Blog Archives - Page 4 of 36

You know you need to ask for reviews. You also have ideas for how to ask for reviews.

There’s only one piece of the puzzle left for you to figure out: when to ask for reviews.

Congratulations — this is actually the easiest part, especially since we’ve already done the research for you. We’ve analyzed the data from hundreds of thousands of review requests and post-purchase emails from PowerReviews clients to determine the optimal time for asking reviews.

What we found may surprise you. Certain days of the week perform better for review collection. Ultimately, however, the best time to ask for reviews depends on the types of products you sell, as well as the demographic makeup of your audience.

Let’s dig in.

The Best Day(s) of the Week to Ask for Reviews

In general, we’ve found that Wednesdays and Saturdays have the highest conversion rate for review request emails. Maybe people are looking for a way to break up hump day, or they have more time on the weekend.

Whatever the reason, emails sent on these days tend to lead to more reviews. This is not to say requests aren’t effective on other days (we’ve seen plenty of evidence to suggest this is the case). But scheduling your post-purchase emails on a Wednesday or Saturday seems to give it the best possible chance of generating a review.

What Time Should You Email Your Review Request?

The best time to send your review request emails depends on your customer base, and their past interactions with your email campaigns. Review your email analytics. Based on that data, you can determine when your customers will be most likely to open and engage with your review request emails.

If you’re starting fresh with a review collection email program and looking for some general best practices, however, the best time slot is between 10am and 2pm. This timeframe captures people on their lunch break, when they have a little extra down time to leave a review. 6pm can be another peak time, when people have finished their workday.

When to Ask for Reviews, Depending on What You Sell

Now you’ve got two days of the week you can dedicate to sending your post-purchase emails. But how many Wednesdays, or Saturdays, should you wait before sending your review request?

You don’t want to send your email too early. You could come off as too eager, but worse, the person may not have even had a chance to try out the product yet.

The vast majority of people prefer to leave a review after they’ve used a product at least once or twice, and 34% of people would like to use it even more before writing their review.

Younger generations, in particular, prefer to be able to vet a product a bit longer before leaving their review. While 40% of Boomers are happy to write a review after using a product once, only 27% of Gen Zers are.

At the same time, you don’t want to wait too long either. People prefer to leave reviews while the product is still top of mind. 77% of people will write a review within a week of receiving or using the product, and 8% will write a review the same day.

There’s also a risk that if you wait too long, your email will get lost among all the other review request emails they’re getting. People order a lot of things online these days, and that shopping behavior has only increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. 1 in 5 people buy something at least once a week. For 6% of Amazon Prime members, they purchase something every single day.

Getting the timing just right is key to maximizing your review submissions. You want to give people enough time to be able to leave a detailed review (customers rate longer reviews as more helpful), without waiting so long that they lose interest.

How long should you wait before sending your review request? Between 7 to 21 days, depending on the type of product the customer purchased.

Hard Goods – 21 Days

When we talk about hard goods, we’re referring to products that last a long time, such as refrigerators, washing machines, and computers.

We recommend waiting 21 days before sending your review request for these products. Why so long? With products like these, the person is expecting to use them for a long time. They want to make sure it works as expected, and they need time to confirm that.

Send your review request too early, and they may have only used the product a few times. With some of these products, like a new computer, they may have not even had a chance to set them up yet!

Soft Goods – 14 Days

Soft goods describe items that are used immediately and only last a few years, such as apparel, cosmetics, and personal care items.

We recommend waiting 14 days before asking for a review on these products. That’s a perfect amount of time for a person to have received the product and used it at least once or twice. With the purchase still top of mind, they’ll be in a good place to write a thoughtful review.

Perishable Goods – 14 Days

Perishable goods are used immediately and have a short lifespan. These may include food and beverage items, as well as flowers and plants.

Like soft goods, we recommend waiting 14 days before sending your review request email. Perishable goods are used quickly, and you want to ask for a review before the person has already forgotten about how much they enjoyed it!

Seasonal Goods – 7 Days

Seasonal items include holiday and seasonal products. They could be perishable, like holiday-themed foods and beverages. Or they could be a soft good, like apparel or decor. Regardless, many of these items are put to use as soon as they’re out of the box.

As a result, you don’t want to delay your review request longer than a week. 7 days is the ideal time for sending a post-purchase email on seasonal goods. The person has probably already used the product, if not multiple times, and you want to make sure you ask for a review before the holiday is over.

There’s another reason why you don’t want to wait too long to ask for reviews on seasonal products.

Reviews increase conversions by 115%, and there’s only a short window of time your seasonal products will be available. You have to make the most of that window to boost your review count — and your sales.

When to Send a Review Follow Up Email

If a customer doesn’t respond to your initial review request, how long should you wait before sending them a follow up? A good rule of thumb is 1 additional week, or 7 days. The product will still be fresh in their mind, but you’ve given their email inbox a little breathing room.

Do you really need to send a followup email? Yes, not everyone will leave a review the first time you ask them. In fact, only 68% of customers will. An additional 28% leave a review the second time you ask them. But 4% of people, you’ll need to nudge them a third time before they write a review. That’s why we recommend sending at least two emails as a best practice.

How many requests you’ll ultimately need to send can depend on the demographic makeup of your customer base, however. Our research shows that older generations are significantly more likely to leave a review after the first request. 74% of Boomers will write a review the first time you ask them, as will 70% of Gen Xers. For Gen Zers and Millennials, however, that percentage drops to around 60%.

The takeaway: If your customer base skews younger, always send at least two emails asking for reviews, if not three. Learn more about what drives customers to leave reviews.

Worried about being a pest? Don’t be. Our data shows that up to 80% of all reviews come from post-purchase emails. Asking for reviews over email can work wonders for your review collection, especially if you ask more than once.

Just take a look at the chart below. These are the review collection numbers for one of our clients, before and after they started sending post purchase emails. Can you guess what month they started asking for reviews?

That’s right. Simply starting a post-purchase email campaign skyrocketed this client’s review collection numbers to the tune of 900%.

It’s Always the Right Time to Ask for Reviews

Do what you can to get more reviews, by asking at the right time, and asking more than once. It’s worth it! Why? 97% of consumers typically read reviews before making a purchase and 81% of online purchases take place on pages with ratings and reviews content.
Timing your ask is just one part of a successful review collection strategy. From collecting and displaying reviews, to managing and responding to negative ones, there’s always more you can do to squeeze more value out of your customer reviews. Learn more in our Complete Guide to Ratings & Reviews for 2021.

By now, we’re all aware that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a transformational impact on ecommerce.

According to eMarketer, ecommerce sales have surged at a completely unprecedented rate – not just where I’m based in the UK, but globally everywhere.

If anything, these figures may downplay the overall impact. According to the US Census Bureau, for example, the first three quarters of 2020 saw a 32% increase in sales compared with the same period in 2019.

Regardless, those numbers are in line with what we saw across our own customer base at PowerReviews. At the start of the pandemic, between February and May 2020, purchase volumes among our customer set increased 3x.

Even though purchase volumes have now stabilized, they’re still consistently 40% to 70% higher than they were pre-pandemic.

But the pandemic’s impact on ecommerce isn’t limited to sales growth. COVID-19 has radically changed people’s reliance on ecommerce, what ecommerce looks like, and how they make purchasing decisions online.

Anecdotally, we have heard from a number of the brands we work with how COVID-19 has accelerated their ecommerce strategy at an unprecedented rate. We hear time and time again how they have done work previously planned to take five years in a matter of months.

At PowerReviews, we have been exploring the effect of COVID-19 on reviews monthly in our snapshot series (check out our Insights section for our back catalog). Almost a year in, we wanted to pause to summarize our findings.

Do ratings and reviews matter more or less in a global pandemic? Do they have a stronger impact on conversions than before? Here’s what we found.

Review interaction up 50% from pre-pandemic levels

Review interaction includes actions like searching, filtering, and clicking to expand and read an entire review.

Based on our data, people are engaging with reviews more than ever before. In the early months of the pandemic, review interaction was up 89% compared with pre-pandemic levels:

Once people settled into their “new normal,” these numbers lowered somewhat. Still, the appetite for reviews remained healthy, with review interaction eventually stabilizing at a level 50% higher than pre-pandemic times.

Reviews build confidence in uncertain times

The pandemic upended several industries. Product categories like food and home decor have soared, while travel and hospitality have suffered.

But, as the eCommerce data tells us, it’s not that consumers stopped shopping. Rather, they just shifted their spend.

For example, in our 2021 survey of over 10,000 beauty shoppers, we’ve found 54% of beauty shoppers wear less makeup now, but just as many have shifted their focus to skincare.

The pandemic also strained supply chains, leaving many items out of stock. As a result, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, many shoppers found themselves forced to try new brands.

With so many shoppers shifting their spend (both online and to new sectors), many of them are purchasing products for the first time. They could be trying something completely new, or buying something they previously would have purchased in store (like apparel or cosmetics).

Reviews are critical to building their confidence during this decision. It’s no surprise, then, that 41% of beauty shoppers say they rely on ratings now more than they did before the start of the global health crisis.

When in-store shopping is either unavailable or feels unsafe, shoppers need alternatives for validating that a product looks and functions as a brand claims it does.

Reviews describe functionality, but nothing beats a photo when it comes to appearance. It’s essential to collect visual content from your shoppers, and all the more so in a pandemic.

Over a third of beauty shoppers say they are now more reliant on user-submitted visual content than they were prior to COVID-19.

*Juvia’s Place displays product photos next to user-submitted content. Shoppers can see how various shades of eyeshadow look on other customers who look like them.*

Reviews have 25% more influence on conversions

Clearly, people are finding reviews more helpful than before. But is all that review consumption translating to more sales? Good news: the data suggests yes. A year ago, around 4.25% of shoppers who interacted with review content would go on to purchase an item.

In the first months of the pandemic, that percentage surged to rates between 6.45% to 6.86% — more than 2 percentage points above typical conversion rates.

As people settled into the new normal, that number stabilized to 5.3%. Still, that’s a full percentage point higher than it was in 2019. In other words, people who interact with reviews are 25% more likely to convert today than they were pre-pandemic.

That jump in conversion rates is significant. But what about impact during the Holidays?

Our research shows that reviews are even more influential historically during this period.

The conversion rate actually peaked at about the same level year-on-year. During the 2020 Holiday season, the influence of reviews jumped to a massive 7.41%:

The bottom line? Not only have shopping volumes increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, so has the proportion of those purchases being impacted by UGC. Imagine what that can do for your conversion rates.

Reviews may be impacted by BOPIS/Click and Collect

There’s no doubt that ecommerce growth has skyrocketed thanks to COVID-19, but what we think of as ecommerce has also grown.

For some retailers, as many as 50% of their online orders were picked up via Buy Online, Pickup In Store (BOPIS) at a local store. With BOPIS and curbside pickup, shoppers have a different set of expectations than they do with a traditional online order. They expect that:

It will be easy and intuitive for them to complete their purchase.
The retailer will provide clear communication about when their order is ready and where they can pick it up.
The actual pickup process will be smooth, and was worth picking up in person vs. having delivered to their home.

That’s a lot — both for brands to live up to, and for shoppers to keep in mind when they review their purchase.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, shoppers may have focused solely on the product they received, and whether it arrived on time. Now, they’re thinking about your product, their personal safety when they shop in-store, and any inconveniences they encountered when they arrived for their curbside pickup. These new in-store experiences present another opportunity for brands to either delight or disappoint them.

Do what you can to ensure the comments shoppers leave in their review reflect a positive experience, and any in-store photos they upload look clean. Download the Guide: Reinventing the Store Experience.

Reviews are up to 20% shorter

Here’s one data point that surprised us. In the first few months of the pandemic, review length plummeted by 24%. It eventually stabilized, but reviews are still about 15% to 20% shorter than they were pre-pandemic.

We measure review length by character count, so a 20% drop only equates to a handful of words. Shorter reviews still hold a ton of value, as our conversion data highlights.

However, our data also tells us that longer reviews tend to be voted “more helpful” by other shoppers. Reviews that are 80-100 characters long receive 2.5 helpful votes on average, while a review of 500+ characters receives more than double that number, or 5.3 helpful votes.

Considering that reviews exist to help consumers make purchase decisions, the more helpful a review is, the more likely it is to drive someone to convert.

As for why reviews are shorter, we can only speculate. Perhaps, with all the online shopping they’re doing, people may simply have less time to dedicate to each of their reviews. Or maybe they just don’t know what to write.

Regardless, this presents an opportunity for brands to find ways to encourage customers to leave longer reviews. The best way to do that? Make it easier for them.

Take Action: 5 Ways to Make the Most of UGC In a Pandemic

With more shoppers turning to eCommerce, reviews have become even more important. Here’s what you can do to generate more reviews and purchases this year.

1. Revamp your review form so it’s easy to complete and generates the most helpful information for shoppers.

Provide a series of prompts for customers to quickly answer before they get to the open-ended commentary. Let them select pros and cons, suggest best uses for a product, and provide demographic information that helps other shoppers identify with them. Not only do these questions help shoppers provide more info, but it also primes them to leave more helpful information when it comes time for them to write the actual review.

Here’s an example from Room & Board:

2. Encourage people to leave longer, more helpful reviews with a progress bar.

At PowerReviews, we call this the review meter. As shoppers type their review, a little green bar grows at the bottom, with explainer text that gently reminds them to keep writing their review. Once they hit a minimum character count, it lights up and tells them to “Keep it up,” reinforcing positive behavior.

3. Make it easier for shoppers to consume your review content.

Display ratings and review content both online and in-store. Online, feature reviews prominently on your product pages, and share positive customer feedback on social media. In-store, display QR codes or print them on your product packaging with links that take users directly to your online reviews.

4. Complement reviews with visual content from verified purchasers.

Visual content builds trust. It helps customers visualize using your product, and imagine the size, scale and basically enables them to envisage how they would use it. They’re especially important for personal products like health and beauty. So, display images from real customers on your in-store displays, social media, and product pages.

5. Ask for reviews.

Seriously. Often, all you have to do to get a review is just ask. 70% of people are willing to write a review if asked. On average, sales double when a product goes from having 0 reviews to just 1 review. Frame feedback as easy and quick (people are strapped for time), but hugely valuable to you. Here’s an example from Vistaprint:

Reviews have always mattered, but they matter even more in the age of COVID-19. Don’t wait to seize the moment. Check out our Complete Guide to Ratings and Reviews for 2021, and develop a growth-busting UGC strategy for this year.

User-generated content (UGC) — including reviews, Q&A, photos and videos — is proven to drive sales growth for brands and retailers. Our own data tells us that once a product starts displaying reviews, the conversion rate for that product increases by 65%, on average. The same goes for imagery: on average, a product experiences a 69% increase in conversion when just one customer-generated image is added to the product page.

While sales growth is certainly an important benefit of UGC, it’s far from the only one. In fact, there’s another huge plus of collecting this content. And it’s one that’s often overlooked by even most progressive brands and retailers.

UGC is full of rich data that — when leveraged — can drive positive change throughout your entire organization.

Of course, you probably use other tools — including surveys — to capture feedback from your customers that you can then take action on. But the beauty of UGC is that you can easily map feedback to specific products. And that makes it a whole lot easier to take meaningful action on the data.

Why eCommerce Managers Should Analyze UGC Data

Constant analysis of UGC data is key to uncovering impactful ways to improve the ROI of your UGC program.

For starters, this data gives you a very clear picture of what types of content is driving sales. For example, you might discover that website visitors who engage with reviews convert at a much higher rate than those who don’t. Based on this data, you determine it’s important to have plenty of reviews for plenty of your products — including any offerings you’re launching in the future. So you decide to execute a series of pre-launch product sampling campaigns to generate reviews before your new products hit the shelves.

Data can also help you understand how shoppers are interacting with the different components of your content display — and how it’s impacting sales. You can then use this information to optimize your display — and drive even better results.

For example, our friends at Clinique might notice that a lot of shoppers filter reviews to see only the one-star content. Surprisingly, though, these folks go on to convert at a higher level than those that don’t.

There might be an opportunity here for Clinique to make this filtering functionality even more prominent. That way, shoppers can easily identify the “worst case” scenario and determine if it’s something they can live with.

5 Other Teams that can Leverage UGC to Drive Positive Change

So the data from your user-generated content can help you optimize your overall program. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

UGC is full of actionable insights that can drive meaningful change throughout your company.

But data without action is pointless. The key is to get the right data into the right hands to put the data into action.

Who can benefit from the insights in UGC? Let’s take a closer look at how five of the likely key teams at your company can leverage the data from UGC to make impactful improvements — and boost your company’s bottom line.

The Product Innovation Team

Innovation teams are constantly looking for opportunities to develop new products — or even entire product lines. The data from UGC is a great resource to uncover these.

For example, let’s say there’s a CPG company that sells protein drinks. The company’s product innovation team is always on the hunt for new ideas. The team analyzes their UGC for existing products and discovers that shoppers frequently suggest a pumpkin pie flavored product. They also notice that a competitor offers a pumpkin spice protein drink, and it seems to perform well with shoppers. So the team starts putting together a proof of concept (POC).

The R&D Team

Coming up with a great product idea isn’t enough. Instead, it’s critical to iterate and improve on that product to ensure it’s in line with market demand. The data from UGC can help your research and development (R&D) team do that. In fact, UGC is full of actionable insights you can use to discover and fix problems with your products — or identify and implement ways to take your product to the next level.

Let’s take a look at an example of these insights in action.

Clif Bar & Company, a food and beverage brand, recently developed a new product formula. Before officially launching, the company conducted a sampling campaign. They found that the average rating on the new bar was 2, and sentiment around the word “taste” was particularly negative. After digging into the content, they found that one of the ingredients wasn’t mixing well with the others. They made a quick change to the formula and ran another product sampling campaign prior to launch. The result? The average star rating jumped to over 4. And the company launched a product they knew would resonate with their customers.

The Merchandising Team

Merchandising teams are responsible for ensuring a retailer sells the right mix of products that meet the needs of its customers. Typically, a merchandise manager oversees buying for a specific category or set of categories. But in order to make informed buying decisions, they’ve got to understand why a product did (or didn’t) sell.

Your merchandising teams can analyze the UGC from your own eCommerce site — and benchmark this against your competitors — to uncover great insights. The result: better purchase decisions. For example, merchandisers might leverage data from UGC to eliminate products, add new offerings, negotiate better deals, and even work with merchants to improve products.

Let’s take a look at a couple real-life examples.

Room&Board had a lounge chair that sold well but had the occasional poor review. Looking at those reviews as a whole, a criticism that kept coming up was that the fade-resistant chairs weren’t living up to those claims. After identifying the issue as a material defect and making exchanges for those customers, the merchandising team used this data to negotiate a major price break on a large new order they were placing.

*Room&Board identified a manufacturing defect in one of its products.*

Gardener’s Supply Company is another PowerReviews customer whose merchandising team depends on the data from UGC. Recently, this retailer found that one of their top-selling watering cans had several reviews that noted leaking. The merchandising team was able to share specific data with the merchant to make improvements to the watering can.

*Gardener’s Supply Company uses UGC to improve products.*

The Customer Insights Team

Customer Insights teams are focused on better understanding current and prospective customers. UGC can be a powerful source of data to enhance their analysis, and it can even lead to improvements of the overall customer experience.

For example, Discount Tires is a PowerReviews customer that collects ratings and reviews not only for products — but also for store experiences. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the company implemented some store-specific policy changes, including mask requirements and the option to self park in order to allow for social distancing. When analyzing the store reviews, Discount Tires determined these safety measures were well received by customers. Based on this data, they made the decision to make these company-wide policies.

The Marketing Team

Marketing teams are tasked with developing messaging and campaigns that attract the right shoppers. The data from UGC can make their initiatives even more effective.

In fact, there are countless ways marketing teams can leverage the data from UGC to better position, differentiate and promote a product. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples.

One way marketers can leverage the insights from UGC is to get a better understanding of what matters to shoppers who have purchased a specific product. For example, a skincare company can determine whether shoppers care about an item being fragrance-free. If it’s a feature that’s frequently mentioned in reviews, the team may want to make this a more prominent message on the website and other marketing initiatives.

Analyzing your UGC (and that of your competitors) is also a great way for your marketing team to understand what words your shoppers are actually using when describing products. Your marketing team can then use this information to improve campaign performance. For example, New Balance, a PowerReviews customer, analyzes UGC to understand how their customers are talking about their products. Then, they use the words and phrases they uncover to power SEO and paid search ads.

Maximize the Impact of Your UGC

User-generated content — including reviews, Q&A, photos and videos — is full of powerful insights that can position your business to better serve its customers. But all too often, this rich data source isn’t used to its full potential. And its impact can stretch way beyond your ecommerce team alone.

Ensure you fully explore all the different insights it generates and make an active effort to get these into the hands of the different teams around your business which can take action on them. In doing so, you make yourself a hugely valuable resource. Why? Because doing so enables meaningful, data-driven changes to products and experiences — which can have a significant and measurable impact on your company’s bottom line.