Published on June 21, 2012 How to encourage your customers to write a review
Reviews can be a powerful part of your online store marketing – reviews that are authentic and trusted can not only build the level of detail about your shop’s products, but they can help build trust by potential visitors in your products.
A challenge for new online store owners starting up is how to add reviews to their store. Filling up each product with fake reviews is ultimately not going to lead to trust and openness so it’s best not to use this technique. Instead do two things: include staff reviews (marked as such on your site) and encourage your buyers to leave reviews.
Just ask
In many cases, the best way to encourage your buyers to leave reviews is not to offer any particular incentive for them at all – it’s just to ask. This appeals to people’s sense of helping others and voicing their own opinion about the products they have just bought.
The reality is that while many people will have an opinion about products they buy, they will not have the motivation to leave a review. This is particularly true for items that have longer lead times for delivery because, unless there’s a problem with the product, the psychological connection between the item they have received and you as the seller diminishes over time.
A follow up reminder about leaving a review can be all it takes to get a review. Send an email to customers telling them that you hope they are happy with the product they purchased and would value their input about what they liked about the product, and to help others know what you thought about the product as well. You could encourage them to either leave their review on Facebook or on your own website (if you have review stars and comments turned on).
Don’t be afraid of negative reviews – no product makes everyone happy and if you only have highly positive reviews and don’t have a world-leading product with a well-established reputation that people expect to be near faultless, then the law of averages says that eventually someone will leave a negative review of the product. Not deleting the negative reviews can actually help you – you’re giving a balanced view of the product which is the point of reviews.
The same goes for when you’re writing a staff review – mark it as a staff review so that people can see you’re being up front, and give a balanced review of the product. That is include the positives and negatives. That’s not to mean you can’t write things in a positive way, what we’re saying is that just you need to take a balanced view in the same way a journalist would.
If you want to use incentives, which ones?
If you do want to use incentives to encourage reviews, then how you provide the incentives, for how long and for who should be carefully considered in advance. We strongly recommend that you avoid promotions stated like this: “review this product and get a $x voucher to use in our store”
This kind of promotion is best for when you are specifically seeking negative feedback to help you improve; it’s not recommended for encouraging day to day reviews by your online shop’s buyers.
The problem with a “review our product and get a voucher” is that you are not encouraging detailed, well-thought out reviews. You are just encouraging people to do something for a reward. Do you want to say to your customers “jump through this hoop for a scooby snack”, or “we really value your input and want you to share it with others”.
This is still the case even if the prize is a good one. This is because the better the prize the more it will lead to customers writing the review just for the discount and not because they want to share their thoughts. You will get reviews that sound fake, and they will be. They are just fake reviews written by real people.
What you are doing is building a psychological association between a prize and the review that is reinforced every time the customer buys. You are both paying for reviews and in the long run eliminating the possibility that customers will review your products just because they want to. Customers will be conditioned to think that they get a reward every time they review a product and will therefore expect a reward every time they leave a review. As soon as they don’t get something for leaving a review, they will feel disappointed and project this negative feeling on to both your business and products. In short, in doing this you are setting expectations that you won’t or don’t want to fulfil. It’s a recipe for disaster.
Try competitions
If you really want to offer incentives, try a promotion along the lines of “all reviews received this month are eligible to go into a draw to win x“. This puts a fixed time limit on what you’re offering and does not directly associate reward with the action of reviewing.
If you go down this path you might also want to add a skill based question with entries to ensure that your promotion is not perceived as gambling. Something along the lines of: “To enter the draw just tell us you want to enter when you send in the review – along with the answer to the following question about our products: xyz.”.
Reviews are an important part of building traffic to your online store, as well as a source of social media traffic. So think about them carefully to maximise their use to you as an online store owner.
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