Choosing the right holiday is hugely important for consumers, which is why they’re willing to spend hours researching online before booking. Reviews and recommendations have played a key part in this process for years, with 88% of travellers using them today.
The past two years have seen the greatest shift in retail since the rise of online shopping.
Brands can no longer rely on shepherding consumers through a tidy funnel towards the final conversion. Instead, they must respond to a new purchase journey driven by consumers, powered by search and social, and reaching across dozens of different touchpoints, from mobile to bricks and mortar stores.
Brands are often nervous about hosting consumer conversations about their products or service on their own sites (or Facebook pages, or their other web real estate). They worry that the discussions will be hijacked by a few cranks and they'll end up with nothing but criticism, posioning their reputation and depressing sales.
We've analysed the data from our curated consumer Q&A tool, Reevoo Conversations, and the results indicate that brands have nothing to worry about.
Earlier this month, Richard Anson spoke to the IMRG Communications Channel Summit on the crucial importance for brands of controlling their online reputation.
He certainly didn't mean silencing your critics by censoring negative feedback. This tactic is a hangover from the pre-digital era and anyone trying it today will fail and will suffer a terrible consumer backlash.
Retailers have always had a tough job, and it’s only getting tougher. Helping shoppers research products is hard, pricing is hard, fulfillment and CRM are hard: all remain key battlegrounds in an increasingly competitive marketplace, mostly because there is no widely-accepted “right answer”.
However, there is one area where a “best in class” set of answers are emerging, and there’s a huge opportunity for retailers to reap the benefits by adopting these best practices.
The most talked about social media trend of 2011 is Question and Answer websites, with big names like Quora and TED Conversations getting huge amounts of attention. Google recently acquired Aadvark, a service which finds the perfect person from your social network to answer any question you could ask. The big question for marketers is how brands can make this newest aspect of the social web work for them.
Product reviews are key for improving conversion, but what about the impact of reviews and social commerce on SEO?
One of the welcome, and often overlooked, benefits of implementing social commerce is that all of this user generated content provides lots of SEO goodness.
Social shopping is a hot topic at the moment but finding ways in which you can make it work today can be difficult. Reevoo Conversations may be just the solution you’re looking for.
‘Reevoo’s Ask an Owner service on the Tesco Direct website is recognised by the Retail Week Awards, being shortlisted for Customer Service Initiative of the Year.’
Reevoo are extremely pleased to be nominated with Tesco’s for such a prestigious award amongst an impressive shortlist including Argos, B&Q and Waterstones.