Ask and you shall receive – driving positive reviews
Ask and you shall receive – driving positive reviews
While research has shown that customer reviews don’t have to be perfect to have a huge impact on sales, getting good reviews is a top priority for many marketers and rightfully so. For most companies the problem isn’t a lack of satisfied customers – that’s been achieved through good products, research and service; but satisfied customers don’t guarantee good reviews or reviews at all. The problem is passiveness – when things are good there’s little incentive to find the time to write a review unless the experience has been absolutely stellar or the customer just loves the to share and let’s be honest, that’s pretty rare. Thus to get good reviews marketers have to take the time to reach out and bring the customers back to actively.
Driving customers back is a relatively straight forward process that entails pairing up your ordering system, email system and review system to shoot out a targeted email a few weeks after a transaction takes place. A simple template that has your brand logo, a short message mentioning the product and a link back to the review page will get the job done. Fancier implementations bring in product photos, identify former reviewers to bypass the information capture form and even try and suppress emails from going out for gift purchases. A few companies have even started to use the delivery date from fedex or ups to insure the emails don’t go out before the product arrives.
Aside from a dedicated email, personalizing your existing customer emails with review links or even personalizing your website to identify past customers and encourage a review can further drive review volume of qualified customers.
While not required attaching an incentive like 10% off on a future order or free shipping with any purchase is a great tactic to really maximize response. Although just asking can often be enough to get people coming back in droves. Incentive or not the big trick is to use a dedicated email with a clear subject line so your email is seen as non-threatening and not an ad. Of course regardless of the subject line any response means more customers back on your site and therefore an opportunity for more orders. Any way you cut it it’s a great campaign.
This isn’t a new idea by any means; enterprise review systems BazaarVoice and PowerReviews have been preaching this for years in their blogs and client meetings, seminars and conferences touch on it all the time yet it’s often overlooked because reaching out to collect reviews is seen as a tool needed only to increase review volume and is often said to get in the way of other email CRM campaigns which are “revenue generating”. But actively asking for reviews isn’t just about getting quantity, it’s also about getting the right people back. The is that the second you stop driving customers back for reviews you risk your ratings. At the end of the day it’s the unhappy customers always have an incentive to talk, comment and review while the happy ones need to be reminded. And as for that revenue, what’s better than getting a happy customer thinking about your product and service while on your website and just a click away from another order.
And driving reviews isn’t just limited to commerce site. Content sites, lead gen sites, even download sites can all benefit from driving reviews steadily and constantly. A great example of this can be found with iPhone app store. While there are hundreds of thousands of reviews for the tens of thousands of products, currently the only direct “call to action” for a review comes during the uninstall process which is clearly something more frequented by people unsatisfied with the application. If Apple (or an App developer) was to ratchet up efforts for their current App users and really push them to rate I’d bet you’d find a whole slew of good ratings from users who have great things to say but never think to take the time to say them. And that’s just as true for your site, products or service.
