How Ratings and Reviews Help Improve Your Bottom Line

How to Boost Your Ecommerce Business With Ratings And Reviews

Handing over money for goods you can’t test, try or even touch? Ecommerce demands that we place a lot of faith in the online retailers we choose to shop with. So what are some of the best ways to boost consumer trust and purchasing confidence? Reviews and ratings.

Why Ratings and Reviews Are Important For Your Online Business

Ratings and reviews are rapidly becoming a non-negotiable part of the online shopping experience. 89% of customers won’t take action until they read reviews. In fact, there are many benefits that ratings and reviews bring to both customers and your online store. Reviews and ratings:

• Help signal that a business is trustworthy – consumer reviews are trusted nearly 12 times more than descriptions provided by the retailer. Displaying them shows faith in your product (and proves you’re a valid business, with real products reaching customers).
• Help with purchase decisions – providing a rich source of authentic product information, 93% of consumers say that online reviews impact their purchasing decisions.
• Reduce the likelihood of returns – almost 65% of returns are as a result of a product not matching the given description. Reviews help give more context, improving the chances of a happier, more satisfied customer.

How to Use Ratings and Reviews to Improve Your Bottom Line

Reviews and ratings have the potential to significantly impact the success of your online store. Let’s run through some of the ways that you can ensure you’re getting the maximum benefit from their use.

Display Ratings And Reviews Across Your Website

The majority of your customers will be looking for reviews before deciding to make a purchase, so make sure they are front and centre! Embed reviews throughout your website, from product pages through to checkout. 

By customising your review displays, you can ensure that customer feedback, user-generated content, and star ratings are displayed in a way that complements your brand.

You might also like to include a dedicated reviews page. As this is regularly updated with fresh user-generated content, peppered with SEO-friendly keywords, it will encourage search engine bots to regularly crawl your website and boost your ranking.

Displaying ratings and reviews across your ecommerce store can have a tangible impact on your revenue. From increasing conversion rate through to boosting AOV, this persuasive form of social proof helps get more sales across the line. Okendo customer Freshly Picked for example was able to enjoy:

• An 11% increase in AOV
• A 5% uptick in their conversion rate

Use Review Data to Create Personalised Email Campaigns

Reviews and ratings can positively impact your marketing campaigns, in other ways than including social proof and star ratings in your emails. The review request process represents a unique opportunity for merchants to collect deeply insightful customer data, which can be used to focus more on targeted messaging, and apply smart segmentation to mailing lists.

Okendo offers its customers the ability to collect valuable product and first-party customer data via its Attributes feature. This powerful tool enables retailers to learn more about:

• Product Attributes – relating to dimensions, quality, fit, comfort, and more. 
• Customer Attribute – a focus on the lifestyle, demographics, and behaviors of the reviewer. 

By taking this information and segmenting email campaigns, online retailers can deliver a more honed, personalised message to their customers. By providing content and special offers that are a better fit for the recipients’ requirements and interests, email campaigns pack a much more effective punch.

Okendo customer, WAG, made great use of data sync to use customer profiling data gained from review attributes to a string of highly personalised product recommendation campaigns. As a result, they achieved a:

• 64% increase in Review Request Click Rate
• 300% increase in Placed Order Rate
• 423% increase in Revenue Per Recipient

Enhance Google Marketing With Ratings and Reviews

With just under half (48%) of shoppers starting their purchase journeys on search engines, it makes sense to ensure that the power of reviews and ratings are applied to your advantage via Google.

By ensuring that review and rating data is pushed to their Google Shopping product listings (including their Google Seller Rating) retailers can:

• Increase click-through rates
• Decrease ad costs
• Drive more qualified traffic to the product pages of their own stores

Review data can also be configured to display in the “rich snippets” that accompany product page links within organic search results, helping you stand out in a sea of competitors.

When Okendo customer Muir Way embarked on an overhaul of their Google Shopping strategy, they knew that social proof would have a big part to play in their success. Populating their Google Shopping Ads with reviews got them the following results in just 3 months:

• 20% increase in Click-Through Rate
• 30% increase in Conversion Rate
• 838% increase in Revenue

Ready to Boost Your Bottom Line With Ratings and Reviews?

If you’re looking for a solution that’s going to help take your online store to the next level, ratings and reviews are a safe investment.

Shoppers interacting with Okendo are 4-5x more likely to convert, and merchants can expect to see AOV increase by an average of 10%.

Providing an industry-leading set of features, many of which are completely unique, and a raft of powerful integrations to enable extended functionality, Okendo is helping thousands of ambitious Shopify merchants succeed and scale through the power of ratings and reviews.