In this era of online shopping, customers want everything, plus a little bit more.
Before they commit to buying, they want to know:
- Are you friendly and understanding?
- Will you give me my money back if I don’t like the product?
- Will you deliver the products within the stated delivery times?
- Will your products perform as I expect?
- How do you address any issues that may arise during the purchase, delivery, or after product use?
For many, the best source of answers is other customers who’ve had first-hand experience buying from you.
Besides, product reviews are a vital element on product pages that help to increase visitor traffic.
Product reviews allow your customers to provide others with intel on the quality of your products and services, and boost trust and confidence amongst new customers. They also allow customers to share their grievances about your products. Hence, your response is as important as the reviews themselves.
Today, we’d like to take you through:
- The benefits of product reviews for your online store
- How reviews help your customers
- Several examples of product reviews in thriving online stores
- Why and how said examples helped specific brands thrive
Let’s start with the top 4 benefits of product reviews for your online store.
Strengthen Your Store’s Credibility
As many as 75% of your customers will be encouraged to interact with your brand after reading a review online. Customers in this digital era liken online reviews to the recommendations they’d typically get from friends and family.
Product reviews can help to build credibility and trust for your brand because they:
- Are a strong form of social proof
- Tell customers of the expected experience because they can’t test the products in real life
- Provide insight on the accuracy of the product descriptions on your site
- Give your customers a voice
Ultimately, customer reviews create a ripple effect for your online store.
How? If a customer once left a review, and you responded appropriately, showing that their opinion counts, they’re more than likely to become loyal to your brand and leave a positive review the next time they shop with you.
It may also mean that if a customer reads an accurate review before purchasing and ends up satisfied, they’ll probably leave you another positive review.
In the long run, you can leverage the trust and credibility built through product reviews to increase web traffic and sales, and generate a measurable return on investment (ROI).
Improve Search Engine Ranking
Unbeknownst to many businesses, product reviews are an effective and consistent SEO strategy.
Why? Product reviews provide your site with fresh, unique, relevant, helpful, and reliable content that contributes up to 10% of ranking success.
How?
- Product reviews help to generate long-tail keywords specific to the products you sell.
- They boost social appearance and authority.
- They appear on multiple product pages on your website.
- They add relevant text to your pages, making your product pages appear more valuable to Google.
Free Micro-Marketing Campaigns
Are you looking for a marketing tactic that won’t cost you a dime? Try product reviews!
Product reviews help to consistently create a positive brand image and boost brand awareness to assist with both long-term and short-term sales. Reviews continue to deliver results weeks, months, and sometimes years after they’re written and also encourage new customers to leave feedback.
Furthermore, product reviews help to boost the success of your other brand advertising campaigns, especially for new businesses, because they’re authentic.
According to Trustpilot, consumers are constantly looking for reviews, hence, adding reviews to traditional advertisements makes customers happy and gently nudges them to make a deliberate purchase.
In addition, a Finance Online market share analysis reports that the timelines of reviews also affect business success in different ways:
- 85% of customers won’t entertain reviews older than 3 months.
- 40% of customers will only trust reviews that are 2 weeks old.
Boost Conversion Rates
The effectiveness of product reviews to boost conversion rates can be proven by the statistics presented in the table below gathered by Invespcro.
This kind of success is influenced by the fact that reviews and star ratings target customers at the most crucial time of the buyer’s journey, the decision stage.
Now that you’re aware of the benefits of product reviews for your online stores, let’s look at examples of product reviews left by customers on thriving online stores.
Example 1 – Civant: Real Stories With Before and After Images
Civant is a skincare brand offering customer solutions to achieve healthier, brighter, and blemish-free skin. They’ve gathered over 800 customer reviews on their best-selling product, Meladerm.
The reviews boost the product’s ranking on search engines. They also help the business to appear at the top of more searches because they include keywords that matter to the brand, such as “hyperpigmentation,” “dark spot,” “melasma,” “acne scars,” “sun damage,” and “age spots.”
Most of the reviews come with before-and-after pictures that help to prove the success of Meladerm. Even better, they show the product’s success for people with different skin types and conditions, thereby building customer trust and encouraging more people to purchase.
Even better, Civant product reviews are from verified purchasers, meaning reviewers did not receive deep discounts or be compensated to write a review.
New customers are also encouraged to vote whether they found specific reviews helpful. It’s impressive how many customers voted, and most reviews have tens of “Helpful” votes, which reinforces the usefulness and reach of the reviews.
Example 2 – Caterpillar Workwear: Feature Reviews on Product Gallery
Although Caterpillar Workwear has been around for over 100 years, they adopt new-age marketing strategies, which include leveraging the power of product reviews.
They not only display their reviews in the traditional way—on product pages—but also have a product gallery on their homepage; where they feature images of people in their gear on job sites.
A customer can easily be featured on the product gallery by simply using the hashtag #CatWorkwear or tagging @CatWorkwear on Instagram. Having product reviews shipped from social media on their homepage helps the business increase its sales as the homepage has the most traffic.
Example 3 – Monkey Learn: A Full Page of Customer Success Stories
Monkey Learn uses a unique approach to gather and display product reviews. They use case studies where they conduct in-depth interviews with company ambassadors.
During these interviews, customers speak about how the AI tool has helped them visualize and analyze customer feedback. In turn, this helps potential customers learn how they can make use of the software to cater to their needs.
They go a step further to ensure this social proof is easily accessible by displaying all the stories on their website labeled, “Customers.” At the top of the page, you’ll also find snippets of short reviews left by other customers.
Example 4 – Backpacker Magazine – Blog Type Product Reviews
Brands like Backpacker Magazine chose to take the road less traveled by drafting blog-type product reviews for customers in their niche.
The reviews are accurate and fair as they’re written by expert reviewers and gear testers who’ve used the products in rigorous trial conditions. These reviewers have a lot of experience and knowledge of various backpacking products, and are in the best position to offer customers valuable insight.
Gear testers also had the privilege to try out products from different brands, therefore, they can draw very fair comparisons.
The brand uses the blogs as an opportunity to advertise brands they are affiliated with or believe in. Brands like yours can leverage this type of product review as a form of paid advertising or an off-site SEO strategy.
Example 5 – GearJunkie: Paid Expert Reviews
Through the right partners you can harness the power of paid product reviews.
If your company sells active-lifestyle products, such as hiking gear or camping tents, then GearJunkie can help you get more reviews, more easily.
GearJunkie has a team of writers, videographers, and editors who can help to start the conversation about your products online. They do this through authentic and engaging articles, live video mentions, or voice call-outs.
Potential customers already trust GearJunkie and consider them authoritative experts in the active-lifestyle world.
Example 6 – Jupmode: Reviews on Product Pages
Jupmode’s success in B2B and B2C screen-printing and embroidery apparel sales can be attributed to the hundreds of reviews and star ratings they’ve received from customers.
Although few per page, these reviews are placed on product pages, which as we said earlier, is good for SEO. The reviews help Jupmode rank for a variety of keywords in the apparel industry, including “Ohio” and “Toledo”, which is the company’s home ground.
Most reviews also mention the exact products, which range from sweatshirts and joggers to shirts and hats. This means that the business gains visibility for what they sell and where they are.
Under each Jupmode review, you’ll find a fit chart that eliminates the risk of buying clothing that doesn’t suit your body type. Reviewers use the fit chart to describe how well the clothes fit: Is it true to size? Does it run small? Does it run large?
Also, reviewers can share their gender, weight, height, and the exact size they picked, making the reviews personalized and convincing for new customers.
Example 7 – Toad & Co: Detailed Customer Reviews on Product Pages
As an ethical brand that boasts sustainability, Toad & Co. relies on what customers say about them.
Why? Many brands claim sustainability and then fail to deliver. So, the best way to find out if a sustainable brand delivers on its promises is by confirming with other buyers.
Toad & Co. has gathered hundreds of reviews per product page that keep people coming back and help them appeal to new customers.
Many of their positive reviews speak of the durability, high quality, functionality, and stylishness of the pieces they sell.
Verified buyers can leave guided and very detailed reviews where they are prompted to share their body size, height, the size of clothing they ordered, and the fit of the item. If a buyer wishes, they can choose whether they’d recommend the item.
These are all qualities that potential customers look for when they know they need to spend a pretty penny.
Example 8 – Tentree: Product Reviews Published on Independent Websites
Independent review sites are a good way to gather feedback from your customers. Trustpilot is one such site that has over 167 million reviews for 714,000+ websites.
Tentree has contracted Trustpilot to seek feedback, suggestions, and experience with the company and its products from consumers.
Trustpilot offers the company the advantage of providing them with insight based on their reviews and helps them gain the trust of customers from all over the world. Additionally, Tentree can respond to reviews on the platform and display them on various social media sites.
Using a reputable third-party reviewer also allows you to enjoy Google Seller Ratings, which are the stars that appear alongside your Google Adwords campaigns. These ratings can increase click-through rates on ads by up to 10%.
Example 9 – Hickies: Displays Product Reviews From Top Global Publications
Hickies tries to leverage the power of established publications, like Forbes, Glamour, and Refinery 29 by displaying their reviews for their elastic laces on the homepage.
These reviews are short and sweet, highlight the advantages of the laces, and feature keywords like “sneakers” and “laces” to help them boost additional keywords.
Additionally, they’re displayed in a carousel to allow customers to click on specific brand names or logos to display the reviews.
This form of social proof gains the trust of potential customers and encourages them that the purchase is worth it.
Displaying these reviews on the homepage improves the effectiveness of your SEO efforts by making you the search engine’s favorite.
Example 10 – Duckworth: A Full Page of Reviews
Duckworth has gathered more than 3,900 product reviews and over 900 site reviews, which they display on one page on their website.
These reviews have inevitably helped them build a name for themselves as best-in-the-world producers of Merino wool apparel.
It’s also worth noting that the first few pages of their product reviews are from verified buyers and show nothing less than 5-star ratings. Other than the ratings, customers can vote whether the reviews are helpful.
Example 11 – Molekule: Reviews in Different Formats
Are you looking to increase traffic and conversions exponentially? Include reviews in multiple marketing campaigns.
Molekule has discovered this trick and spread their reviews in various formats across different pages on their website.
They place some reviews on their homepage, collective review pages, and individual review pages. This adds a touch of authenticity and prompts customers who visit any page on the website to purchase their air purifiers.
On the reviews page, customers can sort through the reviews to find the most recent, oldest, top-rated, and lowest-rated comments.
Example 12 – Outdoor Research: Interviews With Brand Ambassadors
Social media sites, especially Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, are great places to spark conversations with potential customers.
Outdoor Research has found a sweet spot where they use their brand ambassadors to connect with potential customers on various platforms.
In one of their popular videos, “Why Plus Size Technical Apparel Matters,” they have several brand ambassadors talk about why it was important for the brand to include plus-size clothing in their collections.
The female ambassadors speak of their input on a plus-size outdoor apparel line and how they ensured this line is functional and practical. They build the confidence of other plus-size women by reassuring them that the OR designs are made for them and will make them feel like they belong outdoors.
Build Lasting (and Profitable) Relationships With Customers
Earning customers’ trust and building customer lifetime value takes more than utilizing the power of product reviews.
The trick for profitable ecommerce is the ability to retain customers over the long term. Tadpull’s Pond software predicts when customers are most likely to purchase again and what products make sense for the next purchase using AI. With these insights and strategic growth plans we help brands build personalized experiences back into paid and email campaigns to boost profit. Many clients have enjoyed these perks and were happy to leave positive reviews.
“The team’s expertise in analytics and data-driven marketing has guided our paid advertising efforts as well as site-wide UX improvements.”– Ned Wonson, Jackson Hole
Learn more about how our custom growth plans can increase your site revenue and profitability.
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