We all have heard the news in the ecommerce world: Product Reviews are important. How important are they? Studying the analytics of one client we found products with reviews converted as high as 3 and half times the rate verses products without reviews. This number is staggering when you think about the bottom line of your business. This means that you could eventually increase revenue from product pages by 3.5 times by collecting at least 1 review per product. You might ask yourself then, “that sounds great, but how do I get my customers to give me more reviews?”

Today I would like to explore many sound approaches to garner user generated product reviews and some creative methods you may not have tried yet. The most basic way to collect a review from a user is simply by asking them to review a product on your website with a little link near your 5 star rating. Unfortunately it is unlikely a customer will buy a product and go online in their free time just to review a product. I know from experience that I would rather watch a movie or talk to friends than take the time to remember the website and then remember how I found the product and then write a good review. According to the top Product Review Engines, less than 20% of the review content actually comes directly from the website. So where does the other 80% come from?

The majority of your product reviews will come from email! If you do not already have an automatic trigger based email in place to collect reviews, we strongly suggest it and can help you set this program up properly.

You might ask yourself, I already have an auto email to collect reviews, but I am still not receiving anywhere near enough reviews to improve my conversion rate. What do I do?

You get creative…

Here are my top 5 ways to increase your number of reviews:

1. Offer a free gift for their first review: We have seen incredible success with this email offer for our clients. One tip: make sure the free gift has a high perceived value for your customers, but at a low or no cost to you.
2. Promise a discount on their next purchase: remember only give them the discount after they completed their review. Give them reward points for each review, this will give your customers an ongoing reason for contributing to the success of your website
3. If you can, place a personal letter inside each of your packages, asking them to save the un-informed consumer by mailing back a postcard with a review. A creative message asking your customer to help other customers like them can go a long way to connect socially with your customers.
4. Last but not least: Create a Get Involved Campaign. For every review you collect, a dollar will be donated to a well known charity. Make this campaign well known on your site as well as via email, package slips and any other customer communication. If one review increases the products likelihood of being purchased by 3.5 times than the dollar would be well worth it. For those that think a dollar is too high, simply offer a dime to start and test the effectiveness.

That’s the end of today’s wildcard Friday presentation. But before I go did you know that Exclusive Concepts offers a Conversion Testing Service called Conversion Booster? If you are interested in Conversion Booster please feel free to contact us for a free Conversion Opportunity Audit at 1-800-504-4324.

I want to thank you again for watching and have a great weekend!