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.

• Highlight Top-Rated products on your site.  Check out REI’s Top-Rated products section on REI.com.  Utilizing our tags, you can also take it one step further by creating more personalized Top-Rated pages.  See Top-Rated women’s comfortable shoes for travel on OnlineShoes.com.

• 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.

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 can find more details in our In-Line SEO™ Case Study, but seriously, “WOW!”

Why not an API or XML?

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!