We all know that customer reviews are important to your ecommerce site. But how do you go about getting more of them? Watch this episode to find out.

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Did you know that 70% of online shoppers will trust the opinion of a complete stranger? This startling statistic clearly shows how heavily customer reviews influence others who are looking to make a purchase.

But before you can start leveraging online reviews as another arm of your sales machine, you have to recruit customers to speak on your behalf. How, you might ask? It’s simple – just watch today’s episode for five quick and easy tips.

Happy selling!
-Matt Winn, Social Media Manager, Volusion

 

Here’s the transcript if you’d like to read along:

Hi everybody! My name is Matt and I’m the Social Media Manager here at Volusion. Welcome to Two Minute Tuesdays, where we give you two minutes of ecommerce advice to bolster your online success.

In the world of ecommerce, customer reviews are really important. In fact, 70% of online customers trust reviews from complete strangers, so that’s why it’s important for you to have them on your site. With that in mind, here are my five steps to getting more online customer reviews.

First off, you have to make sure that you have a place for customers to leave their reviews, so you need to create a hub for them to do so. Fortunately, if you’re a Volusion customer, you can enable this on your product pages. It’s also a good idea to create an article page that’s dedicated to customer reviews.

Secondly, you’ll want to proactively reach out to your super fans. Your super fans are those who consistently buy from you and give you praise. To leverage these advocates, reach out to them through email, phone call or smoke signals. Whatever it takes, if you simply ask them, they’ll probably do you the favor without question.

Thirdly, try incorporating requests for online reviews into your email campaigns. Send out an email blast to your customers who purchased a product in the last couple of days and link them back to that product page and ask them to leave a review. Again it’s all about asking.

Fourthly, on top of email, you can also post to social. So to further solicit product reviews, send out a tweet post a status with the request on your Facebook page. Again, it’s all about asking your customers to review your products in places where your customers interact.

My final tip is more of a don’t. When asking for reviews, be very careful about offering incentives. It might be tempting to offer cash or a 10% discount, but online reviews are all about transparency. If people find out that bribes are being offered, this could lead to a PR disaster and, even worse, a ruined brand reputation.

Hopefully these five steps to getting more customer reviews is a sure fire way to up your reviews and get more sales. If you have any questions, we’re always happy to help.

From me to you, happy selling!