When looking for a product online, many people will turn to online reviews to see what other customers have said about the product before they buy.
As online review sites have grown, the reviews of their users can now be found on websites and social media all across the web. These reviews can shape how businesses are perceived and play an important role in everyday ecommerce.
In current times, online reviews are critical to a company’s success.
The importance of reviews keeps rising, based on information from my book What is Growth Hacking, and data directly from Amazon, we can find the following information:
👉 90% of the site's visitors will read other customers reviews, and these will have an impact on their decision to make a purchase,
📈 Traffic is 25 times higher for products that have an average review of 3-5 Stars as opposed to a product with no reviews,
💵 43 times as many units of a product are sold when it has an average rating of 3-5 Stars as opposed to a product with no reviews.
The impact of negative reviews should also not be underestimated. A recent study pointed out that over 82% of people seek out negative reviews. But negative reviews are not a bad thing.
Studies have shown that negative reviews can drastically increase the trust in a product, and more and more people in the ecommerce field are starting to acknowledge it.
The quantity of reviews is another aspect that highlights the importance of reviews in ecommerce. The general rule of thumb is that the more you have, the better, but the minimum you should be aiming for is 40, which increases the probability of your visitors trusting your average star rating.
Online reviews can have a huge impact on your sales. Reviews are essential for every business, as evidenced by the benefits such as increased sales tied with an ever-growing customer base.
The 5 most important benefits are as follows:
When you're picking out a product online, you have to do a lot more research and reading than when you're in-store. There is no physical aspect of touch, and you cannot examine a product more closely as you would in person.
This is why reviews are key – they can inform customers about texture, size, and other features that can't be seen in the picture.
Reviews are a valuable tool for creating more informed decisions about a purchase. Reviews address particular aspects of the product, for example, what size the product is, how it is made, and how well it fits in hands.
If a customer has only been looking at pictures of the product they may be fooled into thinking it's smaller than they are expecting when it would be a perfect fit for them. Such information can be obtained from the reviews, this is also why we recommend adding video and image submissions to your reviews.
Ranking high in the SERPs is a goal for most businesses. However, building an SEO-friendly web presence can take time and energy that is not immediately available.
Fortunately, by utilizing customer reviews, you can put this on more of an automated system. Especially if you utilize our review email sweeper template to streamline this process further.
Your customer will use keywords associated with your business products and name. This makes the information that you provide to customers more relevant and more findable by people on the internet looking for details about your industry.
And as a second benefit, the likelihood of these positive reviews showing up is significantly higher.
Just because you dislike a review, a customer posted does not mean you cannot draw important lessons from it. If you identify the pain points that the person raises in their review as being valid you can use this feedback to improve your product or service.
Consumers who see overwhelmingly negative reviews are likely to be dissuaded from making a purchase, in fact about 94% of consumers have changed their mind about a purchase by negative reviews.
This is why addressing the feedback and responding to reviews is crucial to the success of your ecommerce business.
With the ecommerce market continuously growing, it is hard to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate players on the market. Reviews can help you bridge that gap by adding the trust factor that would otherwise be lacking.
It is important to address the fact that by having a larger number of reviews, your trust will increase exponentially with each review. Simply, because a few reviews can still be manipulated but the more reviews you have the less likely this is to be the case.
Additionally, I also recommend you add the option for verified purchases, to further increase the trust.
Consumers trust reviews written by other consumers more than they will trust any other marketing content. Reviews have a twelve times higher level of trust, which means social proof is an incredibly powerful force that you get from your reviews.
You can use your reviews in your Ads, in your Ad copy, and if you utilize one of my Growth methods - you can even use copy directly from your reviews to write better product descriptions, ads, and emails.
