Advice from Actimerce – 5 Effective Methods for Gaining More Reviews on Your Product Listing (2024)

Benefits of Product Reviews

Builds Trust

Seeing reviews on a listing proves that real people have bought the product in the past, and had a positive experience with it. Even having neutral or negative reviews on your listings helps customers build trust in your company, as 95% of consumers suspect reviews are fake if no negative ones are visible.

People are Reading Them

Over 80% of consumers will read online reviews before using a local business. Furthermore, they read an average of 10 reviews before feeling able to trust a business.

Additional Information From Another Voice

When customers leave a review, they will often share their personal experience with the product and customer service, opinions on the products look and usability, photographs and details they feel are relevant. Consumers looking at your listings may rely on these reviews more than they would your description, as the review was left by someone who has extensively tested and used the product in real-life settings.

Rich product reviews also contain a lot of keywords about your product, which can help with SEO and rankings.

Increases Conversion Rates

Having product reviews on your listings is another driving force for making potential customers decide to purchase your product, for the reasons stated above. Overall, having public reviews increases total conversions by around 3%. The more reviews you have, the more effective they will be, but having as little as 30 reviews can help improve conversions by 25%+.

Tip One – Feedback Request E-Mails & Messages

Contacting customers who have recently purchased a product from you is common practice when it comes to encouraging customer reviews. A simple message thanking them for their purchase and inviting them to let you know what they think is simple and can often be enough to do the trick. While you could send a message yourself to every new customer who makes a purchase, this would be a very time-consuming process if you make a lot of monthly sales.

Fortunately, there are numerous third-party software options that will send automated messages to customers on your behalf. However, you can’t ask Amazon customers to leave a positive review or offer any incentives for customers to leave a review at all, as this is against Amazon’s Terms of Service.

Tip Two – Social Media

Social media is a great way to contact recent customers about their experience with your product. It can be as easy as making a story post on Facebook or Instagram, asking people to leave their feedback through the link provided. Social media will only reach the customers who actively chose to follow your page, missing out on all the other customers. While this does limit the number of people you ask to leave a review, the people following your social media pages are often the loyal ones who are willing to take time out of their day to leave an informative (often positive) review.

Tip Three – Inserts & Leaflets

Product Inserts or leaflets are another way to ask customers to leave a review. They can be easily sent with the product when it is delivered to the customer, ensuring that they see them. Most people will briefly skim a leaflet before throwing it away to check for any relevant product information. Therefore, you should make sure that your review request is short and snappy so that the customer reads it properly. You should also make sure that your leaflet has a unique and eye-catching design, as this will help to keep customers engaged. This could include using a theme that consists of a certain colour scheme or font style. You could also include images to make the leaflet more visually appealing.

Another similar option is to include feedback requests on your product packaging. This doesn’t have to take up much space, and can be as simple as a QR code or one sentence saying ‘Please provide feedback on your experience at *LINK*’.

Tip Four – Amazon Vine Program

What is Amazon Vine?

Amazon Vine allows you to receive up to 30 verified reviews from trusted product reviewers on your listing. Depending on the tier of enrolment you are in, you can register up to 5, 10 or 20 different products on Amazon Vine. This is a great method for increasing velocity on a new product listing that has little to no reviews, and the customers invited into the Vine program often leave honest, content-rich reviews with more detail about your product than the average review. Increasing the number of reviews on your listings using this method can increase conversion rates, which will then increase sales.

However, there are multiple steps required for your business to eligible, and the products sent for vine reviewers are given away (the reviewers claim them for free). Apart from the costs of your Amazon account and giving away up to 30 units of stock, the vine program is free for eligible sellers.

Amazon charge £140 per parent ASIN enrolled in the vine program, charged seven days after the first vine review is published. This is the only cost involved in Amazon Vine (excluding general Amazon account fees and the cost of giving away up to 30 units of your stock).

Eligibility

To be eligible for Vine, you must be registered as a Professional Selling Partner and identified as a brand owner. You must also be an authorised brand representative for the item you want to add to Vine, which must also be available to be purchased through FBA. For more information on selling your products through Amazon FBA, visit this article.

For the product(s) you wish to enrol in Amazon Vine, they must be the following:

• Of a brand that you are an authorised representative for
• Available to be purchased through FBA and in ‘New’ condition
• Have less than 30 existing reviews
• Have a description and at least one image

For the full enrolment criteria and steps involved, visit this page on Amazon Seller Central.

Tip Five – Responding to Reviews & Good Customer Service

As discussed in a previous blog, responding to product reviews has multiple benefits – customer retention, better brand reputation, new keyword opportunities, higher conversion rates, etc. Furthermore, research suggests that 89% of consumers would be ‘fairly likely’ or ‘highly likely’ to use a business that responds to all reviews (positive or negative), compared to only 43% considering using a business that doesn’t respond at all.

Responding to reviews = more public positive customer experiences = higher conversion rates = more reviews

Being polite and helpful with your customer service can also go a long way and is not forgotten when customers leave reviews.

Factors to Consider

Conclusion