If you’re an ecommerce brand looking to drive sales and increase customer loyalty, reviews might be the secret weapon you’ve been looking for!
Whether you’re a fashion, beauty, homeware or flooring brand, boosting conversions, increasing sales and building lasting customer relationships is paramount to success. If you’re struggling to obtain great customer reviews on your Shopify website, even when trying your hardest, you might be missing a few tricks that can help you get customers across the finish line. We’ve gathered some of our best strategies to encourage and incentivise customers to leave you fantastic reviews that garner trust and build long-lasting relationships. Without further ado, let’s find out exactly what they are!
The importance of customer reviews
Customer reviews are absolutely integral to building instant trust when a user lands on your website for the first time. They hold significant power when it comes to converting undecided users and can be strategically positioned within product and category pages to drive conversions. If you’re unsure about how reviews can transform your business for the better, just know that a staggering 72% of customers won’t take action without reading a review first. Clearly highlighting the importance of showcasing verified reviews and star ratings throughout your ecommerce site.
5 strategies for getting great reviews
Over the years, we’ve tried and tested hundreds of strategies to obtain reviews for our ecommerce clients. That’s why we’re able to reveal the top 5 strategies for getting excellent reviews, no matter what industry your ecommerce brand operates within.
1. Automate review requests
As soon as a customer receives an online order, it’s crucial to jump on the excitement of their shiny new purchase, as soon as you can. Reaching out to customers post-delivery via a personalised email asking them for feedback, is a great way to demonstrate a commitment to their satisfaction. Review platforms such as our Shopify partner integration Judge.me, allow you to easily create automated review request emails that are automatically sent out to customers, after a specified number of days.
A key tip is to never ask for a ‘good’ review, always ask for your customers’ honest feedback to ensure they feel truly heard and listened to. Not only does this help you to build relationships based on trust, it also helps you and your team to understand your brand’s strengths and weaknesses and helps you to keep improving your products, shopping experience and overall service.
2. Incentivise customers
A tried and tested strategy that we always encourage our clients to employ is incentivising customers to leave reviews with unique rewards, loyalty points or a percentage discount. This helps to push customers to leave a review, especially those who are undecided or are time-poor. However, it can be very easy to get this wrong, so here are our best practices for offering incentives in exchange for reviews:
- Always label incentivised reviews as such. It’s much better to be upfront and transparent with your audience from the outset, and avoid leaving a sour taste when a customer finds out a review was written in exchange for a discount, later down the line.
- Never pay for reviews. This can be extremely dangerous to your brand reputation and doesn’t provide any true value to your brand as you’re not receiving honest feedback from your customers.
- A great way to incentivise reviews is to send new products to key influencers that engage with your target audience, before they’re available to the public. Not only is this great for generating more reviews, it can also help to create a buzz around a new product launch and get your brand in front of the right audience.
3. Strike while the iron is hot
A fantastic strategy for getting great reviews is striking while the ironing is hot. When happy customers message you on social media, share user-generated content (UGC) of their new product or express something positive about your brand, this presents a fantastic opportunity to ask them to leave an honest review. Ensure that you consistently monitor social media inboxes, comments and tags to maximise these windows of opportunity to ask your happy customers for reviews. Meeting your customers where they already are on social media, is a great way to build your community, engage with your audience and drive them to review your product or brand.
4. Showcase reviews on your website
Believe it or not, happy customers actually love to write reviews of products and brands they love. Simply showcasing verified reviews with a prominent call-to-action saying ‘Write a Review’ can be enough to encourage some customers to start typing away and leave a raving review of your brand. Reviews can be displayed in a variety of ways throughout your website from star rating banners and review carousels, all the way to dedicated testimonial pages. All of these features can encourage other happy users to leave a review, so long as it makes it easy for them to do so. After all, if a brand evokes an emotion in you such as joy or happiness, who doesn’t want to share that feeling with others in the community?
5. Deliver outstanding customer service
Finally (and possibly most importantly), no customer is going to leave a fantastic review if your brand hasn’t delivered an exceptional service, going above and beyond at every stage of the process. You should always prioritise your customers’ online shopping experience, ensuring that each and every touchpoint along the way supersedes expectations. That means that from their very first interaction with your brand, all the way through until they receive an ecommerce package, every step must feel seamless, easy and enjoyable to encourage a user to take the time to leave a review.
Studies say that customers who feel an emotional reaction to a brand or product, whether extremely positive or extremely negative, are more likely to give up their precious time to provide feedback. One study even suggests that customers who have a negative experience are 10x more likely to leave a review than those who had a positive experience with your brand. This clearly highlights that you must go above and beyond to delight your audience if you want them to leave a great review of your brand!
But how can you do that? When mapping your customer journey, it’s important to identify key touch points that could make or break a customer buying journey. For example, a slow-loading website, inability to find the product they’re looking for, rude customer service, lack of delivery tracking or a damaged parcel could all cause significant frustration to your customer. Ask yourself how you can make the delivery experience as streamlined as possible, employ web design experts to create seamless navigation that is easy to use and train your team to deliver exceptional customer service. All of these aspects will help you to impress your customers and ultimately, encourage them to write an honest review for your website.
And there we have it! Our top 5 strategies for getting great customer reviews. If you need a helping hand with anything we discussed in this article, don’t hesitate to get in touch and we’d be happy to help.
