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.
We’ve seen brands getting their staff to write fake positive reviews of their products. We’ve seen people slating their competitors in reviews. We’ve seen people outsourcing their review faking via Mechanical Turk or similar sites.
But David Friedman of Ironic Sans seems to have discovered an entirely new kind of astroturfing.
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?
New regulations come into force today that bring online marketing messages under the Advertising Standards Agency’s remit. We’ve known about this for a while, but last week it was revealed that the ASA now considers user generated content on social networks and on brands’ websites to be within the scope of the updated code.
"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.
E-commerce experts have discovered the power of ratings and reviews and are advancing the art and science of social commerce every day.
We enthusiastically recommend getting out there and picking the virtual brains of these smart people. And we’ve even made it easy for you: aggregating opinion is our thing, so based on the Six Essentials of Social Commerce ebook structure we’ve gathered ideas on key social commerce issues: coverage, depth, speed, leverage, traffic and trust.
Consumer trust in the wisdom of the crowd is growing as for the first time customer reviews outstrip both recommendations from family and friends and also independent industry reviews. A recent report by RightNow found that consumers now rank online customer reviews ahead of all other factors that influence their purchases.
78% of UK consumers cited online customer reviews as influential on their purchase decisions, ahead of those whose purchase decisions are influenced by family and friend recommendations.