Customer reviews shape the way people think about you and your products, how much they trust you and whether you are the ecommerce store of choice.
Missing reviews, on the other hand, can quickly send potential buyers to other websites and blow your marketing budget.
So if you want to sell more, you need to generate reviews for your ecommerce website. We’ve rounded up five simple considerations to get you started and improve how well you can take advantage of these reviews.
1. Make it easy to review your products
Let’s start with a change in mindset. You want the reviews to be as simple as possible as they will help your business. Studies consistently show that reviews make your business appear more credible and encourage people to buy from you when they are positive and up to date. If your products have five reviews on the page, they are 270% more likely to be bought than a product with no reviews.
Customers leave reviews when you ask, but a complex process can stop them. Burdening demands and demands means that it is not worth your time.
The same goes for you if you give the customer an obligation to prove that they are an actual buyer. By adding it to their work (especially if you could do it for the client instead), they are less likely to complete a review process.
As a result, ecommerce businesses should look into policies and processes in their operations that will help you find real customers who can leave reviews.
This means that you make sure that you collect sales data and email addresses to let customers know about the products they have bought. Simplify rankings or reporting requirements instead of asking people to fill out surveys with multiple questions.
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The mindset of approaching reviews, especially if you want to increase their number and improve their quality, is: What are the barriers my customers have and how can I remove them so that leaving a review is easier and more enjoyable?
After you’ve thought about the benefits of reviews and want to make them easier, take a look at your current ecommerce website and email marketing services. Get a list of the platforms and tools that you are using to make the whole process easier. This is the list where you begin your search for “Review” and “Rating” plugins and other tools.
Starting with pre-built elements that have a positive track record of integrating easily will allow you to add the features faster. In some cases, you can find tools that will help introduce reviews in a way that naturally fits a client’s journey.
Those integrated with email marketing platforms provide templates where a customer can click on a star rating and then be directed to a landing page with options for more details while the star they clicked on is already highlighted.
Review tools based on your ecommerce platform make it easy to integrate all functions and fill your sales, products, and other pages with reviews. If you are a retail store or not sure where to start, most platforms like Shopify have their own product review apps. That’s not to say they are always the best option for everyone, but they are usually easy to get started with.
Check your other tools and partners while you think about integration. For example, for companies that outsource e-commerce fulfillment, make sure partners automatically add a shipping confirmation to order management tools. These steps will help you provide the best customer service to your customers.
3. Incentivize reviews
If 2020 has taught us something, there are many tasks that we promise ourselves “when we have time”, but still not tackle when there is nothing but time. That means the time to write a review for some of your target audiences may never have come, even those who love your products.
Give them a boost by encouraging reviews – all reviews, not just overly positive ones. Incentives are a quick way to get more people to comment and post. You want honest reviews so that readers can trust them. If it looks like you’ve paid for fake reviews, it can undermine the trust you’ve placed in your audience.
If you fear they will be flooded from the same date, split up your contact lists. Ask some to post on your website and encourage others to rate you on Google or Facebook. Consider running a User Generated Content (UGC) campaign on a social channel to get people to share their thoughts. Spread items to reach a wide audience and avoid getting tagged by an ecommerce platform.
Ask users to review, comment, share, and create. You will get a glimpse of what they love and hate, how they use your products, and where you might need something new. When an incentive is a discount, after spending a lot of time thinking positively about you, they’ll be ready to buy again right away. This is a perfect opportunity.
4. Present reviews from multiple platforms on multiple pages
Part of improving reviews is increasing the effectiveness of the reviews and comments you can generate. You want to get the most out of these articles and use them as selling points on your website and throughout the sales process. By stimulating reviews on multiple platforms, you will get a wide range of content to use.
Think about your buyer’s journey. You can click on an ad and go to either a product or a category page. These are great options for getting positive reviews of any product, and you want as many on these pages as you can to help the customers.
From there, they add a cart and go to a page to review the cart and provide details. Here you likely have shipping options.
Why not add snapshots of reviews talking about how quick and efficient your shipping was? Show them the people who are excited when products and things arrive early. If your UGC campaign resulted in unboxing content, include a video to encourage users to pay for faster shipping, or add more to their order to hit a threshold for fast, free shipping.
After checking out, putting your audience on a confirmation page, giving presentations about your business in general, and making your own post or video thanking customers for their kind words. Turn this page into a celebration about how happy you are making customers.
If you send an email confirmation with order or shipping details, you can reuse the ratings. Give reps the best way to reach out to your customer support and provide an overview of how grateful someone was when you solved their problem.
It’s about encouraging people to think positively about your products, processes and your company. You may even get some who want to write their own reviews because they want to see their names and words on your next email or confirmation page.
5. Respond to complaints publicly and privately
A key principle for improving customer ratings is to admit problems and then solve them. You can’t make everyone happy, but you can make up for mistakes. Have your team proactively monitor your website and other locations for negative reviews and complaints. If you find them, they need to be approached publicly and on private support channels.
If you address items publicly, other readers can tell that you are taking complaints seriously. It avoids problems of just seeing negative reviews without refutation, which leads visitors to believe those negative things. A public response should acknowledge the problem, generally state how you will solve it, then tell the reviewer how to proceed privately.
It is easy to want to formulate these answers in a formula. However, they become less believable when someone can see multiple complaints on different topics while all of the company’s answers are the same. You can allow answers to follow a pattern, but they should not contain the same text repeatedly.
If you are putting someone on a private channel to solve their problem, take it seriously. Whenever possible, work diligently to solve the problem. When you are able to address this appropriately, ask the customer to update their review with this information. You don’t want to pressure people to change the full review, but you can ask them to add it so people know you came up with a solution.
If the customer doesn’t respond, consider adding updates to your review instead. Keep these simple, such as:
We’re glad we solved that. If you have any further questions, please contact us. Thank-you!
Empathizing with the customer, solving the problem, and then circling back are among the best ways to turn negative problems into positive ones for future readers.
Always come back to the “why”.
There’s a main reason you landed on this article and thinking about your ecommerce reviews. You may need more to convince customers, you may want to bury some negative or outdated reviews, or you may be just getting started. Reviews can be helpful in a number of ways, and some of the tactics discussed are better at one improvement or another.
To get started with the right techniques and tools, you need to ask smart questions about why you want to upgrade and improve the ratings. Check that the solutions you are considering are relevant to the audience you are trying to reach. Ask if you are targeting the barriers or giving them something that will make writing a review a compelling task.
Focusing on the “why” behind reviews can make it easier for you to get the types of reviews that you want and that your customers will find useful. You will think about what is most meaningful and relevant throughout the process, simplify it and accelerate the profits made.