5+1 Actionable Techniques to Get Awesome Customer Generated Product Reviews
Free yourself of the classic chicken-and-egg bind of selling more products and getting more product reviews and selling more products…
Like a majority of small to medium sized business owners, there’ a good chance that you’re dealing with the chicken-and-egg issue of getting good product reviews. The thing is, you need reviews to sell products but you need to sell products to get reviews. To help you out we’ve listed below 5 time-tested techniques that will help seal the deal with product reviewers!
I have a good friend that suffers from a little-known disease that he likes to call GAS, short for, Gear Acquiring Syndrome. Among his many enthusiastic hobbies you will find photography, music production, and drone flying, and it’s fair to say that he spends about 70% of his time researching and buying gear, and 30% actually using it.
Despite this mismatched gear acquisition to use ratio, I have to give it to him, he’s become a pro at one thing from his wallet burdening syndrome — not only can he always finds the best quality version of that new feature that he absolutely needs, but he also always finds the best provider with the best prices, shipping rates, customer service and support options.
He’s the guy that finds car services like Iceland’s SadCars and knows it’s legit, or orders Persol sunglasses from obscure German providers because that way he can try out 5 pairs without being charged for the return shipping.
His secret? He does nothing before researching heavily and reading tons of user reviews. He, along with any GAS victim worth his salt will tell you, that you just don’t buy, order, or trust anything without looking through (at least some of) the reviews first.
Needless to say, enthusiastic hobbyists are not the only people that feel this way.
88% of people trust online reviews as much as much as personal recommendations [click to tweet]
and,
63% of people are more likely to purchase from a site which has user reviews. [click to tweet]
But how does one achieve these mythical reviews in the first place?
Well, unlike setting up a one-click point of sales or installing a lead-generation pop-up, there’s no guaranteed ‘easy way.’ That’s because product reviews are earned from customers that have been delighted (or slighted) by an experience they’re really inspired to talk about.
So let’s review: it looks like you need good reviews to sell a product, but you need to sell products to earn reviews, which seems like a bit of a frustrating Catch-22.
But before you despair, we’re here to help! Feature-packed tools like Rivio exist to jumpstart small and medium sized businesses out of this chicken-and-egg bind.
And once you’ve got those essential first reviews under your belt, there are great data-backed ways to vastly improve your chances of getting a large quantity of good reviews in a shorter amount of time.
Here are 5 actionable best practices that you can apply now to start amassing reviews and optimizing your webshop’s credibility and reputation.
1. Ask customers for a product review at the right time in the right place.
There is a window of opportunity between the time someone receives their purchase and the point when they’ve spent some time using it. This is the absolute best time to send a post-purchase email with simple instructions (more on this later) on how to leave a review.
This is a magical time when a customer is feeling something special. Their long awaited parcel has finally arrived in the mail, and every time they touch it they get a rush of endorphins from owning-some-cool-new-thing. And that’s great news for you as a seller! Excited customers are charged up to leave reviews about their new toy, and even more likely to write something positive.
The takeaway: Send customers a post-purchase email 10 days after payment is completed to improve your chances of getting positive reviews. [click to tweet]
2. Don’t overcomplicate the process for product reviewers aka KISS: Keep it simple stupid
It can feel overbearing, marketing-y or straight up annoying to ask customers for feedback after they’ve purchased something from you. You may be worried about scaring them off or even feel like you’re just asking for trouble.
The first thing to do to make leaving a review a delight for everyone, is to make the process really simple and straightforward.
At Rivio, we’ve found that the optimal post-purchase email length is around 150 characters. Write more and you’ll lose readers, write less and you won’t engage them enough.
Don’t forget to make it easy for customers to ask questions or ask for support if they’re confused.
The takeaway: KISS: Enable customers to easily leave a review by providing direct instructions and troubleshooting options [click to tweet]
3. Go for the low-hanging fruit: Lock in customers with one easy opt-in question.
One of the bigger barriers to entry for a potential review leaving customer is the ‘daunting’ amount of questions and thought they need to put into a proper review. Even the most well-intentioned are inclined to open an email requesting a review, scroll through the list of questions and quickly put it to the side, muttering “Oh, I’ll get to this later.”
Here, you can take a note from a business with great review success rates: AirB’n’B. A few days after you host or stay as a guest, AirB’n’B sends you a short and sweet email asking you to review your host and displays a single star rating question. Then, once you’ve clicked the star rating, you’re automatically taken to a series of new pages requesting lengthier text reviews.
This easy opt-in post-purchase email is fast, easy and harmless, greatly improving the likelihood of a reviewer answering the question. Once someone has psychologically committed to finishing the survey by answering the first question, they’re much more likely to complete the rest of your review questionnaire.
Tools like Rivio help clients craft easy opt-in post-purchase emails to increase review completion.
The takeaway: Lock in product reviewers fast with a single star rating question to improve product review completion rates [click to tweet]
4.Get in touch with the #feels: Appeal to your customers’ feelings and experience when you ask them for a review.
As I mentioned before, when you’re asking for a review, it can feel like you’re walking a fine line between improving customer experience for customers and begging customers to do you and your webshop a big one. But you can easily use simple messaging to make your customers understand and feel the former.
First off, don’t forget to use first names in subject lines. Data retrieved from Rivio’s Shopify, Magento and WooCommerce plugin usage data shows that the highest conversions always come from personalized emails.
Examples include: “Mike, please review your YOUR-WEBSHOP purchase!”, or “Mike, we would love to get some feedback!”
Appeal to your customers’ good-guy side and let them know that their opinion and experience is incredibly important to you and future customers. You can include thoughts like “your experience is meaningful,” “your reviews will help x amount of people make better decisions on their purchases.”
Invite reviewers to talk about how the product made them feel and what their experience was like. This way the review process becomes more of an authentic discussion rather than a value transaction.
And while we’re talking about messaging — spicing up your subject lines with emojis can really help! 🚀 Find out how to integrate this in your future emails here and here. Use these guys in moderation so you come off engaging enough but not spammy.
The takeaway: Appeal to your customers’ feelings and experience in your messaging to encourage them to leave elaborate and authentic reviews. [click to tweet]
5. Encourage reviewers to leave product reviews with rewards and coupons
Yes, I know we just said that asking for product reviews should be authentic and not transactional, but rewarding review leavers after they have completed the questionnaire is a proven technique.
🚨 Disclaimer 🚨 : We are not encouraging you to ‘bribe’ customers to leave good reviews! That hack usually becomes apparent to future customers and can turn them off of your webshop!
Coupon rewards for completed surveys not only encourage customers to leave reviews, but also give them a reason to visit your shop in the future once they’ve ‘earned’ a discount.
The takeaway: Encourage customers to leave product reviews with small but meaningful incentives, but don’t make them feel bribed. [click to tweet]
6. Put customers ‘in conversation’ with past reviewers by adding snippets of past reviews
For those of you who are killing it in the review game and well on your way to getting a nice collection of ratings on your products we recommend the following tip to level up.
Include snippets of reviews from past customers in the review questionnaire to inspire more elaborate and nuanced reviews. Questions like, “Tom said this, but Barbara said this, “What do YOU think?,” create a dialog between all of your reviewers and give newcomers a jumping off point to describe their experience.
Rivio’s smart features allow you to easily add this dialog to your post-purchase emails.
The takeaway: Include snippets of reviews from past customers in your questions to inspire more elaborate and nuanced reviews by new reviewers. [click to tweet]
Phew! So there you have it, an action packed list of to-do’s to keep you busy optimizing your product review process.
We’d love to know — have you used any of these techniques or had success getting reviews with a different tip? Drop us a message in the comment section, or email Mike at marketing@getrivio.com to tell us about your experience!
And if you’ve found this article helpful and would love to see more, a click on the 💚 is much appreciated.
Rivio is a WooCommerce, Magento, and Shopify plugin with thousands of authentic product reviews for you, and a ton of great features that will help you achieve and automate techniques 1–6.
N E X T → Sticks and Stones: Dealing with negative product reviews
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