Reviews and ratings build consumer trust in a brand’s ability to deliver a quality product and buying experience. Because of this, they’re a fantastic way to help remove barriers to conversion.
85% of customers go on to make a purchase only after reading online reviews, while 63% of customers prefer to buy from sites that display product ratings and reviews.
However, it’s not enough to simply provide ratings and reviews to your customers. For the optimum impact on conversion rate, you need to think about their placement on your eCommerce store.
This article will help you understand some of the best ways to integrate this powerful form of social proof into your store for maximum impact.
On a Dedicated Reviews Page
It’s important to provide shoppers with a seamless user experience, in order to stay engaged and move efficiently through the consumer decision-making process.
A compelling review page offers simplified primary navigation which is essential to clearly signpost a customer’s way to the social proof that’s needed to get them to convert on your online store.
Give your most motivated visitors easy access to the reviews and ratings they’re likely to be looking for through a dedicated reviews page, which can appear in the main navigation, as well as page footers. This provides a simple but effective way of shortening their journey.
Best Practice Takeaway
Keep the review discovery process as streamlined as possible to prioritize user experience. Grouping categories within your reviews page is an effective way of achieving this. LSKD and Caraa provide great examples of this with category groups based on product type, gender and any other set of attributes that are relevant to their product range.
Alongside Product Recommendations
Personalization is becoming a baseline expectation – the new normal. Efforts here are rewarded with 80% of customers being more likely to purchase a product or service from a brand that provides personalized experiences.
Product discovery has a huge role to play here. Personalized product recommendations take on the role of a knowledgeable personal shopper. The smart, data-informed placement of product suggestions can be enormously beneficial in increasing AOV and conversion rates, via online upsells and cross-sells.
As ever, the addition of reviews (and the reassurance they bring) can prove highly effective at further increasing the chances of conversion. In fact, some online brands have witnessed as much as a 22% increase in orders placed by adding reviews to their onsite product recommendations. Instead of navigating away to seek out a product rating, all the information required is visible, accessible and highly compelling.
Best Practice Takeaway
The unfortunate truth is that almost 70% of shoppers who add products to their cart don’t make it all the way to checkout. Add reviews to shopping carts and at checkout to take advantage of two of the most crucial points of the customer journey. The Okendo-Rebuy integration allows online brands to augment their ReBuy powered on-site personalization experiences with high-impact social proof across your homepage, product, shopping cart, and checkout pages for maximum AOV and conversion rates.
Within Media Galleries
The visual impact of your ecommerce store is critical to success. High-quality product photography is essential; not only on-site, but for your advertisements as well. But alongside these perfectly styled, professional shots, shoppers are increasingly interested in images captured by their fellow customers.
It’s not hard to see why. If a shopper wants a clear and honest depiction of the dress that she’s considering purchasing, seeing the item in question on a “real-life” model helps remove doubts about the fit, color, length, and much more.
By including user-generated imagery in media galleries within your ecommerce store, you can paint a picture of the quality and genuine appearance of your products. Your customers are also likely to be inspired and influenced by their peers, seeing the way that a certain product has been styled with other items.
Best Practice Takeaway
To make the most of the opportunity that UGC imagery represents, create shoppable media galleries. Okendo’s integration with Foursixty provides perfect functionality here, allowing merchants to blend UGC sourced from Instagram with UGC from reviews.
This content can be showcased on-site in beautiful, highly customizable media galleries that leverage an “Add To Cart” functionality to deliver a streamlined shopping experience. Review data can also be incorporated into these galleries, giving shoppers a contextual snapshot of customer feedback and yet more valuable social proof to increase shoppers chances of making a purchase.
Making Use Of Product & Customer Attributes
Information provided within reviews should be relatable and relevant – and this is where product & customer attributes come into play.
Ask for specific information surrounding your customers and products in your review request emails. This could include the customer’s impression of their purchase’s quality, fit or design (product attributes), or relevant aspects of the customer’s own personal information such as body type, hair color or reason for purchase (customer attributes).
This data can then be displayed within your reviews to give curious shoppers a much clearer impression of whether the item in question would be a good match for their requirements, the right fit for their body shape, or whether they should order below or above their standard size. All of this adds up to greater purchase confidence, which in turn, boosts conversion.
Best Practice Takeaway
Reviews that display customer and product attributes can be really helpful, but your customers need to be able to find the right ones for maximum effect!
Give your shoppers the opportunity to refine their search by including review filters for customer and product attributes. This will help them find reviews relevant to their own characteristics or needs to help them quickly eliminate irrelevant reviews and make an even more accurate purchase decision.
Ready to get reviews working hard for your store?
Reviews and ratings have never been more important, as customers continue to look for information that helps them make informed purchase decisions.
Okendo provides the perfect platform to help you effectively collect and then showcase customer reviews & UGC in a compelling, customizable and highly contextual way.
As a Shopify Plus Technology Partner, Okendo enables 3,000+ of the fastest growing consumer brands like SKIMS, Knix, and Zitsticka to build trust, drive conversions and maximize CLTV using the highly persuasive power of customer reviews & UGC.
About the author:
Rachel Tyers, VP of Strategic Partnerships at Okendo
Rachel has more than 10 years of experience in eCommerce & digital marketing. Previously the VP of Strategic Partnerships at performance marketing agency MuteSix, a Facebook Blueprint certified media buyer, Rachel is the co-founder of headless eCommerce platform Nacelle and current VP of Strategic Partnerships at Okendo, the leading review platform for Shopify brands. At Okendo, Rachel manages a broad portfolio of both agency & tech partnerships and helps them strategize and lead high-growth merchants on how to best increase their business revenue using customer reviews and social proof.
