Technology has become increasingly more intertwined in people’s lives. Nearly every major sector of the economy has experienced some form of disruption because of technology — Transportation (Uber), Lodging (Airbnb), Entertainment (Netflix), Personal Communication (smartphones), Fintech (Apple Pay, Venmo, Square), Retail (Amazon) and the list goes on and on. Retail Grocery is no different.
Consumers’ willingness to embrace new lifestyles powered by technology seems almost endless. Over 18 million Americans now have a grocery app on their mobile device and over 50% of omnichannel purchases are digitally influenced. The success of brands such as FreshDirect, Peapod, Instacart, Shipt, HelloFresh, AmazonNow and many others is proof that the grocery landscape is transforming to meet consumer demand. One of the fastest growing sectors in retail is eGrocery. In fact, online grocery sales are expected to triple between 2015 – 2022.
eGrocery 1.0 focused primarily on the distribution part of the marketing mix, or how and where to buy groceries online. eGrocery 2.0 will focus on the other parts of the marketing mix — especially product, promotion and experience. With eGrocery 2.0, the key question won’t necessarily be where to buy groceries online, but rather what should I buy? Owning the digital shelf space online will be just as important as owning the physical shelf space. PowerReviews helps to enable this digital transformation.
Checking ratings & reviews before digital and physical purchases is now second nature to consumers because they come to expect this information to be readily available regardless of what they’re buying. Consumers can vet their buying decisions for almost anything including restaurants, movies, lodging, trips, electronics, apparel, etc. Grocery products are no different. For consumables, people want to know what others think about the taste as well as ingredient contents. A grocery shopper study by Label Insights, found that 73% of consumers would be willing to pay more for a product that offers complete transparency in all attributes. Furthermore, 56% said that additional information about how food is produced, handled or sourced would help them trust a brand more.
Retailers who are seeking to market their private brands rely on user-generated content to help their shoppers understand the quality and value these brands deliver. PowerReviews offers retailers the opportunity to leverage their community of shoppers to help advocate for private brands that deliver value, are comparable to national brands and offer unique or superior product benefits.
PowerReviews recognized early on that eGrocery was a sector in which we were well positioned to help both Brands and Retailers succeed. We’ve made significant investments in our technology and people resources in this space. Furthermore, we have real world client insights from which our future product roadmap is developed. Here are a few reasons why PowerReviews is a leader in eGrocery.
Insights from a Deep Bench of Grocery Clients
We’ve all heard the saying “learning by doing.” We’ve been doing ratings and reviews for over 10 years and have a deep bench of grocery clients from which we’ve been continuously building our industry expertise. PowerReviews has over 60 active grocery clients including BJ’s Wholesale Club, Jet.com, Dollar General, PepsiCo, ConAgra Brands, DelMonte, Bimbo Bakeries, Hormel, Constellation Brands, Hershey’s and many others. With this breadth of clients comes tremendous insights and unique perspective on how to help our clients focus their omnichannel strategy and get the basics right from the beginning. Without giving away all of our trade secrets, here are a few things we know are important for eGrocery and how we help our clients.
The Science of Review Collection for Grocery Brands & Retailers
Most grocery brands & retailers will readily admit that their digital strategies are still a work in progress. Some sell online, but many don’t. In either case, how do grocery brands and retailers collect reviews and how does PowerReviews help?
Review Collection for both non-eCommerce and e-Commerce clients
Collecting reviews can be a challenge since most grocery brands don’t have close one-to-one relationships with the end consumer. Furthermore, personally identifiable buyer transaction information isn’t usually provided from retailers. If a brand or retailer doesn’t sell products online directly to the end consumer, how are they supposed to easily collect reviews? PowerReviews has a full product suite to help. One of our core strengths is the bundling of our product sampling, review collection and syndication capabilities. We have solutions to help clients regardless of where they are in their digital evolution.
Product Sampling
Product sampling is one of the most effective ways clients can generate reviews if they don’t already have them. Sampling facilitates generating quality reviews for new product launches, seasonal promotions or for existing products that have few reviews. We have a full service solution that handles everything for our clients from targeting, fulfillment and review collection to syndication.
PowerReviews has a large and engaged community of everyday influencers which makes it easy to build out highly targeted sampling and review collection campaigns. We’re experts at this and have consistently been able to generate 85% review submission rates from our sampling campaigns.
Review Collection
There is a science to review collection and PowerReviews has a PhD in it. There are 3 critical success factors in review collection: 1.) How to collect reviews, 2.) What to collect and 3.) When to collect content. PowerReviews collects 2X more content for our clients than our competitors given our acute attention to detail and the smart product innovations we’ve made.
How To Collect Reviews
Our Review Your Purchases feature makes it easy for end users to write multiple reviews all at once, instead of receiving emails individually for each product. This is not standard practice in the industry and is a simple innovation that allows our grocery clients to significantly increase the breadth of coverage of their products. Review Your Purchases has been shown to increase product coverage by 300%.
Our Progressive Collection feature allows clients to collect more in-depth information on their products by sequentially asking probing questions. Whereas Review Your Purchases is about product breadth, Progressive Collection is about product depth and getting more granular feedback about the product from consumers.
Our Intelligent Collection feature allows clients to align their collection strategy with their current business priorities. We know companies have changing category and product priorities throughout the year. Intelligent Collection allows clients to be able to prioritize review collection based on various factors such as price point, margin, review coverage or low conversion rate (eg. high traffic/low conversions).
What to Collect
Our Visual Content collection features allow clients to not only collect written text reviews, but also images and video. Nearly everyone has a smartphone these days and they all have photo and video capability. Photo and video collection is integrated into our product. PowerReviews customers have seen a 153% increase in visual content collection when they sent an image or video-only request to shoppers. What’s more, 65% of shoppers that submit a piece of visual content continue on to write a review.
For grocery brands, one use case of this feature is for consumers to take photos or videos of recipes that have been “completed” using a brands’ products. Whether it’s a cake or a fantastic home-cooked meal, some people love to show off their finished recipes. Food items are among the most frequently posted on Instagram and Facebook. Our Social Suite allows brands to easily create campaigns using previously posted items on Social Media from their customers.
On average we’re collecting over 7,500 reviews per month among our grocery clients. Our portfolio continues to grow as does our executional expertise.
When to Collect
When to collect reviews is a critical success factor. If you request the review too soon after purchase, you’ll miss an opportunity because the consumer hasn’t used it yet. And if you request the review too late, the consumer is disinterested and is likely to ignore the review request. PowerReviews’ powerful data analytics capabilities are integrated into our system to time the review request at the right time per product. PowerReviews has over 1500 product SKUs in the grocery space that we’re collecting reviews for. Our data analytics is a contributing factor to our 2X advantage in review collection relative to the competition.
Syndication
Finally, reviews are most useful when distributed where your shoppers are making their purchases. Reviews don’t just sit on brand and retailer websites, but are shared across retailer product pages as well. That’s where syndication comes into play and the PowerReviews Open Network reaches 1 Billion shoppers monthly that account for $90B in sales.
For grocery brands we syndicate to the largest online retailers such as Dollar General, BJ’s Wholesale Club, Tesco, and Thrive Market to name a few. Here are a few things to note about our Syndication Network:
- No access fees
- 80% higher product matching compared to our competitors due to proprietary artificial intelligence and an in-house human-developed executional process.
- Speedy integration. 1-2 weeks setup time which is 50% faster than industry standard
With our sophistication in syndication and overall network management, PowerReviews brand clients frequently see a 2X increase in product page conversions and retailers often experience a 15-20% lift in site conversion.
Our team of consultants has a wealth of experience collecting, organizing and distributing user-generated content, critical for the omnichannel grocery path to purchase. Our years of domain experience working with grocery brands and retailers and our forward-looking product roadmap will help us stay a leader in omnichannel grocery.
