All online sellers and businesses want to have good reviews about their products, and why not? Product Reviews act as the catalyst for attracting new buyers, drive greater sales and build your brand reputation. They are the powerful marketing elements used by businesses on every platform.
In this blog, we’ll talk about best practices and strategies to get product reviews, and the effective ways to get the most out of them. Let’s start!
Create Multiple Places Where You Can Be Reviewed
Ensure your prospects get the correct information about your products or business, no matter where they’re conducting research for making a purchase. To get more reviews from your customers from every end of the digital space, it is the best practice to create profiles on every platform for your customers to leave reviews.
There are multiple third party review sites that are commonly used by customers along with marketplaces review pages.
Yelp
According to the research conducted by BrightLocal, Yelp and Facebook are found to be the most trusted platforms for customer reviews in the US. As a seller with set goals, make sure your business is registered in these platforms with all the correct details. If you’re new to these platforms, you can learn how to get registered using Yelp for business owners.
Yelp covers all the necessary features and provides a user-friendly interface to customers for leaving reviews. Make sure to monitor all the activities, communications from your account. Yelp’s algorithm shows responsive business owners with their recorded response rate and response time. Your consistent presence, adequate responses to the reviews will not only increase the number of reviews on your platform but convert the prospects in large numbers as well.
Create a business Facebook page and monitor it for all the responses you receive through messages and comments. With millions of users present on this platform, it is a massive opportunity to receive reviews in great numbers. You’ll get a closer insight about how your products and services are being perceived across the masses.
In addition, being present on Facebook will enable your customers to find your label without leaving their social network. Facebook like Yelp also rewards responsiveness, so assigning somebody to monitor the incoming messages and user generated content will be highly beneficial for the new customer acquisition and a good reputation over the platform.
Of course your presence on the world’s biggest search engine is a must. It is the all-time high and usable digital space for your customers and prospects to find your business online. To appear in the search results, you should register yourself on Google My Business. This will enable users to find all the information about you on Google, or while they’re looking for directions in Google Maps. It allows your customers to leave reviews about your company and product, and provides a closer insight on how your products are perceived by targeted customers. It should be taken note that all submitted reviews appear in the search results for your business.
Better Business Bureau
BBB is a highly trusted source for your customer reviews. For your businesses in the US, Canada and Mexico you can get registered with it. By registering you can receive more credible reviews and communicate to your customers regarding any surfacing issues about your products. The effective communication will greatly help you in new customer acquisition and cultivating a trusted buyer-seller relationship with your old customers.
Google Seller Ratings
It is a Google Ads Extension that enables users to drop ratings between one and five stars, and they’re displayed on the search ads. It is an automated extension and shows results from the trusted sources such as Google Maps, Trustpilot etc.) and they can be clearly seen within the body of the ad.
Apart from the star count, the rating also includes the unique reviews and separate qualifiers, such as average delivery time, if the item is in stock or not. In addition to facilitating the high-performing ad campaigns, they play a major role in letting your buyers know about the market value and the attached reputation of your products and services.
Use Post-Purchase Email Campaigns
The easiest way to get more reviews for your products? Just ask your customers to submit them. It is obvious that they’re the most qualified people to drop a review about your brand.
Of course not to reach out to every single customer one-by one, but to set up third party service providers such as (Marketo, Mailchimp etc.) and powerful tools to do the perfect, time-saving job for you. After an ample amount of time has passed since your customers received their orders, you can pop in their inbox through enticing emails asking for the required feedback. Your customers are most likely to drop some positive feedback if they’ve a good experience. Post-purchase emails provide great results and let you know about the true user experience your product is delivering.
Offer Incentives To Write reviews
Asking your customers is not bringing any reviews? No worries, offer appealing incentives and you’ll start receiving the reviews about your products.
Offering discounts, gifts or coupon codes in exchange of reviews will motivate your customers to revisit the feedback page. However, you should remain careful about what you’re offering, as it is compliant to the platform’s policies or not. It should be noted here that Amazon is strict with their submission guidelines as compared to other platforms. The two most effective ways to incentivize product reviews are:
Free Shipping Or Discounted Shipping
By offering free or discounted shipping, you manage to get more product reviews and more buyers as well.
Providing Discounts On The Next Purchase
It goes without saying that buyers love discounts. They don’t want to miss the product discount for their next purchase and would easily exchange a review for it.
Review Sweepstakes
Apart from drawing attention towards your products, sweepstakes bring you the increased number of reviews. Many brands reported that they recorded there’s a visible hike in the review completion rate during sweepstakes season.
Optimize Review Forms For Mobile
It goes without saying that mobile optimization is utterly important for driving greater sales, attracting online buyers and of course to get more product reviews. You must check for the records describing how many emails are opened on the mobile devices and purchases that are made through it. You must team up with the programmers to launch a fast, functional and user friendly post purchase email process to get you the better reviews.
It is a common observation that the brands who implemented mobile friendly review forms saw a drastic increase in the submissions as compared to their other practices. Leveraging your mobile traffic and converting your mobile viewers into active reviewers, you can generate more product reviews, just the way you want to.
Try Product Sampling Program
It can be hard to generate a product review if you don’t have a large number of customers yet. New product launches take time to create buzz, win the trust of your customers and eventually land you a good number of reviews.
In such a case, you go for a product sampling program, as it is the go to method to bring you the product reviews. You can reach out to the community of micro-influencers for receiving authentic feedback from their end.
Post All Reviews On Your Socials
Your customers want to feel appreciated and recognized for their review submissions. An easy way to show them that they are heard and appreciated by you is to post their reviews on all your socials. You can repost their positive experiences, interesting feedback about a specific product only, or can directly share their quote with complete credits. By doing something as simple as retweeting a good customer experience, you can gain more reviews and draw more attention towards your products.
Go For Different Forms Of Product Reviews
All those visuals – images and videos – are the major elements that appeal to your customers. They make strong customer reviews and highlight your products in the best way. Moreover, your site visitors are most likely to buy a product with reviews having photos and videos, as such videos are acknowledged as more credible and strong. Allowing your customers to submit the text, video and images will increase the generation of product reviews and bring you more leads and conversions.
Make It easier For Your Customers To Leave a Review
If submitting a review is a slow and complicated process, there are chances that your customers will leave it in the middle. It’s your core job to make it fast and easy for your customers, especially when you’re asking to submit a review through an email. Here’s what you can do:
- Mention multiple options in your email so your customers can choose the platform they’re most comfortable on.
- Attach a link directly to a page where you want to receive reviews. This will minimize the number of clicks and steps they must take to complete the submission.
- Mention the prompt so they don’t feel lost from where to start, something like, “please share a review about our product” or “leave a review about your experience with the most recent store visit”.
- Mention how long it will take. Many customers think they don’t have the time to drop a review. Mentioning that it will take two minutes can change their mindset and convince them to write some words about the recent purchase. You can attach it in a side note and as a postscript to your review request.
Remember Choose The Right Timing!
Asking for feedback at the wrong moment can result in a bad review. Many of your customers and prospects will read it and there’s a chance that they might change their mind to make a purchase from you. To avoid such a situation, ask your customers at the right moment and leverage the amazing results. Ask them for a review:
- after they have a good user experience with your product or service
- if they repurchase or reorder
- if they keep revisiting your estore
- if they refer other to your products
- after they tag you in any post on their socials
- if you receive a positive feedback or compliment from them, you’ve just reached a point of customer happiness. At such moments, they’ll be inclined to give you a good review as a way of appreciation.
Implementing all these strategies will help you generate more product reviews, and drive greater sales and traffic. Good luck!
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