in Customer Marketing

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).

Collecting and posting reviews provides valuable information to your customers and will help bring in new customers as well as help you improve your store. So, how do you collect and post reviews online? Here are three simple and cost effective strategies you can begin using today to collect and publish customer reviews.

1. Use what is already available and FREE.
If you have a Facebook fan page you can add the “Reviews” application to your Facebook page and begin collecting opinions of your store and products from your fans. Also, consider signing up with websites that specialize in collecting and providing localized reviews such as Yelp and create a page for your store. Using Yelp you can not only collect reviews, but also post special offers, photos, and even send messages to customers. Also consider updating and collecting reviews using your free listing on Google as part of the Google Local Business Center. Encourage customers to post reviews on your Google page, which will increase your search engine optimization and website traffic. Over 70 percent of web searches go through Google.

2. Integrate reviews with your website. Having reviews included on the product pages of your website, whether you offer online buying or not, will increase customer visits and increase buyers online and in-store. According to two recent studies by Bazaarvoice, a hosted social commerce application provider based in Austin, TX, review-engaged shoppers became buyers 85 percent more often and spent 68 percent more per visit than shoppers who did not read reviews. Consider starting out by using a low cost solution that is easy to implement on your website from providers such as RateVoice and RatePoint. Both of these providers have review systems that are embedded in your website and allow visitors to rate products and post comments. RateVoice goes a step further and allows reviewers the option to post their comments to social media sites like Facebook. These solutions also allow you to communicate with customers so you can either thank them or resolve a customer complaint, and cost less than 30 dollars per month with the option to scale up with more features. High-end solutions, provided by companies such as Bazaarvoice will create a custom designed rating and review system and integrate it in your website. Bazaarvoice’s customers include large retailers such as Bed, Bath & Beyond and La-Z-Boy furniture.

3. Get creative about collecting reviews and opinions. Ask for reviews by sending an email to all of your customers and requesting they post a review. As a thank you, you can offer a gift card or coupon for their next purchase. Orvis, a retailer of clothing and fly-fishing gear, sent out an email asking customers to review its products and encouraged participation by conducting a weekly drawing for a $100 gift card. According to John Lazarchic, vice president of e-commerce at Petco, a pet supply retailer, offering a drawing for a gift card “boosted review submissions by 800 percent compared with the initial rate of review submissions at Petco.” When appealing to customers to write a review remember to play upon their desire to help others. According to a study by Bazaarvoice, “fully 90 percent of respondents say they write reviews to help others make better buying decisions, and more than 70 percent want to help companies improve the products they build and carry.”

Ask for reviews in all of your communications, both online and offline. You can go so far as to ask customers to post reviews by having a computer with an Internet connection available in your store and offer a free beverage and gift or discount if shoppers will take a minute and submit a review, suggests Switanowski. Consider including a printed card in your bags or better yet, print a request for reviews on your bags, including a mention of the benefit of a discount, gift card, or weekly drawing. If you collect email addresses from your customers, send them an email shortly following their purchase to follow up and request a review. If your store sells products that can be sampled you can offer in-store sampling and ask people that are not even customers yet to review the product based on the sample.

Once you have collected some reviews, be sure to use them in all marketing, both online and print. Rubbermaid, maker of storage and organization solutions for the home, business and outdoors, based in Huntersville, N.C., included a screen grab of a customer review along with a coupon in its print advertisement and found “that when they add reviews to their free-standing inserts [which are mailed and/or put in newspapers], conversion for the coupons increases by 10 percent. This is proof that reviews impact offline advertising and in-store behavior,” according to Bazaarvoice’s Rubbermaid Case Study, April 2010.