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.

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.

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!

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:

1. Adding new testimonials was a lot of work, and therefore didn’t get done frequently enough
2. 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.

A number of our clients and partners have been forwarding these stories to us with notes of disbelief – they are surprised there is still a fear of negative reviews out there despite the numerous reports and findings that stress the importance and value of “negative reviews” (e.g. Forrester’s “Myths and Truths about Customer Reviews” report, Dec. 2008). I set out on a cross-country tour, speaking with several of our clients and hearing their questions and insights about recent events and the state of customer reviews in general. I’d like to share some of those conversations (as well as some internal analysis) with you:

Having collected nearly 5 million customer reviews from more than 350 retailers, we have a pretty clear picture of the distribution of product ratings. We have found that 92% of all reviews are positive (with star ratings of 3 or higher). That leaves only 8% of reviews that are negative (ranking of 2 stars or lower). And since these 8% negative reviews are dispersed among many thousands of products, the negative impact to particular products is quite low. But there are, undoubtedly, products that have consistently negative reviews, and to be able to identify those “less than stellar” products early and confidently enables retailers (and even brands) to enhance their product offering by addressing these concerns in the product (or in the case of the retailer, pulling them from their shelves) so future shoppers don’t have a negative experience as well. More importantly, we know that some negative comments (including “cons”) add credibility to reviews and actually increase the chance of selling that product. It’s all about getting the “complete picture” of a product. Since consumers don’t believe there are “perfect” products, they just want to be informed about the cons (or shortcoming) of a product and decide for themselves whether they can live with them.

In short, if you’ve decided to give your customers the opportunity to communicate with you and other shoppers about your products, it’s important to allow them to voice all of their experiences (whether they be good or bad). Today’s consumers are extremely savvy and can identify fraudulent reviews and unethical business practices with ease – we encourage you to use reviews as an open and transparent communication channel with your customers, not a vehicle with which to dilute credible user insights by adding (or removing) content.

I’m not surprised at all that people are trying to “game the system” and influence product ratings and reviews, and particularly friends of people who work for a manufacturer. It’s something we’ve been worrying about since the company was started, and something we regularly try to find ways to minimize (it can’t be eliminated completely). The “Verified Buyer” feature from PowerReviews is one way, together with the proactive “survey engine” we set up with tens and hundreds of thousands of surveys being sent out every day by retailers to people they know have purchased the product they are reviewing. The biggest benefit this provides is to “drown out” the few reviews that aren’t real, i.e. gamed.

The other mechanism to minimize the effect of fake positive reviews is the voracity of the community itself, and of the individual reviewer. We believe that most people who read reviews are fairly sophisticated, and can sniff out fake reviews (few specifics, no concerns voiced at all, limited comments…). Plus, most review systems have the question “How helpful was this review?” at the bottom of every review, so the readers/shoppers can vote their suspicions. That way, other shoppers can then sort reviews by “most helpful”. In addition, we believe that having “most helpful” as the default sort order is the best way to empower the shopper to make a confident decision, which is how we do it on our product research portal, buzzillions.com.

The part that did surprise me was the outward and open advertisement for positive reviews. if, in fact, it was the Belkin business development person, then it’s one of the less smart moves I’ve heard of in a while. Especially, given the huge and hungry community of “citizen reporters”, together with Goggle alerts, that get the word out so quickly. But I could see people who have a lapse in judgment actually do something like this…once.

My initial instinct was that this was actually a move by a competitor (or personal enemy) who put up an ad like this with that person’s name on it, know it would be found out and distributed widely (like it has been). But if that was the case, Belkin would have immediately disclaimed it.

Bottom line…I think that gaming will become more of a problem, and, unless we continue to advance our abilities to minimize it, it will become worse. Of course, that’s where we come in.

Internet Retailing fake reviews mention: “Keeping the trust in user reviews”

On a smaller scale, PowerReviews has undergone its own significant changes this past year.

1. We now have more than 350 Enterprise clients (up from 150)
2. We launched PowerReviews Express to help small and mid-sized retailers take advantage of our solutions
3. We launched some some exciting new products including AnswerBox, an iPhone App to aid in-store shopping, Social Cross-Sell and Hero Images
4. We expanded internationally to the UK, France, Germany in multiple languages with La Redoute, KiddiCare, iRobot, Shop Direct and many more leading retailers
5. Buzzillions broke past 4 million reviews and established itself as a leader in using reviews to help customers make smarter shopping decisions. See the write-up on Buzzillions in the WSJ

Although there are many factors that contribute to this huge success, we truly believe that it was primarily resulted from building true partnerships with each individual client. This spans from working together to collect as many highly-relevant reviews as possible to drive conversions, to working together on experimental ideas through Buzzillions, to SEO optimization methods and Social Navigation deployments. Our original vision of creating a highly-aligned network of retailers, manufacturers and partners has solidly taken root this year.

Looking ahead into 2009, we see a lot of exciting new trends in the world of ratings and reviews (and other customer-generated content/community).

1. Reviews will be ubiquitous.  Most of the IR Top 500 retailers will have deployed reviews and that trend will continue to the smaller/niche retailers. Brands and luxury retailers will also start to adopt these technologies.
2. Because reviews will be everywhere, consumers will actively seek out those sources that are more CREDIBLE and RELEVANT…which means that consumers will become ultra-sensitized to reviews that look like “testimonials” or “marketing copy” vs. “unbiased reviews”. I also expect that more unethical marketers will try to sneak fake reviews into the system.
3. Reviews will morph into a 3-way dialog between other customers, the retailers and the manufacturer. Everything we build (Customer Reviews, AnswerBox, etc) encompass the idea of a “network” where content can be easily aggregated, analyzed, shared amongst all the partners.
4. Retailers & Manufacturers will start tapping the rich data to improve their businesses. Manufacturers will use customer feedback to improve their product development and product marketing processes. And Retailers will do the same to tune their product assortment and merchandising strategies.

What are your predictions?

On a closing note, as we contemplate all the opportunities (and challenges) ahead, I want to thank all of our fabulous clients who have worked so collaboratively to make PowerReviews successful, our network of partners who have evangelized our products and leveraged the reviews in creative ways, and the entire PowerReviews team whose talent and dedication have made this year successful.

Thank you again for another great year, and have a relaxing and well-deserved holiday!

-Andy

Because Buzzillions.com acts as a consumer facing testing-ground for innovative new services and features, we are in a unique position to observe how shoppers use and interact with reviews. And as we gather those critical insights, our clients benefit both from the high quality traffic we send from Buzzillions and from the enhancements that we develop for our clients.

Measurable Results

With online shoppers becoming savvier and demanding more thorough and objective product information, many have turned to Buzzillions for honest reviews and answers to their most pressing product-related questions. Despite the tough economic climate this year, we have seen an increase of more than 300% in site visits over last year, and the affiliate traffic we send converts at a site-wide-average of over 3% (significantly higher than the retailer’s normal conversion rate) – with some retailers consistently receiving traffic that converts upwards of 18%.

But the real reason consumers are visiting Buzzillions and clicking through to our affiliate partners is because of the large number of high quality reviews – in 2008 we grew site content from 1 Million to more than 4 Million reviews.

Seeing how Buzzillions sends highly qualified traffic to more than 350 retail publishers, several retailers outside of the PowerReviews solution network (those with in-house reviews solutions as well as BazaarVoice clients) have approached us with the goal of featuring their products and reviews on Buzzillions too. We are now proudly featuring review feeds from several marquee clients including Walmart, Sears, Best Buy, Home Depot and Macy’s.

Media Coverage

In addition to increased attention from leading online retailers searching for a proven affiliate partner, major media publications are noticing Buzzillions too. Walt Mossberg and his associate Katherine Boehret of the Wall Street Journal gave Buzzillions a very positive and surprisingly long (1/2 page) review: WSJ Article. And ABC News reported that “Buzzillions” was a top rising search term in Google: ABC News Video. To see a more comprehensive list of media coverage, please visit the media center page on PowerReviews.com.

Behind the Numbers

While these metrics, client signings and media attention are indeed interesting (and encouraging given the economic climate), essential are the driving forces behind these accomplishments. Allow me to give you a behind-the-numbers look at Buzzillions (according to actual users).

In our recent Buzzillions site re-design, we introduced new tools and functionality designed to engage shoppers and empower them to buy confidently at our affiliate partners’ stores. To hear whether our efforts were successful, we reached out to several lifestyle blogs and invited their readers to visit Buzzillions and share their honest opinions in the public sphere for a chance to win some holiday cash.

Needless to say, people were anxious to share their opinions about Buzzillions and we were anxious to hear them. Here are a few interesting comments from those blogs, but I encourage you to visit the blogs and view all of the comments:

“…They even categorize reviewers, ie. if the review was done by a first time parent, a working parent, a parent of two or more children. Very cool. Terrific site that will save shoppers a lot of time.” Read all comments here.

“I like the review format which gives large picture of what’s good and what’s bad and groups them by like categories (Pros, Cons, Best Uses) so you don’t HAVE to read every single review of a product.” Read all comments here.

“It’s a great review website. I love how the pros and cons are very clearly listed…” Read all comments here.

Through our consumer-centric focus, we were able to learn, design and implement major new features on Buzzillions that both enhanced the shopping experience for shoppers and drove significant traffic and conversion growth for Buzzillions and its affiliates. And we’re really pleased to be getting the attention from bloggers and the press as well.

Thanks for a great year, Happy Holidays and please stay tuned for more great sucesses in 2009!

Assuming it is accurate, this is a huge number and all I can think about are the costs associated with serving those impressions and the risks to retailers of having an outside vendor hosting this content.

Our competitor recently issued a press release saying that they served up mountains of review content for their retailers on Cyber Monday. Good for them, I am happy that their servers held up and that they didn’t have CTOs calling them asking why their product pages were hanging on their SaaS provider when people were trying to buy stuff (especially in this “don’t-risk-revenue” year).

Retailers already have fully scaled web hosting capabilities in-house, and at PowerReviews, we have built a system that leverages this to provide a low cost and low risk Review Solution through our Asymetrical ASP. From the start, we invested in and built more efficient technology that helps our entire network of retailers use the systems that they have already built without loss of control or downtime risk. Our clients’ CTOs and IT departments truly appreciate the fact that they are not dependent of someone else’s system for page reads. Bazaarvoice’s solution has them hosting the reviews for you. With PowerReviews you control the data and it’s your choice whether it is hosted by us or you.

None of our clients are worrying about the servers staying up. They can focus on collecting volumes of trusted reviews and then leveraging their value for things like SEO improvements and Top Rated Gear sections to sell more of their best products.

Looking back to 2006 when a minority of the retailers on the Top 500 had customer reviews and answers on their websites, I would say that we have all come a long way in empowering the customer’s voice. That being said, you might want to carefully consider the implications of the “progress” you read about as it relates to the delivery of these benefits.

Some friendly advice: Big Macs and Big Hosting Fees might not always be what the doctor ordered.

On behalf of everyone here at PowerReviews, I would like to say “Thank You” to Jay Shaffer for his passion, dedication and amazing accomplishments during his time as our VP Worldwide Sales and Marketing. His animated and uplifting personality will certainly be missed in this office, but we are excited to see what lucky adventure Jay will lead to success next.

Yesterday marked a big day for PowerReviews. We launched the next generation of Buzzillions.com. You may have read about it in yesterday’s Mossberg column in the Wall Street Journal, titled “Finding the Right Product Review for You“. I wanted to share with you the key enhancements we made and lessons we learned in the research and testing process that I believe can help you take advantage of the PowerReviews review solution. Keep in mind that the lessons we learn on the real-life way users engage with reviews on Buzzillions helps us better prioritize functionality in our PowerReviews solutions.

Starting about 9 months ago, we conducted a number of research and usability studies to understand the psychology of purchase decision making and how customer reviews fit into that psychology. We learned some very basic but extremely important things that guided our design and development efforts:

• The problem that reviews solve is “the fear of making a mistake“, which they can’t afford (especially in today’s economy), and “the pain associated with returning a product when they do”.

• As a result, what people look for the most in reviews is “seeing the downside of a product” in order to make a balanced decision on whether that downside is relevant to them (e.g. a bad instruction manual may not matter to technically savvy people).

• Therefore, Cons are key. Or shall I say “Cons are King“. People don’t believe any product is perfect. If consumers don’t see cons or negative comments in at least some of the reviews, they are suspicious of the reviews, and are driven to continue on in their research process.

• If they do see cons, negative comments or less than perfect ratings, consumers are then able to feel “complete in their research” (like a switch has been flipped), and they are ready to transact with the retailer.

With this in mind, we did a complete re-design of the site and added several key features to help users feel like they’re getting the complete story (positives and negatives), and can feel complete in their research.

Features we added:

• Buzzillions Rank – To know how a product stacks up against the rest, every product on Buzzillions has a “Buzzillions Rank” – a score that incorporates the star rating, number of reviews and credibility of the reviewers. A 5-star product with just 1 review is not likely to be the best product. In addition, a star rating on its own is not definitive. For example, a 3.6 star rating for a Handheld GPS device is actually the lowest ranked product in that category.

• Affinity Reviews – Customer reviews are now organized by affinity groups so shoppers can read reviews from people most like themselves. For instance, if you’re buying a gift for your sister who just had her first baby, you can read reviews for Jogging Baby Strollers just for “First Time Parent”.

Features we enhanced:

• Review Snapshot® – Our research shows that the Review Snapshot is considered a big time saver in the research process, allowing shoppers to scan dozens of products before they drill down to read individual reviews. We re-designed the Snapshot to make the Pros, Cons and Best Uses easier to read at-a-glance (column format, high to low), and put Cons on the same level as Pros, so it appears to get “equal treatment” (to make sure they see the negatives).

• Affinity Recommendations (aka Social Navigation) – We made Affinity Recommendations (the ability to get recommendations from “people like you”) more prominent and easy to use at the top of the product listings on category pages.

• “Most Helpful” as Default Sort – We made “most helpful” the default sort for reviews, which displays the most credible reviews first. This increases the chance they’ll see negative feedback along with the good. Usually “rants” are not voted very highly, so it gives the balanced and helpful reviews the highest visibility.

We will be tracking the response to all of these enhancements on Buzzillions and are looking forward to sharing the findings with you. In the meantime, I think you might find some of the insights in the WSJ article pretty interesting, especially relating to affinity reviews and recommendations, or as they put it “culling the most appropriate product reviews for people based on personality traits.”

Now, if you would indulge me, I wanted to send a huge “Thank You” to all the people at PowerReviews for a job well done! This has been the most comprehensive team effort I’ve ever been involved in with every individual person in the company participating in a significant way, and we’re all excited about the “early returns” from the effort.

Going forward, you will see many different people from PowerReviews share their learnings and insights on the new “PowerReviews InSite” blog including my team member Yury Polnar, who leads the market research efforts at PowerReviews. Until then, if you’d like to send me comments, please email me: “andy [at] powerreviews [dot] com”

Andy Chen
CEO