What impact can customer reviews have on your brand, and more importantly, your sales? How vital are customer reviews and how can they provide a sales lift?
Customer reviews are very similar to word-of-mouth advertising. Prospects are hearing directly from your customers how great your products are and how valuable you and the products are to their lives. When people make a purchase online, they lose that sense of touch and interaction with the product, which can cause some hesitation. If a prospect is on the fence, a customer providing a review about how well your vacuum works years after purchase, for instance, could be incredibly powerful and very well push the prospect to make the purchase. What do you do with reviews that are not so positive? Spin them into a positive buying experience so you don’t necessarily lose the sale based on a bad review.
Recently, I have seen an uptick in retailers utilizing customer reviews to sell products in their emails. Cooking.com is one of the best examples of a retailer that is testing not only the effectiveness of customer reviews, but also how to position the selling proposition in relation to the review. Following are three examples of how they’ve incorporated reviews into their emails (click to enlarge):
In each of these examples, Cooking.com tests the following elements:
- Including the percentage of customers that recommended the product
- Tweaking the call to action - soft sell (Get More Info) vs. the hard sell (Buy)
- Placing the review in a box and pointing it at the item
- Providing the ability for subscribers to shop all products in the line
- Visually displaying the rating (using stars)
- Providing the ability for subscribers to view all reviews of a product
Cooking.com may also consider adding a “review this product” call to action next to the reviews in the email as well.
Testing and tracking are both key to determine the success of including customer reviews in your emails. Are you looking for ways to attract reviews? Check out this post from Linda Bustos, and remember that you should be requesting reviews from all customers after each purchase is made.
Have you had any success with using customer reviews as a selling tool? Share your story below!
Kelly Lorenz
Email Marketing Strategist at Bronto
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