DTC #105: Customer reviews are priceless ⭐⭐⭐
Customer reviews help prospective customers make a decision. They can take over Facebook Ads, Tiktok Ads and landing pages and give a higher conversion compared to any other ad content.
👋 Hola! Welcome to Out of Singapore. I am Shan, I am passionate about entrepreneurship. I write about my entrepreneurship adventures to motivate more of you to set up a new business. I find the weekly writing activity relaxing and rewarding.
I failed disastrously in 2022 (did not make a single penny). 2023 has been mildly successful. I, with support from talented folks, have built a fast growing wellness brand that’s giving established brands tough competition. 2024 is yet to unfold. Aspirations are high, but I will keep my fingers crossed.
To all my friends celebrating Lunar New Year, Gong Xi Fa Cai! 🧧💰💸💰🧧
Unlike the new year from Gregorian calendar, Lunar New Year is a quiet period and everyone travels back home to meet their families. Social media is replete with unmarried folks dreading the questions on marriage and relationship. I wish them good luck, haha! Singapore has been quiet since Friday, most shops are closed, supermarkets shut at 6 pm and some retailers have close signs until 16th Feb. Those who aren’t celebrating, are travelling. Flight ticket prices out of Singapore is up by 2x to 3x. Flight to KL costs upwards of 400 SGD (normal ticket price is 100 SGD).
Today we will talk about reviews. Since we launched our new website in Nov, I have been working on building customer reviews. Apart from reviews, building a pipeline of UGC on social media has been another endeavour.
Customer review is the single biggest driver of purchase decision for a wellness brand. The promise of a wellness brand that makes supplements is that it will change some part of a customer’s wellbeing. The only true measure of this is reviews from fellow customers.
I will cover these topics today
Type of reviews?
How to collect reviews?
Where to display reviews?
What is a high quality review?
Best apps to collect reviews for DTC website?
Secret tips to supercharge growth with reviews
Let’s get started
#1 All the places you can get reviews
Brands have multiple sales channels (if you don’t, please start developing them soon). Customers will leave a review on the platform they buy from. This puts reviews into these buckets.
Brand dot com reviews (aka Shopify reviews) - Your “own” customers that buy via your website.
Marketplace reviews - Customers on marketplaces such as Shopee, Lazada, Flipkart and Amazon.
Amazon reviews - Amazon reviews are a big thing. If you can manage to get 50 “high-quality” review every quarter, your customer acquisition funnel would become smooth.
Social media reviews - When customer share their experience about a product on social media, that becomes a social media review. It could a picture or a video, a story or a reel.
Google reviews - This is two types - Google product reviews and Google seller review. Customers can enter seller reviews on Google Maps. Product reviews are fetched from the source of product feed (brand dot com or marketplaces).
#2 How to collect these customer reviews?
In principle, it is simple - ask the customers to leave you a review. However, less than 10% of customers ever leave a review. The customers who leave a review fall into these buckets
Very unhappy with the product
Very happy with the product
Discovers an incentive for writing a review
For established brands with thousands of customers, review collection is simple. For new brands, it is difficult to get the cycle started.
Launch reviews with friends, family and colleagues - Give your product to people who know you, or work for you. This would mostly be free sales. Unless you are selling gold, don’t fret over the cost. You should get genuine, high quality reviews from them. What’s high quality? I will discuss a little later.
Nano influencers - Reach out to social media profiles in your industry and offer them free product for a review on social media and your website. Focus on relevant profiles with follower size of 1K to 5K. Do not shy away from texting creators with over 10K or 50K followers. Some of them may love your product proposition and take on the product barter.
Email, WhatsApp and Messenger existing customers - Sending a email drip campaign (series of 2-4 automated rule based emails) is the most common. All review apps have capability of sending automated emails. Some connect with WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger via an other app. This is generally done 15-20 days after a customer receives their order.
Nano reviews at each stage (Checkout review, delivery review and complaint resolution review) - These are instant reviews. Request for review on the checkout page is instantaneous and asks customers, why they bought the product? Delivery review is as soon as delivery happens and similarly for complaint resolution.
When you are starting out, you might have to manually upload the reviews that you get from your friends or customers. Please do it, it will save you lots of money and time later on.
#3 Where to display and share reviews?
Very simple question, right? Just display the reviews on the product page and landing pages. No, reviews hold a much bigger value. Here is where you can display them
Email campaigns and flows - Show customers new reviews from another customer each time they receive an email. Automate this so that they get different perspective each time. You can start with a static set of reviews, but plan to make this dynamic soon.
Social media stories and posts - Share reviews on social media each time you receive them. For a new brand, this is powerful.
Checkout journey - Assure prospective customers by displaying a few reviews from existing customers when they are making their purchase decision. This is could just below or above the ATC button. Reviews can become an integral part of the checkout page - for example - “checkout took 30 seconds only”, “delivery was within 1 day”.
Landing pages - A landing page can be designed based on entirely customer reviews. Sections like “why customers love us”, “how did they feel after taking our product”, “do they find us safe” and other doubts that customers may have, can be answered by sections built from reviews.
#4 Components of a high quality review
I did not warn you about bad quality reviews before, haha. For reviews to be impactful, it needs to fulfil certain criteria. These are
Genuine - The user has to be a real one - either a customer who has paid for the product or a real user of the product (who may not have paid for it). The most genuine reviews are from customers who pay. Attached the purchase date and order content along with the review.
Detailed - Reviews with images and videos make the most difference. Images with product images are good, reviews with product images and the customer’s face are gold. Details about benefits seen by the customer help prospective customers, such as “improved my energy levels in few hours”, “feel a stable energy boost after 3 days”, “trusted brand”, “received within 2 days” and so on.
Specific - Talks about specific product benefit and experience, such as “helped sleep better within 2 weeks” or “delivered within 2 days” or “complaint resolved within 2 hours” or “exchange arranged the same day”.
Recent - A review within last few days or weeks improves trust in the review.
#5 Best apps to collect reviews on brand website
There are 5-6 winner apps to collect reviews for your website. For marketplaces, they have their own setup. The secret sauce on marketplaces would be send reminders via customer chat.
Let’s go through the apps quickly.
Judge.me - Cheapest and most trusted review app on the market. The best one to start with and its fuss free. Extremely simple pricing tiers - free or USD 15 per month.
Stamped.io - We use this for our BigCommerce brand. Why did I choose it? It’s UI caught my attention. Judge me looked too simple while Stamped looks clean, classy and upscale. However, the looks didn’t turn out the same in reality. The cost is also on higher side and is complicated with 5 tiers. The app is advanced, nevertheless.
Loox - This differentiates itself on visual reviews, essentially UGCs. For lifestyle brands, such as a fashion brand, this may be a good choice. However, I did not find anything else special in this to consider. Pricing wise, more expensive than Judge but cheaper than Stamped.
Yotpo - Markets itself as retention marketing platform by combining reviews, loyalty, referrals and subscription. I believe it is the only reviews app that provides subscription. The pricing is mindblowing, they follow pricing based on size of the business (which is good) but the lowest tier is expensive.
Growave - I use this for our skincare brand on Shopify. Selling point was wishlist and rewards program at a low cost. It is not the most advanced but does the basics. Biggest limitation - only available for Shopify. Biggest selling point - combines reviews and loyalty (also provides VIP tiers feature to everyone without extra charge).
#6 Secrets to supercharge growth with reviews 🤫
Let me get straight to the point.
Combine reviews with loyalty rewards - Give customers points for leaving a review, upgrade them to next loyalty tier and give them extra gifts for their next purchase.
Keep review fresh - Ensure you are getting reviews at least every week, if not every day. The recency of review improves its value.
Use reviews in retargeting ad campaigns
Cross share reviews on multiple platforms - Import Amazon and marketplace reviews into brand dot com websites. Showcase brand dot com reviews on marketplace product pages and product images.
Reply to reviews - Thank the users, or address the concern highlighted by users on reviews. That shows the brand is responsive to customer issues.
That’s it for this topic. I have a few more areas that I will cover later on this topic. This turned out to be longer than expected. Thanks a lot for reading!
Thank you for your continuous support in this journey. Please like and share if this added value to your day. Every like makes my day 😍😍😍😍😍
Please have a restful holiday and a good week ahead! Jisoo wishes you loads of happiness. 😍
Good bye!