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Customer reviews are an essential part of customer conversion. So in the constant battle against friction and abandonment rates, eCommerce merchants need to integrate customer reviews into your strategy and SMS can help do that.
Shout out to all the people that leave detailed reviews on products. I know you make my online shopping experience a hell of a lot better.
Outside of my own shopping benefits, customer reviews are an essential part of customer conversion. We are talking four in five Americans read reviews before making a purchase decision. So in the constant battle against friction and abandonment rates, eCommerce merchants need to integrate customer reviews into your strategy.
Reviews are a pivotal part of customer conversions because people trust people. Qualtrics provided this year’s review statistics which show just how powerful reviews really are. 91% of 18-34 year-olds trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. That’s close to the same level as the holy grail of marketing—word of mouth.
A 2021 study of the conversion impact of user-generated content analyzed activity on Product Detail Pages (PDPs) from 1,200 eCommerce websites and found that consumers who interact with ratings and reviews convert at 120.3% versus the rate of those who don’t.
Your customers bring their experience, expertise, and opinions to your product descriptions making them richer and more informative. When I started researching chainsaws for a father’s day gift I knew absolutely nothing about them. Through the very detailed reviews other people had left on the site (many including a picture of the tree they conquered), I was able to narrow down the perfect one for my dad. Reviews were the driving factor behind my purchase.
Here’s an example review from Ladiessawtoo featuring her dogs, the trees she cut, and a detailed description of using the product.
Lastly, reviews provide you with valuable insights from your customers. If they love or hate it, your team can take actionable insights to improve products, product descriptions, product photos, and more.
Overall, reviews improve conversion rates and the overall customer experience.
So, why should you use SMS to gather reviews from your customers? SMS has a 98% open rate and gets into the literal hands of your customers. This means that nearly every SMS you send will be read, including inviting customers to leave a review on a recent purchase. Our partner Junip, found that 80% of the reviews submitted to them are left on a mobile device, so it’s not surprising that SMS is the perfect channel to ask for reviews.
Now that we’ve covered that reviews are fantastic, and SMS is a great way to communicate with customers, here are some strategies to ask customers for reviews through SMS:
Use automated SMS drips to ensure you’re sending the review request at the right time and never miss an opportunity. For some products, such as a necklace, it may be best to ask for a review the day or two after the product was delivered. It is easy for a customer to love the product right away and give feedback. For other products, it would be better to let the customer use the product for a while before asking for a review. A customer that just bought a new snowboard may need a few days or weeks to actually try out the product.
Customer lifetime value (CLTV) is a key marketing metric to track your customer experience and how your customers contribute to your company as a whole. This is the total amount spent by customers throughout the period of their relationship with your brand. It is more cost-efficient to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones, so increasing the value of your current customers is important to the growth of your brand. Using SMS to follow up with customers post-purchase is a great way to increase your CLTV. Asking for a review is a great time to thank your customers for their purchase and quickly resolve any issues they may have.
Another way to improve CLTV is to offer a discount code in exchange for a review. Not only are you gaining a (hopefully) positive review but also a repeat customer.
If your customer has left a glowing review, you have found someone that love your brand. As Junip CEO and Co-founder Stuart Arsenault said on a recent podcast, you should engage with them in a strategic way. Staurt said, “We like to think of reviews as an on-ramp to creators. It is the lowest level of what a creator is for a brand. If you think about the number of people that are going to post a YouTube video or a TikTok of your brand, it's 0.0001% of your customers. The number of people leaving a review is often double digits. For most brands, it should at least be three to five percent of your customers. So three to five percent of your customers are creating content for your brand in this way. Expanding [this content] out in different ways means one [brands] can use the content once they've created it. Two, this person has put their hand up and identified themselves as somebody who both loves your brand and likes creating. How else can we use that? Should we send them a text asking them to refer their friends? Should we send them an email asking them to be a part of some other program that we're doing? All of those are things that we're trying to partner with Voyage and other folks across the market automation stack to get better at generating that next thing.”
💡 Listen to Staurt and Voyage CEO Rev Reddy discuss how Junip was founded, why eCommerce reviews are so important, and how reviews turn customers into creators.
A simple, “Hi! Thank you so much for your purchase! We’d love to hear what you think of your new product! Click the link to leave a review, and we’ll send you 15% off your next purchase: ” is all you need to gain valuable insights, improve conversion rates, and increase your CLTV.
Want to learn more about what SMS can do for your brand? Click here to see what the most powerful SMS marketing and message commerce platform in the world can do for your brand, request a demo today!
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