Customer reviews on the Internet strongly influence users’ decisions. Positive and authentic evaluations provide other customers with important purchasing arguments and can increase sales by an average of 30 percent. In this blog post, we will tell you how to get more positive reviews to improve your conversion rate. Here are five tips and best practice examples.
1. Share Experiences
Encourage your customers to share their experiences. An easy way to do this are after-sales emails that are sent shortly after the order has been placed. For example, Zalando asks for an evaluation by email a few days after the order confirmation. Particularly convenient is the feature that the buyer can click on the stars directly in the email.
Boooking.com even sends several emails per trip, including reminders. The approach here is similar: The user can input his/her rating directly in the email and is forwarded to the website for additional details.
2. Integrate Evaluation Forms
It is not always the best solution to ask your customers for feedback via email. In addition, disturbing pop-ups for ratings have the tendency to bother users while they are browsing the online shop. This bears the risk of customers exiting the purchase funnel. However, there are examples that show how you can integrate evaluation forms into the customer journey in a meaningful way.
Both on the product page and on the category page, visitors can interact using the buttons. This is combined with the call to action “Rate Now”.
3. Ratings Need a Good Reason
Hardly anyone spends time on ratings for no reason – even if it is only five seconds to click on asterisks and the “Send Feedback” button. A glance into the email inbox quickly shows that the same call to actions are used over and over again. Lines like “Your opinion is important to us” or “We would like to improve our service further and further” are among the most popular ones. Such call to actions are not wrong, but certainly do not attract the highest attention and are ignored quickly.
Therefore, make sure that you provide your customers with added value and explain why they should give a rating.
Airbnb plays with the curiosity of its customers at this point: Customers cannot read their own rating until having rated the host. Deadlines also mean that ratings are more likely to be given (“I do it because it’s only possible until tomorrow.”).
4. Make the Process as Simple as Possible
The faster customers can submit their reviews and the less effort and time is required, the better. With helpful hints (for example, which aspects the review should contain) you can save users a lot of processing time. This leads to more reviews with high-quality content.
Inspiring questions in the input box help guide users and assist in the thought process by providing first ideas. With some providers, the overall evaluation is even more simplified by dividing the review into three or more main characteristics.
5. Reward the Evaluator
Generally, the author of a review does not benefit for any obvious reasons. This is why the principle of reciprocity is used to motivate the user and create an incentive.
Online giants like Amazon or TripAdvisor base their entire business on customer ratings. Accordingly, substantial work is done to get as many customer reviews as possible, mostly through ranking systems. Gamification can motivate users to regularly share their experiences. At Amazon, a Hall-of-Fame is maintained for this purpose in addition to a list of 10,000 top reviewers.
At TripAdvisor, users with a particularly high number of customer ratings are rewarded with special badges and are encouraged to submit even more reviews.
The technical integration of a rating system is usually not an obstacle. It could, however, be more difficult for online shops with a low level of awareness to collect a sufficient number of customer opinions. Nevertheless, it is important to actively address this issue.
What Influence do Customer Reviews Have?
Various studies have shown that customer reviews have a positive influence on buying behavior. Ekomi’s infographics show, for example, that sales of products with a positive rating increase by an average of around 30 percent.
Psychologists explain this behavior with the effect of the Social Proof: People usually follow the behavior of others – even when shopping online.
Increasing numbers of potential buyers turn to online product reviews via smartphones, even in classic retail stores. Instead of relying on the individual opinion of a salesperson, they are relying on the statements of independent people – in other words, on customers who have actually tested the product.
The following figures confirm that this is no different for online purchases: Just one rating increases the conversion rate by 10%. (Source: eKomi 2016)
We are happy to support you in obtaining customer reviews.
