The 6 Principles For Fantastic Product Reviews

Imagine you’re browsing the Internet and looking for a restaurant for a special dinner with your loved ones. You’ve found two restaurants with similar price range, similar cuisine and both establishments are relatively near to your house.

There’s only one difference, though.

Restaurant A has four 5-star reviews, three 4-star reviews and one 3-star review. Restaurant B has no reviews at all.

If you’d choose Restaurant A, you’re not alone. 85% of consumers say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

If there are no reviews for your products, your customers don’t have any recommendations they can trust.

Aside from the social proof that product reviews & ratings provide, you can also use them as learning opportunities because they can highlight things that you can improve in the way you run your business and develop your products.

These two reasons – social proof and feedback for improvement – represent why you need to work on getting fantastic product reviews. And in today’s video, we’ll talk about exactly how you can get them by following this great system:

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TjChz2_zs8&feature=youtu.be&h=360]

1. Automate your sending of post-purchase follow up email

If you had to manually email someone and ask for feedback every time their product has been fulfilled, could you do it?

It’s best to save your brainpower for hustling and business expansion and just set up an automated system to send a follow-up email. Set it, so you don’t forget it.

2. Remind your customers to leave a review

3-7 days after sending your post-purchase follow-up email, send an automated email reminder so your customer will remember to leave a review – if they haven’t already done so in the first place.

Your first email may be forgotten or flagged for later – all of us are busy bees, after all! – so send an email reminder with a simple “Hey, we’d still love your feedback, if you can spare us a minute…” to encourage reviews.

3. Trigger the sending of the post-purchase follow up email after order has been fulfilled

If you sent the post-purchase follow up email after your customer buys from you, there’s a general fulfillment time that’s allotted for product shipment and delivery, so they won’t be able to leave a review if they haven’t received the product yet, right?

The general fulfillment time varies, so send the post-purchase follow-up email:
– 24 to 48 hours after product has been marked as “fulfilled”, or,
– 4 days (if this is your company’s general product fulfillment time) after product is fulfilled

4. Use clear, concise copy that elicits genuine and honest feedback

Telling your customers to give you a “five-star rating” so everything’s perfect is easy to do. After all, it’s great to see a five-star rating on your product. It makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside, like you’re snuggling your favorite blanket. A perfect review is nice since this means your customers are happy!

It’s easy to ask for only positive reviews. But is it helpful?

Make your copy as encouraging and as authentic as possible. Ask for honest reviews. Ask your customers their opinion as to what areas of improvement there are.

A four-star review with plenty of information as to why this rating came about is better since it gives you action points for product development, delivery or customer service improvement, don’t you think so?

5. Auto-approve reviews and moderate defamatory or offensive reviews

Do you know someone who’s perfect in all aspects, all the time?

No one’s perfect. This is human nature.

So if your customer sees that all of the ratings of your product are all five-star, they become skeptical as to how true and how honest the ratings really are. After all, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

It’s better for you to publish a spectrum of reviews – from one-star to five-star – and then publicly reply to them.

Sometimes, a customer can be overly emotional (and withhold the full story) when giving a one-star review, so replying to them publicly allows you to present two sides of the story.

6. Be automatically notified whenever you receive low reviews (1-, 2- or 3-star reviews)

This allows you to prioritize engagement with customers who have complaints and solve their concerns accordingly. 70% of complaining customers will do business with you again if you resolve the complaint in their favour.

I hope this video proves to be useful to you in your journey in getting fantastic product reviews! Let me know in the comments below if you have any questions or any feedback you like to add – honestly! 🙂

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