The end goal of all marketing, including digital marketing, is to increase your business profitability and revenue by making more sales.
Marketing helps guide your audiences towards a purchase decision, and having the right marketing strategies in place is crucial to growing your business and increasing your revenue.
One way to help encourage your leads and prospects to become customers is with product reviews.
Reviews are a powerful marketing and sales tool, but getting them isn’t always as easy as you’d like. Encouraging your customers to leave reviews on your products or services requires the right strategy.
In this article, we’ll help you understand the value of product reviews and give you some important tips on how to get more for your brand.
What is a Product Review?
A product review is the feedback or opinion a customer had on a specific product or item that they purchased from your brand.
After buying and using the product, a customer has the option to leave a written review about what their experience with the product was. They might include things like how well it worked, what the buying process was like, how they liked (or didn’t like) your brand, and whether they would recommend the product to others.
Many businesses that have e-commerce platforms or online buying options will display their product reviews online so that other potential customers can access and read the reviews throughout their buying journey. They help your leads and prospects understand what verified buyers have experienced with your products.
Why are Product Reviews Important?
Product reviews are a form of social proof. Social proof is a psychological phenomenon in which people follow the actions and recommendations of others.
People will often go out of their way to look for reviews on products so that they can see whether other people, often strangers, would recommend the product.
Think about it: when you last purchased an item, did you look at the reviews? Odds are you did, even if you just briefly looked to see how many positive reviews the product had.
A product that doesn’t have any reviews can appear untrustworthy to a potential customer since there is no social proof that other people have enjoyed the item.
Product reviews increase the amount of clicks and purchases your items have, all while helping to inspire more trust in your brand, answer important user questions, and create user-generated content without your team needing to come up with it themselves.
12 Tips to Get More Product Reviews
Now that you understand why product reviews are so important, let’s spend some time examining tips and strategies you can implement to help gather more product reviews.
1. Make it Easy to Leave Product Reviews
The first, and most important tip, is to make leaving product reviews easy for your customers. If the process of leaving a review is difficult, customers most likely won’t make the effort.
Make sure your customers can leave their reviews on mobile devices since they spend most of their time on mobile. You can also have the option to just leave a basic star review, so customers don’t need to write a paragraph in order to leave their opinion.
2. Encourage Your Customers to Write Reviews
In addition to making it easy to leave reviews, you want to make sure that you take time to encourage your customers to leave a review. Tell your customers that reviews are available, and direct them to where they can go to submit their reviews.
Highlight how valuable their opinion and feedback is, and how much you would appreciate a review from them to help encourage their action.
3. Create Incentives for Your Customers to Leave a Review
If just asking isn’t doing enough, you can also create incentives to encourage customers to leave a review.
You can offer things like discounts, gift cards, store credits, loyalty points, or even cashback in exchange for a product review.
These incentives can help your customers see the value in leaving a review and can encourage them to take the time to get it done.
4. Ask for Product Reviews at the Right Time
Another important tip is to make sure that you are asking for product reviews from customers at the right time. You want to get the review when their satisfaction is at its highest, such as when they just received the item.
If you wait too long, their enthusiasm for the product might decline, making them less likely to leave an enthusiastic review.
You don’t want to ask for a review after a bad experience either, so make sure you are careful about your review requests.
5. Collect Different Forms of Product Reviews
Product reviews come in different shapes and forms. You want to encourage audiences to leave a variety of product reviews in different formats.
For example, a customer can leave a star rating, a text review, a product image, or a product video. You want to get a variety of these forms of feedback, as that can diversify your social proof and help new customers get a better idea of the product.
6. Prominently Display Your Reviews
Your reviews should be front and center on your product pages.
Often the review is right next to or under the product images, allowing your prospects to quickly locate the reviews and associate the star rating with the product itself.
If your reviews are hidden down the page or on a separate link, you aren’t optimizing your reviews to help boost sales and increase product visibility.
7. Send a Follow-Up Email After Delivery
After a customer has the product delivered to their home is often the best time to follow up and ask for a review.
You might want to wait a day or two if the product takes time to set up or use, but this strategy allows you to tap into your customer feedback when it is freshest in their minds.
In addition, this tip helps you automatically follow up with each customer who buys from you, expanding your pool for gathering reviews.
8. Use a Digital Tool to Organize Your Efforts
Trying to manually track customers for reviews is exhausting and ineffective. A product review tool or app can help you automate your efforts when it comes to collecting and displaying reviews.
It can help simplify the process for both you and your customers while also providing you with analytics and reports to help further develop your product reviews strategy.
9. Include a Call-to-Action on Communications
Part of collecting reviews is being consistent. It may take a few reminders for a customer to leave a review.
Include a CTA or link to leave a review in all of your regular marketing communications with customers can help remind them that leaving a review is an option.
Try adding a link in your signature or a button at the end of your email template to call your customers to action.
10. Listen to Negative Reviews
Negative reviews are an unfortunate reality of collecting reviews. Even the best products can fail, or a customer can have a bad experience they are determined to share.
The best strategy with negative reviews is to listen to what they say, respond with kindness and understanding, and leave them up so they can be seen. If you delete or hide negative reviews, or, even worse, respond negatively to them, you can seriously damage your brand reputation.
11. Don’t Forget About Social Media
Reviews can be left in more places than just on your website and e-commerce platform.
Social media is another place where customers can come across reviews, so having reviews visible on your social media platforms is important and helpful when it comes to boosting sales and increasing your brand reputation.
You can even post some of your especially positive reviews to showcase your new success stories to your customers and followers.
12. Put Your Customer Service Team to Work
Your customer service team is one of the most powerful tools you have for collecting reviews.
Customer service team members often communicate with customers directly and can ask for reviews personally during conversations. This verbal request can be more influential than a written request in an email.
Work with your customer service team to come up with a script to request reviews during positive interactions with customers.
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Wrap Up
Product reviews are a big part of social proof, which is necessary to help your leads and prospects make the decision to purchase from your company.
Without product reviews, customers have to go by their own intuition, which can be harder to nurture. When you have plenty of product reviews, your customers will be more likely to make a purchasing decision.
Reviews are just one form of feedback, which is essential to the growth and success of your business.
To learn more about other forms of feedback, check out our blog on collecting feedback, where you’ll learn about the importance of collecting feedback, as well as some ideas on how to use interactive content to fuel your feedback strategy.
