Online post-purchase reviews increasingly influence purchase decisions and allow consumers to research the efficacy of products and whether they bring the health benefits the products claim to other users. Acting as a digitised word-of-mouth, reviews are the new digital currency for measuring consumer engagement and sentiment. This guide examines why consumer reviews are so vital, addresses headlines regarding the prominence of fake reviews and provides actionable recommendations on how to get customers to leave reviews, both on own-company eCommerce websites and leading retailer Amazon.
Influencing consumer decisions
It’s no secret that online reviews play an important role in customers’ decision making, not only in the food and nutrition markets, but across all industries. According to Spiegel Research Centre, products with reviews are 270% more likely to be bought than products without (2017). Additionally, Testimonial Engine found that 72% of consumers will wait until they’ve read reviews before taking action on a purchase.This is not hugely surprising in the domains of probiotics and sports nutrition, where key customer questions are not centred around the look or spec of a product but “Does it work?”.
Who better to answer this than other consumers who have purchased the product themselves? With Clavis Insights finding in 2019 that reviews can boost conversion rates by 50%, making sure your existing customers become brand evangelists can reap huge rewards in terms of generating new business.A key benefit of reviews is the accumulation effect – an investment in reviews acts like digital equity that permanently stays with your product, raises awareness and influences consumers.
In short, positive and genuine online customer reviews:
Are vital to customer decision making.
Can increase the likelihood of customers taking action on a purchase.
Can increase your conversion rate.
Product visibility
Another, possibly underestimated, benefit of online consumer reviews is the impact these have on your product’s visibility and click-through in Google and Amazon’s search engines.
Whether you are selling your product on your own company’s eCommerce site or a third party retailer, optimising your product page to appear in relevant searches is key for securing sales through this channel.
Keywords
Did you know that Google can crawl reviews on product pages? This improves your chances of ranking for keywords your target audience are actually using, particularly long-tail keywords, which often have a stronger commercial intent and better conversion rates. This is very pertinent to the nutraceuticals market where consumers are likely to be searching based on multiple attributes such as flavour, health benefit, ingredients, format etc.
Review data in rich snippets
Utilising good technical practices for Search Engine Optimisation (known as SEO – more on this later) means review data can be displayed alongside other product information on Google’s search results page. These ‘rich snippets’ are shown to improve click through rate – and it’s hardly surprising. Look at the below page of Google UK results for “Vegan protein powder” which has an estimated search volume of 7k in the UK alone (note that as this article addresses the effect of reviews on organic ranking, I’ve scrolled past the “paid” ads at the very top of the search).
