Every online retailer knows that the reviews are good news for the business: they can be used to build trust – 79% of customers consider reviews as trustworthy as personal recommendations from friends – and they make your online store more appealing to the shoppers – 63% of customers prefer an online store with product reviews to a one with no comments about the products. But there is more to reviews than meets the eye and you can use them to increase your revenues in more than one way. Get inspired by our tips and approach your customer reviews in a new, creative way.
Reviews as Marketing Tools
Reviews are a source of knowledge for customers, who want to compare different items and choose the ones, which seem to be the best. But reviews are also extremely useful for online retailers, because they help them understand what customers think about their products. If you not only sell, but also manufacture your products, reviews can help you improve your products by eliminating features, which generate most complaints from your customers or enhancing the most popular characteristics of your products. If you do not have any control over the manufacturing process, you can use the reviews to determine the best direction for your business – choose the products, which are popular among customers for their good quality, over the ones, which only generate poor reviews.
Reviews as the source of keywords
Take a few steps back to look at what a review really is – fresh, new content regularly posted on your website without you having to do anything about it. As thus, reviews can be used as your search engine optimization tools and they can help you improve your ranking on the Google search result page. On top of that, the users, who leave reviews for products, are unintentionally enriching your product descriptions with new, relevant keywords. All you have to do is to make sure that the reviews are visible to Google bots and can be easily crawled, and voila! You should see an increase of traffic to your website in no time. If you are not sure how to make your reviews available to Google crawlers, contact a Magento web development agency.
More than just a review
We are used to seeing reviews as posts, each one published with no connection to the others, but reviews can be so much more than just that. Customers, who leave reviews want to engage in a discussion about the products, so why not let them do that? You can change your reviewing system to a more advanced one, which allows customers to rate and comment reviews left by other customers. You can also create a special forum, where customers can post their questions about products and receive answers from your online store staff or from other customers. Since customers tend to trust other people’s opinions more than product descriptions, this can also be a way to advertise your products and convince your customers to buy them.
Marta Gromadzka is a writer and editor with a wide variety of experience, including writing for websites internationally and editing books on many different subjects and in a variety of formats. Facebook and Google+ page
