A product review can help validate your product’s popularity. When customers see hundreds of reviews on a website, they feel like they can trust your brand. Before a customer goes ahead with a purchase, they’re likely to read a review. About 77% of customers read a review before making their purchase. According to Marketing Land, 90% of people say that their buying decisions, whether or not they buy your product, are influenced by the reviews they read. So if your store has positive reviews, you can land more sales. But getting reviews isn’t a one time thing. You need to constantly reach out to your customers to grow your store’s reviews. About 73% of shoppers don’t find reviews older than 3 months to be relevant.
Example: Sephora is one of the most popular beauty online stores. Their high number of reviews prove this. One of their newest products a Just Peachy Velvet Eye Shadow Palette has received over 800 reviews and 40,000 loves. They include all reviews to their website even the negative ones. When a customer reviews a product, the reader can easily see the customer’s age, eye color, hair color, skin tone, and skin type. If a customer with similar details rates it positively, a potential customer may purchase the product because it’s likely it’ll look good on them. Customers can easily sort to only read reviews from their beauty matches to get the best understanding of whether or not a product is a good fit for her. Reviews can even be sorted by most helpful, newest, oldest, and rating level. Customers can even view looks from their beauty matches for those looking to see photos of the product being used.
Product Review Tips:
Ask your customers. Asking customers for review is the most effective way to get reviews. According to Search Engine Land, about 70% of customers will leave a product or business review when asked to. So whether you send them a quick email after they’ve received their product or have an app do that for you, you can grow your product reviews from customers simply by letting them know you’d love one.
You can also reward customers for a review. For example, if you have a loyalty program you can offer a discount, points or small gift card in exchange for the product review from your customer. This can help incentivize customers to leave a review.
Use an app that automatically adds positive reviews and contacts your support team if it’s anything lower than a 3 star. This will give you a second opportunity to resolve your customers’ issue without damaging your reputation. You’ll need to make sure that you offer that customer a great solution that helps ensure you deserve a higher rating.
Add photo reviews. Photo reviews are one of the most effective reviews around. Seeing a picture of a customer with the delivered product allows potential customers to have set expectations. You can even contact those customers and ask for their permission to use their product photos for your social media or advertising. Photo reviews helps you gain social proof that your brand is reputable and delivers great products.
Don’t write fake reviews. You’re trying to build a brand. Trust in building that brand is important. If you have 10 reviews and no followers on social media, it’s gonna look fake. Avoid deceiving people. If you haven’t made any sales yet, your focus shouldn’t be on getting reviews but on getting customers. Once you start getting customers, that’s when you can focus on building up your reviews.
However, you can borrow reviews from AliExpress. While customers won’t mention your brand they will be able to offer insight into the product. This can be helpful for encouraging customers to take a chance and buy the product. The more information you can share about the product the more likely a customer is to buy it if it’s right for them.
Use an app that optimizes reviews for search. Getting a rich snippet helps make your product link more enticing to browsers. When a customer sees a review rich snippet it’ll show your star rating on the product. The more reviews you get on a product, the more likely you are to get a review rich snippet.
Encourage customers to leave reviews on your website when they post externally. There are so many platforms where a customer can leave a review. Social media, Google and review sites are just some of the popular places where customers leave reviews. If you notice your Instagram or Facebook are flooding with customer photos, contact those customers and ask them to leave their photo review on your website. Offer them a small free gift as a thank you for the review, even if it’s just a discount code with their name on it.
Offer free samples. You can grow your reviews when starting out by offering people free samples. You can ask them to take a picture with the product and ask them to leave a review if they were happy with it. Ask them to give you feedback on the product directly as well. Do they like the look and feel? What would prevent them from buying that product? Would they buy several of a similar product?
Make leaving a review super easy. Some apps allow you to enter your review in your email and it automatically posts it on your website. This makes the review process hassle free for a customer.
Ask for a review shortly after a customer has received their product. If you contact the customer six months or even a year later, they may not be as excited about the product as they were when they first received it.
Product reviews can also be from professional product reviewers. There are many product blogs that write product reviews for brands and share them with their audience. Some of these product review bloggers offer giveaways to their audience for a chance to win your product. Others give an in-depth look into the exact product you sell. Either way, it’s a great way to tap into a new audience. While generic product review sites may have bigger audiences, niche review sites offer a more targeted audience for your brand.
Product Review Tools:
Product Reviews by Shopify is a product review app that allows you to quickly see all your reviews in one spot. The review is optimized for search and will show the products star rating and number of votes in its Google listing. The app matches the font and design of your theme to ensure a consistent look.
Product Reviews Add-on by Stamped is an extension of Shopify’s product review app. It offers a great selection of features. Customers are able to leave their product review directly in their email making it easy for them. You can easily track which customers will be getting emails about writing a review. Positive reviews can be posted on Facebook and Twitter as posts to showcase why customers love your brand. It even has an AI feature that checks to see if the feedback matches the star rating. When customers leave 1 or 2 star reviews, they’re redirected to an apology page where you can add a discount code to win back a second chance.
Judge.Me Product Reviews sends customers emails to help you grow your reviews. Customers can leave their review directly in their email. You’re free to customize the review emails anyway you want. You can even blacklist customers who’ve already left reviews. The app runs quickly so customers can view reviews faster. Customers can even leave photo reviews. Store owners can reply to customer reviews to thank customers or offer a solution.
Photo Reviews by Loox is a customer photo review app. Reviews with customer photos can help increase conversions making this a great app for social proof. Emails are sent out to get reviews in an automated process. You’re free to customize the app’s color scheme, email timing and more. You can moderate reviews to choose which get posted. It even has a rich snippets integration to help your rating appear in search results.
Product Reviews by Appsonrent is a review app that simplifies getting online reviews. You can view all your reviews on the app with ease. You can even reply to your customer’s reviews.
Smile by ShopPad allows your customers to rate your products with emojis. This is great for brands looking to be a little bit different. If you’re selling to Gen Z or millennials this app may be a way to get them engaged and leave a product review.
Yotpo Social Reviews claims to be able to help store owners generate 3x more reviews than any other review app. They’ve partnered with Google, Facebook and other social networks to help you retain more customers. The app is optimized for search and will also help boost your conversion rate. Customers can add their own photo reviews. Your product will show its star rating and number of reviews when you run Google ads. Your customers can even push their reviews and photos on Pinterest. You can respond to your reviews on this app too.
Ali Reviews by FireApps allows those who dropship to import AliExpress reviews. That way customers can see the reviews of those who’ve ordered that specific product. This is particularly useful for new store owners who haven’t built up any real customer reviews. While the reviews won’t be store specific, they’ll be real reviews for that product from that supplier.
Product Review Resources:
Hubspot’s 19 Online Review Sites for Collecting Business & Product Reviews lists 19 different websites who will review your product or business. Not all of the sites are good for dropshippers so use discretion. However, you can also look up other product review sites on your own to find someone who will review your product to their audience to give you social proof. When I’ve sent products to product review sites in the past, we were able to get a few sales and grow our social media following from it.
