media — there’s no reason you can’t tweet about it or make it the subject of a Facebook post! A good idea is to link the product that was so well-reviewed.
• Creating a graphic of some kind with the customer’s quote included — this might be shared on social media, in a video, in an infographic or pdf document.

Ask your customers to leave reviews… automatically

So how do you get reviews in the first place?

You’re a lot less likely to hear from happy customers.

Unhappy customers have good reason to contact you — they want you to make things right.

But the happy ones will take the product they’ve received, use it, and go on living their lives.

Sometimes they have every intention to review you, but they don’t.

They don’t mean to forget, they just do. 

Unless something really blows their minds, they probably put “review this thing” low down on their mental list of priorities.

Good automatic follow up

Following up can help you remind customers to leave a review if they’ve forgotten, and we can do it automatically.

We go about setting up triggers based on the activity of your customers. We can email customers and ask them to leave a review (or take another action, if preferred).

Send an email asking customers to review their products after they’ve had them for a period of time you specify.

You decide not only how many emails you want to send, but when you want to send them.

So if you want to ask customers to review their new purchase once after a 30 day period, you can do that.

Or if you want to email them two days later, then after a week you can do just that.

We set up this functionality and then it runs on autopilot

If you can remind customers to leave a review (and maybe emphasize how much their opinion means to you, or even offer a coupon in exchange for their valuable feedback, they will be more likely to respond and then the ratings come rolling in from those happy customers who would otherwise have forgotten to reply.

Earn more trust — and make more sales

Considering how powerful those reviews can be, it’s worth putting the time in to use them well.

Earning trust is often the hard part and so a multi-pronged approach can be worth the setup of the various trust building factors.

Stephen

W4WS