Product reviews are one of the most important strategies for sourcing user-generated content (UGC). Not only do they give you the opportunity to offer a steady stream of content by and for human beings, but they also fuel your content strategy with everything from good SEO to better value for your customers.
What really influences customers?
The way consumers make buying decisions is changing. In the past, they were much more influenced by brand names and the sex appeal with which products were marketed. However, as Stanford Professor of Marketing Itamar Simonson stated in a recent episode of TechCrunch TV, “The sizzle is becoming less important.”
Today’s consumers want value and to get it they’re relying more and more on reliable sources of information. In the Internet age, one such source is customer reviews. According to a recent iPerceptions study, 61% of shoppers read reviews before deciding on a purchase (2011). Customers might read fifty reviews from experts and other users to have a better idea of what to expect from a product.
Why does my site need product reviews?
Value
Since consumers do research online to make a purchase, why not provide that research right on your site so they don’t have to go looking for it anywhere else? Product reviews are an excellent way to provide valuable content for your visitors.
Product reviews can provide information about how a product can solve your consumer’s problems. You can offer expert reviews side by side with customer reviews to give them a broad range of information.
There are some awesome reviews out there that give valuable information to consumers, telling them the best and worst aspects of a product from the vantage point of someone who has used it. These reviews give visitors the information they need in order to be happy consumers.
Trust
Consumers respond to brands that care. Giving them a chance to respond to your products is about creating a relationship of trust with customers that makes them want to keep coming back—and makes them advocates for your brand because they like doing business with you so much.
Product reviews also make great sticky content, keeping visitors on your site longer and building a community of returning visitors.
Conversion
Beyond offering customers value (and therefore a reason to stick around your website) and building great relationships with your customers, the bottom line is that consumer reviews increase conversions. Several statistics support this claim:
• According to Reevoo stats, 50 or more reviews per product can mean a 4.6% increase in conversion rates.
• Customer reviews are nearly 12 times more trusted than manufacturer descriptions, according to a survey of internet users. (eMarketer, 2010)
• Consumers who read reviews are 105% more likely to make a purchase and spend 11% more than people who don’t. (Bazaarvoice, 2011)
SEO
User-generated content like customer reviews helps you create an ongoing flow of authentic content for search engines to crawl and for people to link to. That alone makes it well worth your time. Product reviews can also boost your SEO efforts in the following ways:
Improve rankings
Since more people are looking for consumer reviews, more are searching for the name of the product plus the word ‘review’ or similar words like ‘ratings.’ Offering product reviews or ratings helps improve rankings for your product pages.
Increase click-through rates from the search results page
This rule stands if your reviews are formatted correctly to show ratings in the search engine results. Distilled, an online marketer out of the UK, has shown that these rich snippets can increase click-through rates by 10-20%.
Long tail targeting
People who write reviews use the same language that searchers use to find what they’re looking for. As a result, you get to hone in on some of that long tail traffic that can be difficult to capture.
What about bad reviews?
As for bad reviews, recent research suggests that they don’t hurt you as much as you might think. Reevoo, a social commerce company, reported that bad reviews improved conversions by 67% (2011). They also noted that people who pay closer attention to bad reviews tend to convert better, perhaps because those who search for and read negative reviews are more likely to be in purchase mode.
A Reevoo study in 2010 suggested that negative reviews also make the positive ones more believable. However, the proportion of good to bad greatly impacts the potential benefits of bad reviews. Too many bad reviews can set consumers’ red flags waving.
Looking forward
As practical and persuasive as your product information no doubt is, users want product reviews. Keep writing your excellent product descriptions but also give customers an option and incentive to create online reviews on your site. Then, add in curated content in the form of expert reviews.
Check back with us to learn more about the “How” of user-generated product reviews, as well as new ways to source user-generated content to help you stay ahead of the curve.
Connect with Filament for more ideas about creating and curating content that drives sales, creates trust, and engages today’s savvy consumer.
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