“What can we do to convert more of our site’s visitors into buyers?” This is one of the most common questions our clients ask us. We have found that one of the best and most cost effective methods to convert your current visitors into buyers is to accept and display customer product reviews.
The most popular online shopping networks, Epinions.com(SM), BizRate.com®, and Shopping.com™, have been built from the core concept of allowing consumers to write reviews on products. More and more consumers are using the web to research products before making their purchase, and customer product reviews now play a major role in the sales process.
Marketing Experiments Journal tested product conversion with and without product ratings by customers. Conversion nearly doubled, going from 0.44% to 1.04% after the same product displayed its five-star rating.
There are a number of ways that integrating consumer reviews into your site can substantially increase your conversion rates. These include answering common questions to help skeptical or ‘on-the-fence’ visitors close a purchase decision, introducing additional uses for a product and helping to up sell additional products.
Not only do consumer product reviews have a long history of increasing sales, they can also make your site stand out from your competitors. If your site provides the consumer with the answers they need, this builds their confidence in your product and increases your credibility. If you combine this with a competitive price, the chance of the customer making the purchase from you has increased substantially.
Now that we have covered some of the positive effects of customer product reviews, let’s touch on a potential darker side of the product review feature. Some smaller merchants who have a small client base might feel tempted to fabricate reviews. However this practice will ultimately hurt a merchant as most consumers can tell if a review is authentic. Your customers are trusting that your reviews are real, so be honest.
When assisting some clients with launching a customer product review program we have been asked the question “What should I do with negative reviews” We then remind the merchant that some negative reviews can actually help them and can bring validity to the program. A negative review can be beneficial to the merchant in identifying what product(s) consumers are not happy with, reducing returned orders by setting buyer expectations and answering their common questions. They can help consumers by possibly directing them to the correct product that meets all their needs, alerting them of additional items that may need to be purchased, or providing the ‘truth’ on a product without all the marketing hype.
One way we recommend dealing with a negative review is when you are notified of the issue and the product service was purchased from you, you can initiate contact with the client to see what needs to be done to rectify the issue. This feedback can then be sent to manufacturers and suppliers to improve their products and improve your relationship with them.
So how do you launch a customer reviews program? First, you need to start collecting consumer product reviews. We recommend emailing past clients with an incentive to write a review for the product(s) they purchased. The incentive can be a discount coupon, gift certificate, or similar token of appreciation. You can also start accepting reviews from the general public. Many ecommerce platforms such as GoECart require the reviewer to enter their email address to submit a review; this is a great way to increase your newsletter subscription list. Going forward you can send an email to customers a few weeks after they have received their purchase seeking feedback on the product and inviting satisfied customers to write a testimonial.
Customer reviews also provide some indirect benefits. For example, they supply your website with relevant original content that can be indexed by search engine crawlers. The reviews typically contain keywords and phrases that are unique from technical specifications and standard manufacturer descriptions. It also exposes customer-generated terms to the Search Engine Crawlers that other customers may be searching for to find that same product. This can help to increase your search engine rankings and help you better connect with customers.
All GoECart merchants have the Customer Product Review feature built into their standard platform. The GoECart site administrator can approve each of the reviews before they are taken live on the site, thus removing any irrelevant reviews. The GoECart platform treats consumer product reviews as normal page, because of this when a user performs a site search it scans the reviews to display them in the search results page.
Since people can easily to jump from one site to another, today’s internet merchants must look at what they are going to do to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Product reviews not only have been shown to increase browsers into buyers, but they also contribute to your differentiation from your competitors. Over time this will cause customers to come back to your site when they are ready to make the purchase. There is definite value in that.
