Last year, Reevoo delivered over nine billion word-of-mouth impressions across our customers around the world. Increasingly more and more of those impressions have been delivered to mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones.
We recently started collecting reviews and social content in our 18th country. With thousands of reviews collected every week across our network, in more than a dozen languages, we’re well placed to observe some interesting trends in international review culture.
We’ve already looked at which nationalities tend to turn the air blue when they’re unhappy with a purchase. But useful insights can be drawn from a much simpler analysis: how long are reviews across Europe?
Choosing the wrong type of review system can open the floodgates to negative reviews, misleading consumers and damaging your brand.
Passive review systems make no effort to solicit reviews from customers, instead relying on site visitors to leave reviews, without checking if they actually are customers. These systems rely on customers being sufficiently motivated post-purchase to spontaneously return to your website to write a review. Anger and disappointment are great motivators, so unhappy customers are far more likely to write reviews in passive systems than happy customers.
"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.