With the ability to purchase just about any product online, customers turn to the opinions of others to influence their next purchase. Whether they are shopping online or in a brick and mortar store, no one wants to be unhappy with their new purchase. Whether you are searching for the perfect pair of socks, or a fancy “last a lifetime” power tool, customer reviews will influence these purchases.
- Over 70% of Americans say they look at product reviews before making a purchase.
- Nearly 63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews.
It can be tough to build up reviews on your site depending on your site’s traffic, customer engagement and loyalty. Depending on what e-commerce platform you are using, there are a couple of options to drive an increase in reviews:
- Reward reviewers with Coupons: Some platforms can support this directly like WooCommerce which automatically sends the reviewer/customer a coupon upon successfully completing their product review. While you cannot selectively reward the customer based on the score, most customers will leave honest positive feedback if they feel they will be rewarded with something such as a coupon.
- Include review summaries in your site’s search results allowing these to show your strong customer satisfaction when searching for a specific product.
- Always sort your product from Newest to Oldest. This keeps the results relevant to recent sales.
- Never, ever add your phone fake reviews. Customers are smart and no good can come from this.
- Respond to customer’s review, even if its just to wish them well with their newly loved “widget”.
- Never require a customer to create an account to leave a review. While this might seem logical, many loyal customers do not want to create accounts for a variety of reasons.