PowerReviews Insider » customer reviews

PowerReviews Express Launches Review Accelerator

Kamran Lotfi — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:49:06 +0000

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.

Mining the Gold: 5 ways to really leverage customer reviews

Matt Parsons — Wed, 20 May 2009 18:24:30 +0000

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.

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.

Making Sense of Reviews. Are there too many of them?

Darby Williams — Thu, 07 May 2009 00:46:32 +0000

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.

I’ll let Graham describe his experience shopping on Kiddicare.com in his article, How to organise e-commerce product reviews.

A Big Step for Us (and Small Retailers)

Darby Williams — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:21:57 +0000

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.