One of the fundamental principles of social commerce – in whatever form – is that it only works for businesses if it works for consumers.
Reviews, recommendations and other social commerce tools are only able to increase revenue for businesses because they’re helpful for consumers, giving them more information and more confidence in a vendor or product. And this can only happen if these social tools are carefully designed to work well for consumers, offer the right features and be as easy to use as possible.
It might be hard to believe, but bad reviews can be good for business. We've been digging into the data around the impact of displaying bad reviews on your website, and we've discovered some remarkable conclusions.
The surprising truth is that bad reviews have a variety of business benefits. Most significantly – and most surprisingly – they increase conversion rates: consumers who deliberately seek out bad reviews convert 67% more often than normal shoppers.
We take the review collection process very seriously here at Reevoo. After all, it’s the core of our business. Without high-quality social commerce content coming in, we couldn’t offer the services we do.
Shopping has become social and multi-channel. Consumers are more likely to be influenced by customer reviews or opinions on social networks than offline conversations with their friends and family. And they aren’t just looking on retailer or brand websites: a recent IBM study shows that nearly 50% of consumers now use multiple channels during the shopping process, up from 14% last year.
Marketing lore used to say that a happy customer would tell one friend, but an unhappy customer would tell ten. In the era of social media, that unhappy customer is more likely to tell everyone they know.
In all the discussion around the newest ASA code regulating the promotional use of social media and user generated content, we’ve been surprised that so few people have brought up the existing regulations in this area.
This chart should be familiar to anyone in retail. It’s well known that the most profitable time for a product is the first few weeks after it hits your shelves or your site. You want to be able to use every tool available to make the most of this golden window but, traditionally, one of the most powerful conversion drivers has been unavailable in this period.
Once you understand the social commerce benefits that reviews offer, the importance of having reviews across your entire product range is obvious. Why keep the conversion uplift, traffic boost, SEO benefits and other advantages restricted to just your top products?
So review breadth is a no-brainer. But what about review depth? Is there a ‘magic number’ of reviews that give the maximum benefit, after which extra reviews don’t make a significant difference?
"Why would you be passionate enough about something that's sort of 'meh' to bother writing a three star review?"Seth Godin
At Reevoo, we have a huge amount of respect for the wisdom and marketing savvy of Seth Godin. But in the case of customer reviews, we don’t think he’s quite right.
Godin's question is frequently raised as a criticism of the accuracy and usefulness of ratings and reviews. That’s because it directly impacts two key elements of social commerce strategy: volume and coverage.