How to Leverage Product Reviews to Motivate People to Buy

Product reviews are as integral to ecommerce as Add to Cart and checkout. Yet, as with most building blocks in ecommerce, retailers get the most benefit from product reviews when you optimize them for your store. Reviews are not one-size-fits-all. Nor are they “set it and forget it.”

Instead merchants should use strategies to add value for customers through product reviews. With the right approach, product reviews can become a powerful sales tool for your online store.

In this latest video, Lauren, a conversion strategist at Command C, reviews several retail sites to highlight specific strategies that encourage people to buy. Take a look.

Transcript: How to Leverage Product Reviews to Motivate People to Buy

Hi, I’m Lauren. I’m a conversion specialist here at Command C, and today we are taking a look at reviews and the best practices around showcasing those on your website. We’re going to look through a few examples. This is just a couple of other things we’ll go over, like distribution summaries, showing reviews on pages aside from just the product page, photos and videos, and a few other topics.

In this video, you are going to learn how to take the information from your reviews to learn more about your customers. You’ll also see how to use reviews to help reduce the fears, uncertainties, and doubts for future potential customers. And you’re also going to learn how to showcase reviews to help motivate people to purchase and to help make information about your product more clear for them.

Insight #1: Show a Summary of Product Ratings Distribution

So one of the most important parts of a review section on a product page is a ratings distribution summary. This is something you are probably familiar with from Amazon. It’s a great way to break down a rating. So instead of showing 86 reviews and four and a half stars, you can break that apart to show how many of those reviews are five stars, one star. So people can get a better idea of how people are feeling about the product, how much people like it, versus feel a little lukewarm towards the product. And these distribution summaries, clicking on them also allow customers to filter. If you click this five-star bar here, that allows customers to just see the five star review. It’s a great way to help them narrow down the reviews.

Insight #2: Highlight the Reviewer’s Information When Helpful

Something else about reviews. So you want to consider what information is important to customers. In this example, we’re looking at an apparel store. So for Alo, they ask reviewers to mention their body type, height, bra size, size of the product that they ordered, and then the fit. Whether it was small, true to size, or large.

The great thing about reviews like this is that this really helps customers get a better idea of what product is for them. So, especially for apparel stores, this is really crucial because one of the biggest reasons customers don’t order is because they’re just unsure about how the item’s going to fit, what size they should order. But here, being able to see what this customer’s body type was like, and what size they ordered and how they felt about the size, really helps reduce those fears, uncertainties, and doubts for future customers. Here I can see, okay, these two people had the same body type in the same height and they ordered the same size. So if this fits me, then I would feel a lot more confident in purchasing this particular size.

Insight #3:  Invite Customers to Share Product Photos and Videos in Their Reviews

Next it’s important when you are asking customers to leave reviews to also allow them to leave videos and photos as well. A lot of customers trust review photos in videos over the photos and videos from the brand. They see customer photos as more authentic, more true to real life. It’s kind of like when you see the stylized fast food photos, you know it’s stylized, that’s not exactly what you’re going to get, and some customers feel like that towards the stylized brand photos. So they really like seeing how the product looks on somebody who’s not a model or out actually being used.

Insight #4: Test Product Review Placements in Different Areas of Your Online Store

Lastly with reviews, it’s important to test these on multiple different parts of your store. You want to test showing them on category pages, like here for Osprey, or on the homepage like here for Brooklinen.

Brooklinen also does something pretty interesting. They showcase their reviews twice on the product page. You go scroll down a bit under the product information, and they show a couple of reviews pretty high up. Then they have a button that allows you to scroll all the way down to see the rest of the reviews. That’s something you could even test on your own store. So quite a few different things to try out on your store.

Insight #5: Respond Publicly to Negative Reviews to Build Trust

And the last thing I want to leave you with is if you do happen to get any negative reviews, make sure that you respond to this. So this is something customers come to expect, and they actually perceive your store more highly even if there is a negative review. They’ll perceive you more highly if they do see that you respond to it. They see that you’re active and engaging, and you will reach out if there is an issue.

Hopefully you got a good idea of what the best practices are around showcasing reviews on your store. Not all of these apply to every single store. These are just some general best practices around showcasing reviews. Make sure you take these ideas and test them on your store and see how they do. Alright. Thanks for watching, and see you in the next video.