How to Encourage Product Reviews on Shopify Stores April 19, 2016 19:00
As your Shopify store grows, creating new and unique content can start taking up a lot of your time. One way to help get unique content on your store is through product reviews. Reviews are extremely helpful as they provide information about your products from a user perspective. This helps build trust in potential customers, and can also improve search optimization.
In this post, we’ll go over four ways you can encourage customers to provide product reviews, and look at a few Shopify apps that can be used for review management.
Encourage product reviews: 1. Make the ask
Obvious as this may be, sometimes merchants forget to ask people for reviews in order confirmation or follow up emails. Simply having the ability for customers to post reviews may not be enough. You should explicit ask customers to leave a review for the product(s) they purchased.
This shows that you care about what customers say about your products, which can help build customer loyalty. It also prompts people with a specific avenue for sharing their experience.
Encourage product reviews: 2. Offer incentives
According to Power Reviews, even though 95% of customers use reviews in making their purchasing decision, only 42% actually write reviews. One of the best strategies to gain reviews is to give something back in return. Typically, when a customer posts a review, it is for the benefit of other visitors to your store. By providing an incentive, you create value for the customer posting the review.
95% of customers use reviews to make purchase decisions, but only 42% write a review for products they’ve purchased.
You can offer one of your lower-priced products, provide discount codes for your store, or give a store credit towards your store purchases. All these incentives provide customers with tangible or monetary value, and gain you future purchases as well.
Encourage product reviews: 3. Send giveaways and samples
In general, all types of reviews are good as they provide you and potential customers feedback about your products. Reviews are even better when they are well-written and detailed. You can specifically target a list of high quality reviewers who are customers, or industry bloggers and reviewers to write reviews about your products.
You can send free giveaways and samples of your existing or upcoming products to get reviews. In this way, you have the opportunity to receive detailed reviews that touch different aspects of the product experience. On top of the product description that you provide, this can go a long way in informing potential buyers about your products.
Encourage product reviews: 4. Build a connection
This is something that helps in all aspects of your business – whether that’s increasing sales, building loyalty, creating advocates, and creating a great customer experience to grow your business. You want your customers to care about your products and your brand.
You can make the extra effort to connect with your customers through personalized lifecycle emails, through customer service and support, or by surpassing their expectations. Some ways of creating a “wow” experience are:
- sending a gift on your customer’s birthday (if they’ve shared the date)
- adding a free gift in their order package, especially for new customers
- including a hand-written note in their order package
- upgrading their shipping method for free
When you create more value than your customers have paid for, you are more likely to get something (in this case, reviews) in return.
Encourage product reviews: Shopify apps
Below are a few Shopify apps that can enable product reviews on your store, and automate parts of the review process. All these apps create reviews that are SEO-friendly by creating rich snippets of the reviews.
Example of how rich snippets form search engine data (Source)
Product Reviews
The free Product Reviews app by Shopify adds a review area to your product pages. The app also gives you an overview of all your reviews, and lets you manage and do bulk actions for reviews. In addition, you can import or export reviews via CSV files if you get or use reviews on other platforms.
Manage all reviews in one place (Source)
The app tries to replicate review areas that match your theme’s style and layout. You have the option to edit and customize the review area style and layout based on your preferences without using any code.
Review area on a product page (Source)
You can learn more about the app in the Shopify documentation.
Yotpo Reviews
The Yotpo Reviews is a powerful app that allows you to not only add a review area on your product pages and manage reviews, but also automate many parts of the review generation process.
Yotpo app review area (Source)
You can start with a free version for basic review management functionality. The free app allows you to create review requests in-mail, where customers fill out the review form within their emails after they’ve purchased your products. The emails are mobile-friendly so that customers can give feedback while on the go.
You can also upgrade to a paid version of the service to get user-generated photos within reviews, automatically create incentive coupons, have social integration with different platforms, and more.
Take a look at the full list of Yotpo features on their website.
Kudobuzz Testimonials & Reviews
The Kudobuzz Testimonials & Reviews app allows you to display and manage reviews. The app also lets you import reviews from your social media pages to display on your store website.
The app displays reviews through a widget area that you can display in a number of different ways. You can display reviews and review form on product pages, show reviews on an entire page, in a slider, or on a tab.
You can start using Kudobuzz for free, or upgrade to get more features.
Encourage product reviews: Summary
Product reviews are some of the best user-generated content you can get for your store. This helps in improving your search optimization as you get unique content from each customer. Reviews also help build trust amongst potential customers as they get to read about your product from a customer’s point-of-view, even if it’s a bad review. This gives potential buyers a holistic view of your products, which can help with their purchasing decision. And more trust translates into more sales for your store.
There are four basic ways you can encourage customers to post product reviews:
- Actually ask customers to leave you a review if you already have the functionality on your store.
- Give them coupons or other incentives for leaving a review.
- Send your most vocal advocates and industry bloggers free samples or giveaways to review.
- Build a connection with your customers, so they feel some amount of loyalty towards your brand.
Shopify has a number of apps to encourage and manage product reviews – Product Reviews, Yotpo Review, Kudobuzz Testimonials & Reviews, and others.
Do you receive product reviews for your store? What has your experience been with reviews? Please share in the comments below.
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