Understanding your customers or users is one of the biggest challenges any business can face, but once you've solved this challenge, how can you ensure your customers buy something when they shop on your site? Many marketing studies have shown that 72% of customers WILL NOT take any buying actions until they've read reviews. Another shocking statistic is that about 95% of customers read reviews before making a purchase. So, how can you gather positive user reviews? Below are a series of tips to help you improve your thoughts!
Understanding your users is one of the biggest challenges any business can face, but once you've solved this challenge, how can you make sure your customer buys something when they shop on your site. Many marketing studies have shown that 72% of customers WILL NOT take any buying actions until they've read reviews. Another shocking statistic is that about 95% of customers read reviews before making a purchase.
So, how can you gather positive user reviews? Below are a series of tips to help you improve your thoughts!
When starting a new business or online shop, attracting customers to purchase a new item is the most likely the number one challenge on most store owners' lists. However, what if you didn't sell anything at all? It's less of a risk to new customers to try a new item for free. I mean, who doesn't like free stuff?
There are a few ways to allow customers to try your items for free. One technique is to ask users to buy an item from your shop, and when they leave a review, you refund them their purchase. This can be a time-consuming process but can yield the most reviews. Another technique could be to include a free item with any purchase. Meaning, if they purchase an item, you'll send them something else along with their purchase. Scroll down for more tips on what to include in your packaging.
Once a user buys something, are you sending them another email to ask how their item is or how your purchase process went? This is an essential step in creating user reviews that many stores should implement sooner rather than later. Today, most online purchases need an email to confirm the user's order. Once an order has been placed, follow up with the user on how their checkout experience was; once they have their item, follow up on how they're enjoying it!
Pro-tip; stagger the amount of time between your product's delivery time and the time you send a review email. Doing this allows the user to have a few days to test and try your product.
Once a user's thoughts have been submitted, follow up with a personal "thank you" message. Thanking the user for their time or consideration will show the customer that you care about their thoughts on the product or service. What if a user leaves a negative review? Below are some example responses for positive and negative reviews.
Positive:
- If the user leaves a positive review, you might want to consider offering them a discount or reward next time they shop. This will attract the user to buy again and show the customer that you value them, as mentioned above.
Negative:
-Negative reviews are never fun to read and reply to. However, negative reviews or issues must be addressed quickly. Once a user leaves a negative thought, you might want to consider offering the customer a refund, discount or return instructions. Going back to what we mentioned above, the goal in replying to reviews is letting the user know when they are being heard. Many customers will not care if they are being respectful or not, respond to these people, offer a solution, analyze if the problem could be solved in the future, and proceed with other business objectives!
Another incentive for all reviewers is offering a discount for customers that leave a review. For example, if you messaged a user leaving a review but did not offer a deal the first time, follow up with them offering a discount if they leave a review. This process works well for customers that may have forgotten to leave a review or need to be incentivized to provide feedback.
Now that you have a consistent process for gathering user views, what questions will you ask to make sure their feedback is helpful? Although users' specific comments can be beneficial, many users might leave one word or one sentence answers to type-based questions. Start by showing a few smaller questions with short suggested answers. Then, at the end of your questionnaire, have an area for users to add specific details if they are interested.
Call To Action review cards may come as a surprise to many, but this simple trick works well! A review card is a branded paper card that is placed within each package you send to buyers. On the card, we add a thank you message and a call to action link asking the customer to leave a review if they liked or disliked the product. This simple but yet effective method is a great way to increase reviews at a low-cost to you. We made an example of a review card you can use! You can download this FREE template here!
You might be asking yourself, is this worth the design time, printing cost, and effort? The answer is yes! When we tested this idea, we increased overall positive reviews from less than 10 to over 60 in less than 2 months ONLY using this method.
Another bonus to using a review card is that the cost is relatively cheap. Buying a pack of cardstock is about $10.00 in our area, the design time was less than an hour, and we used our at-home printer to print each page. Each page held 4-5 cards on them.
Last but not least, we need to showcase reviews to customers. We covered where to place review elements in our blog post here, but to summarize, when designing your page layouts, be sure to showcase reviews on specific product pages or as a whole on an individual page. This will keep your site organized and easily read reviews on the particular product they are looking to purchase.
Thanks for reading our thoughts on generating positive user reviews. We hope you found this article helpful! If you did, consider subscribing to the blog below or following us on our social platforms. We have much more coming very soon!
Thumbnail photo by Nimi Diffa on Unsplash.
