Customer Reviews: Top Strategies for Getting and Using Reviews

by Melissa M. Kellogg

Collecting and providing product reviews on your website is one of the most important ways to improve your site and increase sales. Numerous surveys show that reading reviews before buying is important to today’s shoppers. Reviews are also an important part of creating conversation with and between your customers.

“Customer reviews have become the new PR,” says Lynn Switanowski, retail expert and founder of Creative Business Consulting Group, a retail consulting firm based in Boston, MA. Shoppers tend to trust the words of other consumers over the advertisements and other company-generated content they see, she adds. In fact, 84 percent of consumers said they were more likely to check online for reviews prior to making a purchase, according to a recent survey by Brand Reputation (Retail Bulletin, October 2009).
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Five Creative Ways to Use Your Blog as a Marketing Tool

by Carolyn Howard Johnson

Your business can benefit greatly from using your blog to as a marketing tool.

Here are our favorite techniques for creating a successful blog:
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Building Your List: The Foundation of Profitable Online Marketing

by Melissa M. Kellogg

A good customer contact list can be a gold mine for your store, says retail expert Ted Hurlbut, principal of Hurlbut & Associates, a merchandising and inventory management consulting firm based in Foxboro, MA; and the best lists are built one person at a time as part of creating better relationships with your customers. The most useful and profitable list is one that customers and prospects have requested to be a part of. Customers will want to receive email from you if it provides something of value to them, Hurlbut says, and asking customers what is of value to them is one of the best ways to create a list-building strategy that will work.
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