Nearly 95% of shoppers read online reviews before making a purchase. Reviews have become an incredibly powerful means to shape consumer behaviour. Therefore, merchants tend to lose out if they do not actively request, collect and display reviews from their customers.
To be a dominant market player in your industry, you should invest in how to collect reviews from your customers and how to use these reviews to boost sales for your business. Collecting reviews shouldn’t be difficult to do once you avoid the following pitfalls.
1. Requesting Reviews Without Easy-To-Use Rating Scale
Writing can sometimes be a difficult task. Moreover, we live in a rat-race world where people hardly have time. For this reason, some of your customers may decline to review products they bought from your store if you limit the options by requiring customers to leave only text-based or written reviews.
Such a demand may demotivate your customers from giving you reviews. And not having your customers leaving reviews for your store will not work to your advantage.
Give your customers a choice between pressing the star review scale to review your products or write a paragraph about their experience with your products or both. This way, customers who do not have the time to offer a written review can press the star rating scale instead of just refusing to review your product completely.
Even though shoppers will prefer a written commentary of previous shoppers, they’ll still prefer to buy from a shop that has a lot of five-star reviews compared to a store that has no review or just a handful of reviews.
2. Sending Too Many Review Requests
Nobody wants to be harassed, and in fact, it can be very discomforting and disruptive if you keep receiving the same message from the same brand to leave a product review over and over again.
Being too persistent in your demand for reviews and sending your customers a lot of reviews requests will be a nuisance.
Sending a follow-up message may not be bad in itself. A campaign with even one effective follow-up email converts 22% more prospects.
That said, continually sending numerous messages to your customers requesting for reviews may annoy your customers and discourage them from reviewing your product, or at worst— give you negative reviews even if they had a positive experience shopping from your online store.
So even though it’s highly encouraged to send follow-up review request emails, do it tactically so you do not end up producing unhappy customers because of that single act.
3. Impersonal Review Requests Email
Your review request email should be addressed directly to your customer by using subject lines with your customer’s name and any other real-time personal information that the user voluntarily shares with you. Statistically, personalized emails drive revenue to about 760%.
Personalization also involves sending review emails at the best times. Personalizing your review requests emails will help you deliver a positive communication experience that is more relevant and individualized.
Generally, if your customers receive email messages with mentions of their names, they’ll feel more inclined to open it than emails with generic salutations. Example:
“Hey [first name],
I hope this email finds you well. We appreciate your purchase from our store. Can you kindly tell us how the product you bought from our store has served you?”
4. Lengthy Review Emails
In an era where 205 billion emails are sent every day, shorter emails are more likely to receive a response.
When you’re crafting your request emails for reviews, keep them short and straight to the point. Make sure you strip out all unnecessary language, and fluff.
The trick is to ensure your email is well-thought-through, well-written and does not waste the reader’s time to ensure your customers respond to your email on time.
5. Email Request Without Clear Call-To-Action
The main reason why you’re sending the review request email is to solicit reviews from your customers. So after warming your readers/customers into the message, lay down your request and end with a clear call-to-action (CTA). In this case, your CTA button should lead your customers directly to your review page.
On your review page, tell your customers if you want a text-based review, rating review or both. Here’s an example you can use;
“Please review your purchase by answering these questions:
- Why did you buy the product?
- Did the product meet your expectations?
- Will you shop with us again?”
6. Using A Non-Responsive Mobile Review Page
In 2018, mobile phones usage made up 52.2% of internet traffic, a huge jump from 16.2% in 2013.
This means the majority of your customers are likely to open your email with their mobile devices. Therefore, your review page must be mobile-friendly to ensure your reviews page is able to adapt to different screen sizes to enable your customers to respond to your reviews request emails.
In summary, collecting reviews from your customers is non-negotiable. A tool like the Kudobuzz Review app is perfectly built to help merchants collect reviews from customers and choose the ones they want to show off on their site through beautiful widgets with ease. Despite this, there are certain things that should be avoided when soliciting reviews as discussed above.
About the author:
Abdul-Karim Awaf writes for the Kudobuzz blog. Kudobuzz is a provider of easy to use tools that help online merchants increase site traffic and sales. Kudobuzz owns the Kudobuzz Reviews, the Kudobuzz SEO and the Kudobuzz Multichannel Apps.
