What Makes the Product Reviews So Important For eCommerce

Online business is increasing each day more than the previous, with its scenario continually changing with time. Online reviews are now all over the internet, influencing the customers’ insight of a product or a brand. These are a strong proof of how important and pivotal they can prove to be if used with a good strategy, to increase your sales and escalate your profit.

Benefits of Online Reviews

If the ratings and reviews of real people are good, there is a very high chance that the consumer will buy that product. Therefore, since people so much depend on these reviews for their consumerism, retailers too directly can benefit from them.

• Changing the perception of your customers. With genuine reviews that speak of your good products, after sales assistance and reliability, you can automatically build a good reputation among your customers and win more in the bargain
• Providing an unbiased insight to the customers. Apart from the product description you may provide on your site, people like to read the first hand user experiences to get an unbiased real consumer opinion. For example, reading about how comfortable the wedge heels were to walk in all day on a vacation will make your customer imagine herself in the same situation and automatically rule out any related questions.
• Building trust and credibility. Reviews also provide a way to your customers to trust you and gives your product or brand a much needed credibility. It especially becomes necessary when you are a start-up.

Encourage Online Reviews By Customers

Now that you know how much and how good online reviews can influence your cash register to get overflowing, let us see how can we encourage such reviews by our customers.

• Sending e-mails. Emails are not just a great way to increase your sale, they can even prove to be very effective to encourage your existing customers to share, like and write about their experience with your product
• Making reviewing easy. Do not force your customers to write reviews for you. Request them politely if they could give them a little of their time and effort. Let them write their experience in their own way without having to go into hard technical details.
• Offer them rewards. You can offer to give them small coupons or discounts as reward for writing a review of a product for you, like a discount of 5% on their next purchase or something as small as a chance of sneak preview of upcoming product.

Tools Necessary For Reviewing Task

You can very well manage and automate reviews using very handy tools.

• Email marketing. It is an important tool to connect to your customers, follow them up and encourage them to write reviews for them. You just need to set up an auto-responder in your email marketing software that sends an automatic email to the customers after a week of their purchasing a product from you so that they have had enough time to gather experience with the product. Some common and very handy email tools are MailChimp and AWeber.
• Yotpo for social review. This is a very conducive tool to manage reviews and marketing of online stores. It generates huge quantities of reviews, use them to increase traffic and sales through social media platforms, emails and other channels. It is also gives very valuable analytics and to channelize your marketing force.