You must monitor and respond efficiently to reviews to provide the transparency that gains consumers’ trust, protects your reputation, and helps you win on the digital shelf.
Displaying reviews can increase conversion by 270%, according to Spiegel Research Center and PowerReviews, but the exact benefit is more nuanced. Reviews impact higher-priced products (380% conversion lift) more than lower-priced products (190% conversion lift), with shoppers preferring products in the 4.0-4.7 rated range (perfect scores aren’t trustworthy).
Reviews give access to the voice of the customer, or the collective feedback and expectations of your consumers. But, harnessing this data in an efficient and timely manner is hard because it’s spread out across multiple sites and systems. Gaining a holistic view of your product reviews can help you gain actionable insights that can drive results.
Form a Dedicated Team and Strategy to Respond to Reviews
Whether it’s one person or a dedicated team, a clear team assignment and strategy for responding to reviews will help you respond faster and better by giving you a unified voice and clear plan on how to respond to specific types of reviews before they roll in. Your primary goal is to make sure that every single negative review receives a rapid reply that concisely addresses the issue (and takes the conversation offline if necessary).
Here are some helpful tips for handling negative reviews:
- Provide your perspective calmly and clearly on the issue.
- Describe what you did to solve the problem and why it won’t happen again in the future.
- Show that you care about your customers and that you offer stellar customer service.
A quick, high-quality response from your brand can help show shoppers you care, and works to keep their impression of your brand positive. Historically, replying to negative reviews inspired 33% to post a positive review and 34% to delete the original, negative review.
See Your Reviews in One Place to Respond Faster
Replying too slowly to negative reviews or not responding at all can be extremely damaging to future sales. Salsify pulls your Amazon reviews into a single place where you can automatically create tasks to reply to each review faster.
This capability fits inside of a unified platform that helps you centralize your product content, improve it, and activate it to your sales channels. By centralizing reviews in the same platform as your source of truth for product information, you improve your ability to monitor and respond to the voice of the customer, while also helping incorporate what you learn back into the product.
For example, with content insights from your product data in the same platform as your review insights, you may notice that there are negative reviews on products with poor content scores, which may have resulted in a misinformed purchase decision. You can fix the product content, activate it to that channel, and respond to the negative feedback with that context to show your brand’s desire to improve and better serve shoppers.
Encourage Shopper Engagement With Responses That Boost Your Brand Perception and Sales
Shoppers trust other shoppers, and reviews with pictures and videos are even more valuable for brands that gain positive ones. According to research from BazaarVoice, brands and retailers both agree that visual user-generated content in the shopping experience creates a more engaging experience (91%), increases discoverability of products (82%), deepens brand trust (81%), and increases conversion (81%).
The pace at which this content is being submitted is rising, raising the stakes of handling negative reviews quickly even further. (Imagine shoppers actually seeing your product in action — or not in action — when there’s a problem). For example, grocery (184%), health and beauty (160%), and consumer packaged goods (115%) are categories that all saw big year-over-year increases in visual content submitted with reviews, according to the same report.
Here are the five Cs of building relationships with your shoppers:
- Capture: Continually monitor reviews to identify problems and opportunities.
- Comment: Respond quickly to show shoppers you care about having a real conversation with them.
- Celebrate: Highlight their wins as they enjoy your products.
- Care: Make commitments to fix problems to show that you care about their losses when things don’t go well and take immediate action.
- Cultivate: Build your community by encouraging shoppers to post reviews with images and videos.
Turn Insights Into Action
The voice of the customer can spark ideas and improvements to your products and marketing, drive sales, and create opportunities to be loyal to shoppers. Take control of how shoppers perceive your brand by listening closely to them, responding, and turning those insights into action. Visit Salsify Digital Shelf Analytics to learn more.
Photo by Morning Brew on Unsplash
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