How To Ask Customers for Reviews That Get Results
Reviews and ratings are essential for your eCommerce business. They boost your credibility, help you rank higher in shopping searches and online marketplaces, and help prospective customers make their purchasing decision.
Overall sentiment, recency, quality, and consistency are all important when it comes to your reviews. This means you have to be able to generate lots of high-quality, positive reviews that continue to roll in over time. To learn more about what's important for your store's reputation, read our complete guide to review management.
While Stamped makes it easy to highlight reviews and ratings in the optimal locations on your website, you may have to set up some outbound messaging that prompts buyers to leave feedback on the product they bought (or the seller in general).
With this in mind, there are a few ways to ensure that you're putting your best foot forward when it comes to review generation:
1. Use the Channels Your Customers Prefer
Everyone responds differently to communication when it's handled in different channels, which is why it's important to identify and utilize your buyers' preferred method of receiving something like a request for feedback.
Being able to send follow-ups and review requests on multiple platforms — for example, email, SMS, and Facebook messenger — increases the likelihood that they'll take action.
2. Act Fast for Best Results
Timing is important for effective review management. Wait too long to send a request for feedback, and customers have a much lower probability of responding because their experience is no longer fresh in their minds. But, if you send it too soon, it's likely that they won't have enough time to engage with the product they bought — and if they do leave a review, it won't be high-quality enough to truly illustrate their experience with your product.
We recommend that eCommerce business owners wait at least one week — but no more than 30 days — to send a feedback request to verified buyers.
3. Be Authentic and Personalize Your Requests
If it were you, which would you rather receive? A generic message from a brand asking to leave a review, or a personal note that uses your name and information about your purchase to thank you for your business and ask for a review?
If you're like most people, the latter comes in first, because consumers like to feel appreciated after choosing a brand to do business with, especially by smaller stores. No matter what channels you're using to send your review requests, make sure you personalize your messages and communicate that leaving a review is more like doing your brand a personal favor than it is simply checking a box in the sales process.
4. Keep It as Simple as Possible
As much as you'd like to believe that your customers like your brand the best, there are so many options out there, and no matter what you sell, chances are that your store isn't the only one your customers are purchasing from.
That's why it's so important to make the process of leaving a review or rating the experience as simple and streamlined as possible. This means forms embedded directly in communications, clear questions about a customer's experience with your brand, and links directly to a feedback page that can gather every piece of relevant information in as few steps as possible.
5. Work Smart, Not Hard
It might feel like a daunting prospect to realize that you need to find a way to make sure you can generate reviews from the customers who buy from you. It can be — but not if you use proven tools to help you get a leg up on the competition.
That's where Stamped's Reviews & Ratings software comes to the rescue. With simple features like post-purchase email automation and embedded email feedback forms, Stamped can help you improve your review generation conversion rate while saving you time in the process!
