How to Increase Conversion Using Reviews

When talking about conversion, we’re talking about things that brands can do to help get a potential customer to checkout and make a purchase. In order to get to checkout, customers need some sort of reassurance that your product will work and there needs to be a sense of trust.

So, now the question becomes: how can you show customers they can trust your products? The answer is quite simple…reviews! Reviews are a form of social proof that help new customers convert based on insights of people who’ve actually tried the product. To leverage reviews as social proof and get customers to convert, we need to make sure our review collection & display methods are suited for this.

Collecting

In order for reviews to do their job and be reliable sources of information, we need to set ourselves up for success by optimizing how we actually collect reviews. There's 3 things to focus on when collecting reviews.

The timing of review requests

In order for a review to be helpful, it needs to be relevant. Ideally, it should also speak to the product performance. That’s why the timing of review requests is so important. You want to make sure that customers have actually received their order before asking them for a review and that they've had enough time to use it. When customers have had enough time to try out your product, they’ll be able to speak to the product benefits in much greater detail. These in-depth reviews are much more effective at communicating relevant and persuasive details to future customers.

Make it easy for customers to leave a review

Over 80% of all reviews are left on mobile, which means your review forms need to be designed for a mobile-first experience. Doing so not only makes it more likely a customer will leave a review, but it also leads to more personalized reviews. Research shows that customers feel more comfortable sharing personal details using their phone and that reviews submitted on mobile reflect customers’ true feelings. This makes for far more detailed reviews that can heighten purchase intentions.

Collect customer data to add context to reviews

Reviews in and of themselves are good at sharing customer experiences. But what’s really powerful is when a review also displays information about the customer who wrote that review. This “extra info” is what we refer to as custom questions, and are a proven way to make your review section more personalized. Custom questions give context to a review that help future customers decide whether the product will work for them.

Displaying

So now that we have an effective method in place for collecting high quality reviews, we want to make sure that we’re displaying them correctly. We know that 98% of all shoppers look at reviews before making a purchase. This tells us that customers almost always interact with your review section, so making it easy for customers to find what they’re looking for is key to keeping them engaged on your site. There’s 2 key components to an engaging review section that will convert customers.

Media Galleries

Photo and video reviews are the holy grail of your review section. An analysis done by Power Reviews, confirmed that 88% of all shoppers specifically look for photos and videos from other customers before making a purchase.  If customers aren’t able to easily find this content in your review section, they'll go somewhere else to find it. Obviously we don’t want this, page exits kill conversion. That’s why Media Galleries are such an important component to a high converting review section. Junip’s Media Galleries aggregate all of the media from your reviews and put it in one easy to display place at the top of your review section. Customers can easily find the UGC they’re looking for without leaving your page.

Custom Questions & Filters

The next component of a high converting review section is letting customers easily read the reviews that are most relevant to them. This can be done with custom questions and filters - these are the additional questions we ask during review submission that tell us more about the customer and how they used the product.

For example, this is the review section for Sunsoil’s CBD Soft gels. By asking customers their Reason for Use, potential customers can select their specific use case and quickly read reviews that speak specifically to the efficacy of their personal use case. Without this, a customer would have to scroll and read each review until they come across one that talks about the use case they're looking for. This is a very cumbersome process and leads to much higher exit rates, hurting conversion.  

Leveraging

We’ve gone over the basics of how to collect high quality reviews that lead to higher purchase intentions. We’ve looked at the components of an engaging review section that make it easy for customers to find what they’re looking for. Put those two together and we’ve got a high converting review section on your product pages.

A customer's purchase journey doesn’t start on the product page though. It starts the second they land on your website. To keep purchase intentions high and exit rates low, there's a few ways you can leverage your reviews as social proof throughout each page a customer visits.

• Use your average product ratings & review counts as social proof throughout your website. Collecting 1,000+ 5 star reviews and achieving an average product rating of 4.60 are both huge accomplishments. It communicates to customers that your products work and people like them. You can leverage this throughout your website as stamps of approval on landing pages or sections where exit rates can be high.

• Select reviews that talk about common product objections & insert them on relevant landing pages and sections. Finding reviews that talk about specific product benefits or results a customer has seen are very persuasive to browsing shoppers. Especially when placed next to sections that cover product benefits or comparisons. They act as the proof that backs up the claim.

• Display star ratings alongside CTAs. Sections where there's little product info but CTA's are present - i.e. product recommendation widgets, collection pages, etc. Conversion is more difficult because the customer is missing context that tells them whether or not the product is what they need. Since there's not too much real estate in these sections, adding a star rating is a perfect way to signal trust to browsing customers and get them to take that action.

Putting this into action

If you're looking to take your review collection and displays to the next level, it's time you switched to Junip. We make collecting reviews from your customers a seamless experience and give you the tools to easily display them everywhere that matters. Don't just take it from us, read how Manduka increased their on-site conversion by 14% after transforming their review collection & displays with Junip.