With so many eCommerce store options available, and more popping up daily, simply having a digital storefront is not enough to succeed. You need to have a means of differentiating yourself from the competition. One of the best ways to do that is with customer reviews.
Social Proof and customer testimonials are ever-important in the world of online shopping. Consumers are smarter than ever before with 81% of shoppers researching a product before they buy; and this number is only increasing as time progresses.
Average consumers are willing to spend 31% more for products that have great reviews.
If you’re not proactively providing answers to frequently asked questions (FAQ) or providing forums for users to give feedback and review your products, you’re falling behind in a major way.
Let’s talk about how to get you up to speed.
Types of Customer Reviews:
Starting with the basics, let’s break down the types of ways your customers can provide you with valuable feedback.
Video Reviews:
Video testimonials are not only a great way to share more information about your products, they’re engaging and consumable for your customers in a world where we’re constantly scrolling for the next big thing.
Review Aggregation Sites:
Websites that capture and share customer review data can be a great way to bring further awareness to your products or services outside of your main eCommerce storefront. Amazon, G2 Crowd, Choice and RecoRank are just a few examples.
Product Page Reviews:
Arguably the most important, having customer reviews on your website product pages is vital. Incorporating both long form written feedback and a point system like star ratings is a fast and consumable way to help increase your product-page conversion rates.
Testimonial Quotes:
Written testimonials are flexible content you can use across your marketing strategy. They can be valuable social content to spread the word about your products, or it can be used across your website to further nurture users to learn more.
Written Case Studies:
Think of case studies like a longer and more qualitative version of Testimonial quotes. Typically 500 words or longer, this breaks down specific use cases of your product or service and how it positively impacts your customer on a regular basis. These can be quite powerful in B2B sales and helping leads or shoppers understand why your product is the right fit for their specific needs.
Now that we understand the general types of feedback that are available to you, let’s talk about how we start collecting them and spreading the word.
How to collect customer feedback:
Identify “Brand Champions” in your Customer Base:
Brand champions are customers who are heavily invested in your brand and products, are quite frequent buyers and may go so far as to promote your brand on their own social media feeds.
Identifying the users who are already thrilled with your products is a great place to start in gathering candidates for user feedback.
You can typically find these users via your social media tags or comments, in your day-to-day Customer Support conversations or even during customer feedback sessions.
Nudge Shoppers to Provide Feedback:
Setting up automated email drip campaigns to users who purchase your products can help you continue to nurture conversations with your customers.
You can also nurture this behavior in your ongoing support conversations. Once your team starts to engage with a customer they know is happy with your product or service, share links to your product pages or review sites.
Not only is this feedback valuable to other customers, but it’s valuable to you and your team as well. Understanding whether a product is actually living up to your customer’s expectations is a huge key to building long term relationships with your customers.
Incentivize User Feedback:
Lastly, if asking your customers isn’t working the way you intend, there are plenty of tools out there to help you incentivize your customers to leave reviews in exchange for gift cards or swag.
Now let’s dive into the fun part, what we do with all this great customer feedback.
How to incorporate Customer Feedback in to your Marketing Strategy:
Product Pages:
When it comes to promoting your products with customer feedback, make sure that you’re designing your product pages in a way that prioritizes review content.
Amazon does a great job of this, as you can see directly below the product title is the graphical treatment of how many review stars this product has gained, along with the total amount of reviews provided by users.
Shoppers instantly know that if 52,000+ users provided feedback and the star rating is still well above 4 out of 5 stars, it’s a great initial indicator that this product is high quality and well received.
Adding small badges like “#1 Best Seller” adds another level of credibility, which will only help your conversion rates.
Website Content:
Adding customer testimonial quotes or video reviews to your home page is incredibly powerful. It’s a great way to get users interested in your products and increase the chances of them going further into your website to learn more and ultimately purchase.
YouTube Content & Ads:
Uploading your customer videos to YouTube is another way for users to learn and bring more brand awareness to your products. It gives another avenue for users to find you, and ultimately helps bring more referral traffic to your website.
It can also be really powerful for retargeting or remarketing ads; when users visit your website, you can remarket to them in other forums. YouTube is particularly useful with this type of strategy, both in organic content and advertising.
All in all, there is a ton of value in creating these types of conversations with your customers. Not only does it make them feel heard and appreciated by your team, it also provides value to you in helping increase your sales conversion rates and overall creating happier customers.
Need help creating your product descriptions, meta tags or responding to your customer reviews? We can help with that. Sign up for your 7-day trial of Copysmith now to start writing for free!