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.

And, a quick look through the agenda reveals a star line-up of not only keynote folks, but roundtable and case study presenters too – the real nuts and bolts of these types of workshops.

PowerReviews (www.powerreviews.com) is honored to not only sponsor Wednesday’s Retail Case Study Round Tables, but participating as well. Our very own Marketing Analyst Yury Polnar will be presenting a case study in partnership with Jim Healy, Product Manager at Onlineshoes.com, regarding the successes Jim has seen by using customer reviews in their social merchandising efforts.

Today, I am honored to be hosting a round table discussion on Creating a Consistent Experience in the Multi-Channel Environment. And when I say honored, I mean it.

Look at some of the roundtable hosts:

• Tony Brown of Timberland
• Brenda Spencer of Harry & David
• Patti Freeman Evans of Jupiter Research
• Jay Greenberg of Spencer’s
• George Michie of The Rimm-Kaufman Group
• Bryan Eisenberg of Future Now, Inc
• Ben Viscon of REI
• Pinny Gniwisch of Ice.com
• Nancy Miller of Woodcraft Supply
• Stephanie Pike of Circuit City

Not only am I honored by such company but thrilled as well as many of the above I consider not only esteemed colleagues but dear friends as well.

I’ll keep you posted as the events unfurl, but for those of you not here please know this – you are missing out so make plans to be here next time!

I am thrilled to share with you two more retailers that have integrated customer feedback directly into the site navigation. In conjunction with their platform provider GSI Commerce, Toys R Us and Dick’s Sporting Goods both began offering the social navigation experience on their respective sites.

So what does this really mean? Let me both explain and show you:

Toys R Us

On the Toys R Us site, shoppers visiting the Games and Puzzles Category can now browse for products based on highly relevant insights from customers just like them. Our customer reviews solution uses a tag-based approach for gathering data which can then be summarized and presented as additional filtering choices in the site navigation. In addition to narrowing selections by price, brand or color, shoppers at Toys R Us are only one click away from discovering games and puzzles that are easy to assemble or have clear instructions or great for the backyard. Equally important is the ability to find items recommended by other casual or avid game players or, which I think is incredibly empowering, are from Child Care Providers – now that is one voice that many folks might want to hear from.

Here are some of the navigational choices now available in the Games and Puzzles category:

Pros

• Awesome
• Clear Instructions
• Easy Assembly

Best Uses

Backyard
Creative Development
Entertainment

User Profile

• Avid Gamer
• Casual Player
• Child Care Provider

While powered by the same technology, the experience on Dicks Sporting Goods is excitedly different in both presentation and filtering choices presented to the shoppers. The new tags ideally capture the voice of the reviewer in terms of the type of golfer they are and the specific product attributes they are interested in, allowing the shopper to connect with the product.

Visiting the Golf Clubs, Drivers category, avid shoppers quickly notice the addition of star ratings in the product list display – immediately signaling that reviews must be near by!
Dick’s Sporting Goods

The names for the customer feedback section headers are slight different with more intimate headers like Why I like it and About me. With this implementation, shoppers can quickly and easily find the drivers that match them and their interests such as the most accurate for off the tee use by other beginners like me. And with just three clicks the shopper is presented with 10 products to choose from out of the original 79 drivers presented.

Why I like it

• Accurate
• Comfortable
• Large sweet spot

How I use it

• Long Holes
• Off the tee
• Replacement

About me

• Beginner
• Casual player
• Golf Enthusiast
• Tournament golfer

I invite you all to see these experiences for themselves and play around and watch the magic happen.

Oh, and one final note. There are those out there that are saying that their site offers social navigation just because they integrated the rating level into their navigation – such as shop for items that are 4 Star or higher. While this “technically” can qualify as social navigation, it certainly does not capture the spirit or experience that the term suggests. In fact that is like referring to a Vespa as a motorcycle! So beware out there – make sure you know what you want and don’t settle for less!

How do I know all this? Well, we have just such a PowerReviews customer – Onlineshoes.com.

Customer Spotlight: Onlineshoes.com

From our very first meeting we knew they “got it.” They immediately grasped the value our relevancy-based reviews solution brings to today’s online shopping experience and the impact our innovative, tag-based approach could have on what is already the widely adopting practice of selling shoes online.

Starting with the basics

Shoes need to fit. Period. And with all online shoe companies offering free shipping on returns to eliminate any concern a customer might have about ordering shoes that might not fit right, adding reviews to provide accurate sizing information to shoppers was a no-brainer. Sales go up, returns go down. The Onlineshoes.com folks, however, saw this as “a given” and the starting point for what any review solution would provide. What they were more interested in was what they could achieve beyond ensuring a proper shoe fit. Because in the world of shoes, fit is just the first, but required, hurdle to cross for shoppers – with real satisfaction being achieved when the shoes they buy are as comfortable as they had hoped or provided the traction they wanted or better yet, were the right look for that weekend barbeque or special occasion.

Onlineshoes.com realized from the start that by fully integrating our review system into their online shopping experience, our enhanced review content could address product concerns well beyond just size and fit. That’s because we gather feedback in a tag-based format around the Pros, Cons and Best Uses for each product, providing shoppers with more informative and highly relevant customer reviews. To realize the full power of reviews, though, Onlineshoes would have to leverage reviews throughout their entire shopping process, beyond just the product page. And that is exactly what they did.

Social Navigation

Well, they did it! Onlineshoes is the very first website to offer Social Navigation – the ability to narrow product selection based on feedback from customers just like them – to the ecommerce world. Because of the structured format of our review content, the terms or “tags” gathered during the review submission process can be directly integrated into site navigation, presenting shoppers with additional filtering choices to browse products and narrow product selections based on real customer feedback, In addition to browse by color or by size, shoppers can now chose to browse products that other customers have said were “comfortable” or “warm” or were great for “wet weather” – all the things you would want to be absolutely sure of before their first use.

I invite you all to experience Social Navigation first hand and see the very first instance of the future of online shopping. (scroll down past the “Colors” navigation to see Customer Feedback choices)

Onlineshoes

Finally I would like to publicly acknowledge the incredible group of folks, led by Jimmy Healey, Product Manager at Onlineshoes, who shared this vision with us and worked incredibly hard and smart to achieve this incredible milestone. Here are some highlights and accomplishments along the way:

• Pre-launch email blast to last 6-months of customers generated a review volume at launch covering 20% of their product assortment with some of the more popular products having more than 20 reviews.
• Tested subject lines in the email before committing to the Big Blast to make sure they got the highest open and review submission rate possible.
• Displaying the ratings snippet with the product on all category list pages helped promote the awareness of reviews to their shopping base, further driving the adoption or reviews which covered 30% of products within the first two months.

Realizing the vision

We have been busting at the seams to tell the world about our vision coming to life, but this functionality was launched just a short while ago and we are still gathering data and developing related metrics. For those of you that may have some of our earliest sales collateral, you’ll see that Social Navigation is a since the very beginning. We did know that we would have to be patient, though, as Social Navigation is dependent on several factors, the most important of which is review volume – including the penetration of reviews across product categories as well as the depth of reviews per product.

The cat is out of the bag

With the recent interview in February’s Internet Retailer Magazine: The Power of Customer Reviews, Jimmy Healey at Onlineshoes shared with the internet world his early findings with their implementation of social navigation.

I could go on and on and on and on about this great company but then I would never get any work done. I suggest all of you keep your eyes on these guys as I continue to expect great things from them as they find greater ways to harness the power of customer reviews across their website!

Next in the series – Top Rated Emails
My mail just got rated!
Not so obvious – buyers, merchandisers, vendor feedback, customer returns..,the synergistic perks.
Multi-channel – catalogs, kiosks and in-store

I am down that the Internet Retailer Web Design ’08 in Miami this week (and yes, I jetted back across the U.S. yet again having just been in Orlando for the Shop.org event) and must confess I am truly impressed with the show.

Of course, like lots of folks I had my doubts about this first, single topic focused event by Internet Retailer as they had been doing just a singe wide ranging national event up to now. But I can say unconditionally that they hit a BIG home run with this show. People are all a buzz with the quality of speakers and content on the first day as well as the small amount of vendors are getting large traffic to their booths with matching interest from retailers.

While we do not have a booth here at this event given our travel schedule, I am walking the show because some of our partners and client are speaking. The presentation by my dear friend Lauren Freedman, president and founder of the eTailing Group is still being talked about this morning. Lauren always hits one out of the park. And I am expecting the same from Glenn Edelman of The Wine Enthusiast who is the closing act for the show, speaking on Making Site Search Do More Than Just Return Results. I suspect he will be sharing with the audience his plans for implementing Social Navigation – the ability to filter product selections by customer feedback such as comfortable, soft, easy to use – on their website in 2008!

Trust me on this one folks; you definitely want to put this show on your list for 2009!

Left jab…

And if that was not enough “love” already from Internet Retailer, yesterday an enormously important article, The Power of Reviews by my new dear friend Mary Wagner hit the wires. This is a MUST read for every retailer as it is packed with important information and insights about reviews, pricing models as well as a quick introduction to Social Navigation as implemented by onlineshoes.com.

It is indeed an honor to be featured by such a respected and well known industry giant known for superb coverage of all think ecommerce!