How to Get More Reviews On Your Site
As discussed in a previous blog post, reviews can play a very important part in driving traffic to your website and also improving your conversion rate (through building a higher level of trust).
Getting reviews can sometimes be a challenge, here are 5 tips to get you started:
1. Keep it Simple
Before even asking your customers to leave you a review you should ensure your review process is simple and frictionless. When requesting a review you should include a link and not ask the customer to have to hunt for anything. If you are asking for a product review then a link to that product would be fine (as long as the customer can leave their review from that page of course!)
2. Send out a friendly email
Expecting a customer to just leave a review isn’t going to be the best course of action, however asking them how they found their shopping experience and then pointing them in the right direction will prompt them into action.
There are a number of email platforms that can help you with this process including Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor and Constant Contact.
3. Incentivise
If you are sending out emails but not getting a good response then it cam be a good strategy to incentivise the customer to leave a review, for example:
Tell us what you thought of {product_name} and get $10 off your next purchase!
This not only encourages users to leave feedback but is also great for customer retention. It allows you to further build a relationship with the customer, encouraging them to come back to you and increase the lifetime value of the customer.
4. Use a third party review system
Wherever possible I always think it is a good idea to keep your review system in house, however there a number of big players who have a brand that customers trust. What’s more they have completely nailed it when it comes to keeping things simple, in some cases only asking for 1 or 2 clicks.
This type of feedback has minimum friction and therefore you would expect the adoption rate to be much higher.
Some of the more popular feedback systems out there include:
Before committing to any of these I would research them in great detail as it is not a commitment to take lightly.
5. Make your service/product that good, people just want to talk about it
Ok, so this last one might seem like a cheat, but is it? It’s not good enough just to meet people’s expectations but you should always be aiming to exceed them wherever possible.
Amazon do a really good job of this: when choosing the standard delivery they will always give you an estimate of the delivery day, yet 9 times out of 10 this will always be exceeded, so you get your order quicker than anticipated and without upgrading your postage.
Word of Mouth marketing is one of the most effective and powerful forms of marketing, so you should always try to take advantage of it.
If you product and/or service is worth talking about then people will want to tell you about their experience with it (good or bad). Therefore they’ll only need some gentle nudging towards your review process and here comes the friendly email…….
If you have a winning formula to generate reviews and are willing to share, I would love to hear them.