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Getting Better Quality Reviews
As a marketer your goal isn’t to just collect reviews, it’s to collect quality product reviews.
What’s a quality product review?
Let’s look at these 2 reviews:
A: Generic:
B: A quality review, on the other hand, specifically addresses shopper concern about mattress delivery to buildings:
Which one do you like better?
Instead of sending out a generic post-purchase email that says, “Hope you are enjoying product X, please write a review” study the product and the reviews you have already collected. Is there a feature that isn’t talked about enough? Is there a feature that is unfairly criticized by a tiny minority? You can identify 15 such scenarios specific to you.
Now that you have the most promising ideas craft a review request email.
Look at an example CAMINO CARRYALL 35 on Yeti.com is marketed as a rugged bag. But most of the reviews don’t talk about that feature. So what can one do? Simple, send an email to people who purchased the bag in the last 6 months. Here is my example email:
Subject: Camino Carryall is rugged, right?
Hi, Steve.
You’ve had your Camino Carryall for the last 6 months. We hope you’re using the heck out of it. We also hope you’ve been rough with it because ruggedness is a feature engineered into the bag. But you know what? We have 853 reviews and only 6 talk about the ruggedness of the product. That sucks because we went through 38 prototypes just to maximize ruggedness.
If you’ve taken the bag through the paces we would love your feedback on the ruggedness of the bag.
[review link]
We need your help, Steve.
Regards,
CEO
This email works for a number of reasons:
A: We’re asking Steve for a very specific thing
B: We’re challenging Steve to tip the balance of ruggedness reviews (they’re just 6 right now)
A little about us
Thank you for reading this article about collecting quality product reviews. We are Frictionless Commerce and over the last 11 years, we’ve thought about just one thing: how do we get online shoppers to convert? We’re fascinated by buyer psychology. Once we’ve understood how your site visitor thinks we use our 9 point copywriting process to convince and convert them.
Comments 5
I do like the concept of very directly, personally engaging the customer on a specific aspect of the product. I think that will pay dividends over simply asking them for a review.
But isn’t this sort of contrary to the advice in some of your earlier posts? Previously, you had warned against emphasizing the importance of a feature that buyers don’t really find that important. I would suggest that if only six of 853 reviews of the Camino Carryall mention how rugged it is then either that is not an important feature to the buyer or the buyers perceived it is not nearly as rugged as Yeti suggests. In either case, stacking the reviews to support this feature might not have the hoped-for impact.
ReplyFrictionless Commerce
Hi, Chris. Appreciate your comment and your reference to a possible contradiction. I guess it depends on what the retailer wants to focus on. I would only expect YETI to update their review request email if they strongly felt an important feature wasn’t being talked about. Sometimes nudging helps the buyer think about a feature they actually do care about but would have missed mentioning on their own.
ReplyAbsolutely love this Rishi!!! Forwarding this to one of my team members now!
ReplyRishi Rawat
So glad you like it. Share away 🙂
ReplyI love this. I always learn things I didn’t think of implementing that will have real impacts on my business.
Reply