Hot on the heels of Citysearch, CNET and digg, PowerReviews has integrated its platform with Facebook Connect. Why is this so important? It enables the integration of your site with Facebook in a way that makes it much easier and faster for consumers to publish their activities on your site to Facebook. Specifically, starting this week, PowerReviews is offering your users the ability to post their reviews to Facebook as soon as they submit their review – driving pervasive sharing of review content on Facebook. At face value, that seems “useful” for community building. What’s not so obvious is the traffic that it builds on your site almost immediately.
How It Works
Facebook Connect is integrated directly into the write-a-review process so it’s super easy for users to publish their reviews to Facebook. In the past, users could post content to Facebook, but only if it was already on your site. This meant that users had to keep checking back to see when their review was posted on the site. How many people do you think remembered to do that? Once it was live, they could then post the product page to Facebook. Even then, their review may have been one of many on the page. This posed too many barriers to the user to be an effective marketing tool for you.
With Facebook Connect, users can now post their review to Facebook immediately after they write it, while their excitement about a product is fresh in their mind (and before they forget to do it).
Facebook Connect highlights their specific review content in the post and allows them to add their own comments.
The key is that PowerReviews posts only a “snippet” of the review on Facebook, requiring their friends to click on a link to read the rest of the review – which takes them to your site — and that’s what drives the immediate traffic uplift.
When their friends arrive on your site, the review is highlighted, making it a fulfilling experience once they arrive.
Why Use It
Facebook is the largest social network in the world. In April 2009, Facebook reported an estimated 200 million monthly active users. This is a powerful network that you can use to spread the word about your products and your site, driving significant short term and longer term traffic to your site.
During Citysearch’s initial beta testing of Facebook Connect they found:
“In the four months the site has been testing Facebook Connect, 94 percent of reviewers have published their reviews to Facebook, where an average of 40 people see them and 70 percent click back to Citysearch. That has translated into new members: daily registrations on Citysearch have tripled.” New York Times
That’s an average of 40 people seeing a post about your site and 28 people coming to your site for each review posted to Facebook. Not bad.
If you are interested in using Facebook Connect with Reviews on your site, contact us at info@powerreviews.com. If you happen to be at the Internet Retailer Conference East in Boston, June 16 and 17, stop by Booth #1036.
We at PowerReviews, have always known the best way to populate reviews on your ecommerce site is to solicit them from your customers post purchase with a follow-up email. In most cases, it was something that required a fair amount of technical expertise from extracting your order history to populating the correct links in your email template. So it gives me great pleasure to announce Review Accelerator™ for PowerReviews Express.
What is Review Accelerator? It is a simple and easy way for PowerReviews Express clients to send follow-up emails after their customers purchase a product, inviting them back to review. Review Accelerator is the result of years of optimizing the format, design, and process to maximize the response rate and quality of reviews with hundreds of our Enterprise clients (to achieve response rates as high as 15%). We take care of all the complexity and implement the best practices for you.
Why is Review Accelerator™ so important? Quite simply, without a well-implemented follow-up email program, you won’t get enough reviews. Our research shows that 74% of customers believe that four reviews per product is the minimum needed to make an informed buying decision. Review Accelerator can help you achieve this milestone 10 times faster (in 1-2 months instead of 1 year).
With the addition of Review Accelerator, we believe PowerReviews Express provides a complete review solution that will exceed your expectations. You not only get our unique tag based solution that consumers prefer 2-1 over stars and comments, but a program that accelerates your review collection. It is the fastest and simplest way to reap the benefits of reviews on your site.
As head of Client Services at PowerReviews working with many of our 300+ clients, I’ve seen a significant shift in how customer reviews are being employed by retailers and Brands in the past 18 months. In the early days, my work centered around educating clients on the importance of customer reviews in closing sales on their site – giving shoppers the confidence to actually buy. By the time 2008 rolled around, using customer reviews as a “purchase validator” had become the norm on retail sites, and now over 60% of the IR 500 have deployed reviews in that way.
In the last year, my work has focused primarily around leveraging reviews and other user generated content before and after the validation stage of shopping - to attract new shoppers to their site, help shoppers sort through and find the right product for them and get more engaged with the Brand after they leave. I wanted to share with you some of the key lessons I’ve learned in this process that will help you get the greatest sales uplift value from customer reviews.
1. Maximize the number of credible reviews on your site
It’s no secret that the most important step to getting full leverage out of reviews is sending an automated email to invite customers back to write a review after a purchase – commonly called a post-transaction follow-up email. This is the proven method to generate the most reviews on your site from a very credible source – your known customers! In fact, one client recently increased reviews by 26 times by implementing the follow-up email. Our system marks these reviews with a “Verified Buyer” badge, which creates trust among your customers.
We recommend that you send the follow-up email to all past purchasers from the previous 6 months prior to launching reviews on your product pages. Within the first month, you should have 20% of your total SKUs have at least 1 review, with 100% review coverage for your top sellers. Further, as the Netshops Case Study shows, it’s the number of reviews per product that drives sales uplift, with 4-7 reviews per product being enough for 75% of shoppers to “have sufficient confidence to judge the product” (etailing group study of 1200 typical internet shoppers).
Did you know the follow-up email also ensures a more balanced and improved overall product rating? Because the email captures reviews from a wider cross-section of customers, our customers have experienced a 15% increase in the average product rating across their site once they implemented the follow-up email! If you need help, let us know. We’ve created a tool to help you send the follow-up email.
2. Make a great first impression
It’s one thing to collect customer reviews, but if you don’t display the reviews in a user friendly way, with an informative and easy-to-absorb review summary, you’re not getting the greatest sales impact from these reviews. That’s why we created the next generation of our review summary, called Review Snapshot 2.0. Initial tests showed an 18.3% reduction in product page bounce rate and a 16.7% increase in product page conversion. Check out the Review Snapshot at Jelly Belly.
3. Maximize SEO Benefit
Since the inception of our review solution, we’ve provided customers the ability to increase natural search traffic from customer review content via our SEO Mini-Site. This solution leverages a set of SEO-optimized review landing pages, which drive traffic through the landing page to the product page. Late last year, we launched our next generation SEO tool called - In-Line SEO(tm), which enables customer review content to be indexed directly on the product page itself. Early customer review adopters, such as eBags, Newegg and Zappos, created home-grown review solutions to achieve the SEO benefit of reviews directly on the product page. Now everyone else can benefit from this approach without having to manage the review display themselves (so you can easily adopt all the review enhancements in the future). Check out Robert Chea’s blog post last week for more details.
4. Take review content everywhere it can drive more sales
After you’ve spent the effort collecting credible, high quality reviews, make sure you leverage those reviews throughout your site and in your email marketing efforts. In our case, the review content is “tag-based”, which means you can take it entirely new places in social merchandising and social marketing.
On category pages and anywhere you list products, include the star ratings snippet. Thirty days after adding ratings on the category page, Diapers.com experienced a 15% increase in product page views and a 14% increase in conversion.
Embrace Social Navigation to its fullest by adding ratings and review tags to your site navigation so people can narrow by “use” or “pro” or “lifestyle” (about me). Check out Social Navigation implementations at sites such as OnlineShoes.com and Dick’s Sporting Goods. For a very different Social Navigation interface, using tag clouds, check out Kiddicare.com.
Add ratings and review tags to your email marketing campaigns. By adding ratings to their email, Mountain Gear increased click-through by 8%, conversion by 17% and Average Order Value by 85%. Impressive results!
5. Take your online reviews offline
With the retail market still dominated by offline sales, it makes good business sense to bring ratings and reviews to your offline customers. PowerReviews allows you to provide customer reviews in store with mobile applications that fully leverage the powerful Review Snapshot feature – high impact in a small form factor. We also can suggest ways to maximize the display of customer reviews in store by leveraging both the ratings and the tags in store signage.
I encourage you to fully harness the amazing content your customers are creating for you every day. These are just some of the ways you can do that, with clear wins for you and your customers. As always, if you have any questions about the information shared, please contact your Account Manager.
When we launched PowerReviews Express in January, one of the first platforms we tested the integration on was Shopify from Jaded Pixel Technologies. Since it was so simple to set up an e-ecommerce storefront, it was perfect for our QA efforts. I remember thinking we need to partner with these guys. Well a few months later, I am excited to announce Jaded Pixel Technologies is now a partner and PowerReviews Express is fully integrated into the Shopify e-commerce platform.
What does this mean to a Shopify client? We took an easy implementation and made it downright simple. The usual integration process has three steps. The first step is to upload a product feed. With Shopify, we pull it directly from the Shopify platform with a click of a button. The second step is to select the appropriate “write-a-review” forms for the product categories (that’s important because we have product-specific review forms with tags for the “pros”, “cons”, “best uses” and “reviewer profiles” that relate to each category). Since this is very straightforward, we didn’t need to simply it. The final step is to put our JavaScript code on their pages in order to display the review content. With input from their CEO, Tobi Lütke, it was decided that their technically-savvy merchants would have the option to select exactly where to display their customer reviews.
Last, but definitely not least, we are about to launch a fully automated “Follow-Up Email” program with Shopify — automatically sending their clients’ customers an email 3-4 weeks after their purchase asking them to review the product. Why is this a big deal? As many of you know, a review solution on its own doesn’t guarantee success. All of our ROI studies indicate that review volume is the primary driver of sales uplift, and follow-up email drives 95%of that review volume. (one such ROI study is with Netshops)
So, welcome Shopify merchants to the PowerReviews family! We are excited to partner with Jaded Pixel to offer you our award-winning review solution for Small and Medium-Sized Retailers fully integrated into your eCommerce Platform.
I wanted to share an article I read this morning from eConsultancy reporter Graham Charlton, who was recently shopping for a travel cot online. In his research, he encountered long lists of cots to sort through, as well as pages and pages of customer reviews to read for each cot. Having written on the topic of customer reviews before, Graham was struck by the problem of “how to make sense” of reviews when there were so many of them. He reflected on one of the tools that was developed by Amazon to help shoppers make sense of reviews — asking the crowd to vote on whether a review was helpful or not and allowing shoppers to then sort reviews by “most helpful”. At PowerReviews, we feel this innovation is so important that we recommend “most helpful” as the default sort order for reviews to all of our clients.
In his shopping research, Graham found his way to Kiddicare (as you might expect, a client of PowerReviews), and discovered two other innovations that were helpful in making sense of reviews for him – filtered navigation using review keywords (we call “Social Navigation”) and summaries of reviews (we call “Review Snapshots®”), both uniquely enabled by our “tag-based” approach to reviews.
When Andy and I started this business several years ago, we knew that SEO was an intrinsic part of the value equation for customer reviews. But to provide a review solution that grows in functionality with every product release, we chose to use Javascript on the client’s website to pull in new features as soon as they’re released, and in most cases with no effort by the client. The problem is that content using Javascript is invisible to search engines like Google and Yahoo! That is the case for Bazaarvoice, and that was the case for PowerReviews.
To work around the “invisibility” problem, both companies created special review landing pages (or “review mini-sites”) that search engines could index, bringing a sizeable stream of new search traffic to the mini-site. But not to the product page, and that’s the rub. Unlike any other page on the website, the product page is the best equipped page to convince visitors to buy. And it’s the place retailers and brands have chosen as the place to focus their SEO efforts.
Our new In-Line SEO solution brings together the merchandising and marketing power of customer reviews onto the Product Page, driving search traffic to the place it can generate the greatest sales. And doing so without sacrificing the productivity benefits of working with an outside service provider.
33% Increase in Sales from Natural Search
I could go on and on about why it’s important to have search-friendly review content on your product page, but the results speak for themselves. One of our first clients to implement In-Line SEO is Diapers.com, and they experienced some impressive results.
Within two weeks of implementing it, natural search traffic on Diapers.com increased by 49%. And because all of the incremental traffic landed on the product page, search-related sales increased by 33%. A key driver of the increased sales was a 59% rise in the number of keywords driving traffic to the site. (Diapers.com did not have an SEO solution for reviews prior to the launch of In-Line SEO).
You many have heard from Bazaarvoice that they offer an API to enable SEO on the product page – providing a coding interface to include customer reviews as HTML content on the product page. If you have explored this route, you probably discovered it would change the fundamental working relationship you have with your service provider. We know, because we have long provided an XML interface to our clients as a stop-gap SEO solution, and only 3 clients out of 300+ chose it. The vast majority of our customers did not because 1) it required them to build their own front-end display, and 2) it required new engineering development every time we released a new feature. And isn’t easy integration and no maintenance a key point of outsourcing?
Until now, retailers had only two choices for product page SEO — (1) “build-it-yourself” and get the full SEO benefits on the product page, or (2) outsource it to a SaaS provider and live with review landing pages. In-Line SEO™ gives you the benefits of both.
So welcome to the new world of outsourced customer reviews, where you can have your cake and eat it too!
Not one for blatant self-promotion, it’s time to step out of my normal self…
I’m super excited to announce that PowerReviews is one of 300 cool companies selected as Finalists for Webware 100 – the top 100 Web applications around the globe!Over 5,000 applications were nominated, and we’re proud to be one of the 300 Finalists.And we’re the only Customer Reviews and Social Commerce provider that made it!
Here’s where you come in – to actually become Webware 100 WINNER, we need your vote to be the best 10 out of 30 Commerce companies.
As you may know, we launched an on-demand version of PowerReviews in December, called PowerReviews Express™, focused on small and medium-sized online businesses.Express has the same tag-based reviews capabilities that are used by our Enterprise clients, such as REI, Staples and Toys “R” Us, but at an affordable price (starting at $80/month), and with a simple “wizard-based” set-up process.
We now have over 200 Express clients, including highly vertical sites like DiscGear.com, AlpacaDirect.com and FridgeFilters.com. Our early clients are starting to experience the same benefits that our Enterprise clients have already.To get a sense for that, here’s what Jim Hobart, the President of AlpacaDirect.com, has to say about the benefits he’s seeing from having reviews on his site.
Next Major Milestone – PowerReviews Express Partners with eBay’s ProStores
I’m excited to say that today, we are announcing an event that we think will trigger the next major milestone in the adoption of customer reviews and social media in online commerce, accelerating the pace of adoption by smaller retailers and brands.eBay’s ProStores group has selected PowerReviews Express to provide customer reviews to its 40,000+ small and medium-sized business customers.We have been working closely with ProStores to integrate PowerReviews Express into their platform to make it extremely quick and easy to implement, resulting in implementation times as short as one hour.
You’re probably aware of ProStores – it’s one of the largest providers of customizable online store solutions for small and medium-sized retailers – so it’s a big statement for a leader of this size to actively encourage its merchants to adopt customer reviews, and to make it super easy for them to do so.We see this as the next big step in the adoption curve of customer reviews, started over 12 years ago by Amazon.com. Now with the majority of larger eCommerce players having already adopted reviews, the next wave is to move to smaller companies and to companies in all major product categories.And with the adoption by the leading small-business ecommerce platform provider, the next step along the adoption curve begins.
As a second-time entrepreneur (the first company was Fogdog, an online sporting goods retailer), I have learned how important it is to be open-minded and flexible in tough times.At Fogdog, founded by Robert Chea and myself in 1996, we experienced the go-go Internet days of 1998 and 1999, as well as the unexpected and sudden downturn in the Internet economy, financing market and overall economy in 2000.Robert and I learned then that it’s critical to be proactive during economic downswings in order to minimize their effect.
Today, we are addressing the downturn in the following ways:
First, we have moved from a “subsidized pricing model” (where Buzzillions subsidizes Clients who share content with Buzzillions) to a “paid subscription” model, with monthly subscription fees considerably lower than other players in the market.
Second, we have created “PowerReviews Express” a lower-cost delivery model (starting at $80/month), aimed at the 200,000+ small and medium-sized online retailers and brands, with tools to make set-up and management of reviews much more efficient – for clients and for us.
Third, we have significantly expanded our revenue base with the launch of three new products, all of which are meeting or exceeding sales expectations.
AnswerBox – a question and answer solution for knowledgeable customers and staff experts to address questions posed by shoppers not yet ready to buy.
In-Line SEO™ – a breakthrough SEO feature that sends reviews-based search traffic directly to the product page where it generates the greatest sales uplift.
PowerReviews Express™ – described above.
Lastly, we are realigning our organization and reducing our headcount by seven people.
With the revenue enhancements, investments in our delivery model, headcount reductions and the continued growth of Buzzillions, we believe thatwe are doing what we need to ensure we stay healthy and not only weather the storm but thrive in 2009.
A posting on VKI Studios’ official company blog today, discussed the value that a “customer-facing, independently-moderated [customer review] system” brings to the online shopping experience.
A joint client of ours - PetWellBeing.com - had an in-house testimonials engine on their site and decided to enhance their system by implementing the PowerReviews customer reviews solution in an attempt to overcome two challenges:
Adding new testimonials was a lot of work, and therefore didn’t get done frequently enough
Some customers probably doubted how representative or authentic the testimonials were, as they were clearly hand selected by internal staff
Here’s an example of a past product testimonial:
Conversion Rate Increase:
After just a few months of launching reviews on PetWellBeing.com, “The results exceeded even our wildest expectations, ” writes Michael S. from VKI Studios. PetWellBeing.com has collected dozens of (overwhelmingly positive) reviews for many of their products in that time, but what’s even more notable is that fact that, “conversion rates of all products have increased…even those products that have received some negative reviews,” adds Michael.
Handling Negative Reviews:
VKI Studios offered a final tip in their posting: “Embrace the occasional negative review. Consider it a wonderful opportunity to improve your credibility and gain customer trust.”
PetWellBeing.com received a negative review from a “Verified Reviewer” (one who has entered his/her email address but is not verified to have actually made a purchase) saying that the product didn’t work well for him/her and doubting that any of the “testimonials” on the site were real.
Despite initial fears that such a review might be from a competitor trying to tarnish the company’s reputation, that it might plant seeds of distrust in the minds of other shoppers, or that it could decrease sales for that product, PetWellBeing.com expertly decided to allow the review to stay up on their site. By allowing the review to stay, they effectively discounted the accusations in the review and showed the reviewer (and all others) that these are in fact real reviews, written by real people and that they are not unfairly filtered to only display positive comments. With this simple act of transparency, the company has shown its customers that they encourage honest feedback, regardless of the star rating, and they have reaped the benefits as a result.
As we’ve discussed on numerous past occasions, negative reviews tend to elevate both credibility and resulting sales for entire product offerings, and PetWellBeing.com is a perfect example.
Our hat goes off to VKI Studios and PetWellBeing.com for overcoming those “surfacy” fears that many companies face when implementing and maintaining customer reviews. And a much deserved “congratulations” for increasing conversion rates through fair and honest business practices.
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