Holiday browsing is upon us and in some ways, purchasing is already picking up. Consumers are starting to compare prices and shipping costs, but these types of comparisons do not begin until consumers first choose which product to purchase. When trying to find that item, customers often rely on reviews.
Product reviews have become one of the key ingredients to converting a “maybe” into a sale. A recent Marketing Sherpa case study reported that sites with customer reviews saw a 17% conversion lift from websites without reviews. Small businesses to large retailers, such as Walmart understand the importance of providing product reviews as a way to increase conversions.
Because you’re a savvy eCommerce merchant, I’m going to presume you already have a version of product reviews on your store. Now, what? How are you going to use product reviews to drive traffic to your site and help you convert sales? If your site has pages of empty reviews, I doubt that is helping much. Furthermore, if your site has nothing but praise, you may not be helping yourself as much as you think. Consider that product reviews are a tactic to increase customer confidence, which ultimately leads to brand loyalty and sales. I’m going to point out some strategies in which you can use product reviews this year to increase sales.
First, let’s address all of those empty review pages.
One of the first concerns I hear when a merchant is considering adding product reviews to their website is, “Won’t empty reviews make me look bad?” This is a valid concern; but, there there are very easy and proactive ways to get your product reviews moving. One savvy Solid Cactus client, Crescent Harbor (www.crescentharbor.com) installed Solid Cactus’ Star Product Reviews in July of 2009. In order to generate reviews more quickly, they sent an e-mail promotion to their customer list inviting customers to come review products they’ve purchased in the past. And, as a strong call to action, they entered each customer that posted a review into a product giveaway. As you can imagine, Crescent Harbor was flooded with reviews within days. This was a very creative approach to providing better customer service, which in turn led to increasing customer loyalty and building customer confidence. Not to mention, the return visits to the site likely led to additional sales, too.
What if your store is new and you don’t yet have a large customer list? How do you get off to the right start?
In this example, your attempts to fill your reviews may be a bit slower than the previous example but don’t count yourself out. You could offer the same promotion to your customers as you make sales. With a product such as Star Product Reviews, after the purchase an e-mail is sent to your customer requesting they provide a review of the product they’ve recently purchased. It’s important to note that you have control over the amount of days that pass before this e-mail is sent. Of course, some products may take longer than others to be tested by the customer. You may not want to send a request for reviews on a first aid kit or grill in five or 10 days because it may not have been used yet; maybe you set it for 30 days. However, an electronics device will probably see a more immediate use, so you may want to consider sending the review request within 10 days of the purchase.
One of the last components of how customer reviews can drive traffic is to have SEO-friendly reviews. Not all product review solutions are SEO-friendly, so let me take a moment to explain a bit about Star Product Reviews and how it easily supports the strategy I’m presenting.
With Star Product Reviews, three components exist for improving your SEO. First, your product’s item page will be indexed organically, as always, based on your keyword strategy. However, with Star Product Reviews, your review can also show up in organic rankings. For example, for Crescent Harbor, I did a search for Norwell Legacy Wall Sconce. In one of the listings that came up in my search, I found the product page (example 1) that would show up in a typical search. Additionally, I found another listing of the product from the URL “reviews.crescentharbor.com” (example 2). So, two different opportunities of organic searches for the same product were created simply because of Star Product Reviews. A third way to be considered is that the header of your reviews can be indexed as well; so, if you have “Product Reviews for Norwall Legacy Wall Sconce”, listed on your item page, you’ve just gained a third way for your website to be ranked organically.
Next, let’s talk about managing your reviews. You may be tempted to only publish positive product reviews, but I strongly urge you against that. Granted, I don’t believe you should have extremely negative posts; however, if you want to earn your customers’ trust, remember that everyone has a bad experience once in a while. Don’t try to fool shoppers into believing all of your products are exactly what customers wanted. It’s possible that a particular purchase wasn’t a good fit and you’ll earn more trust by admitting that.
Having some negative reviews can still boost the sale. Let’s face it; a lot of negative reviews tend not to relate to the product’s performance. For example, I’ve seen statements like “the blue was darker than I thought it would be” and in turn, has a lower rated review. I’m sure you’ve seen these sort of posts also. Sometimes they come across as so nitpicking that it actually may persuade the customer to trust the product more. As a customer, if I’m considering purchasing a vacuum cleaner and the worst thing I see someone complaining about in reviews is they didn’t like the shade of blue, I’d still consider that particular brand; the color of the vacuum cleaner isn’t as important to me as the quality. You can also use a bad review as a form of damage control. If someone is posting bad reviews based on one aspect of a product, address those concerns. For example, in the case of “bad shade of blue”, you could improve your product details by being more descriptive about the color or compare it with other colors and, you may also want to post a better product photo that captures the color better. Negative products reviews could also help you determine which products to offer or discontinue.
As far as how you can manage the actual posting process, I’ll again use Star Product Reviews as my example. In the administrative panel of Star Product Reviews you have the ability to review, edit, post, and delete reviews. If you want to edit for a glaring typo or remove a particularly sensitive subject in an otherwise positive review, you can. If you desire to have review be more hands-off, you can choose to have reviews post automatically. With this option, Star Product Reviews will protect your site from abuse with a built-in profanity filter, which allows you to target specific words you don’t want to appear.
Don’t overestimate the sales strength that is created when your customers can compare products via your other customers’ experiences. More importantly, don’t lose a sale by letting your customers go somewhere else to find a review.
By Gregory Davis
gregory.davis@ebizinsider.com
