Case Studies
How Kent Street Cellars Thrives as a DTC Wine Merchant with Shopify x REVIEWS.io
January 9, 2023
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4 min read
For its co-founder, CEO and namesake Ryan Popoff, Popov Leather started as a hobby. Unable to find a quality, unbranded leather wallet he decided to make his own, and quickly found himself selling similar creations on Etsy.
Fast forward to today, and Ryan has a successful business that sells a wide range of handmade leather goods, employs 24 people, and fulfils between 50 and 70 orders per day.
As a DTC brand, trust signals are a vital part of the marketing mix, and Ryan has been collecting reviews from the start. The challenge, however, was finding the right review platform to support his business.
Having worked with a number of providers, Ryan was increasingly frustrated by a lack of support and unjustifiable costs. What he needed was a fairly priced product that allowed him to fully leverage the power of customer feedback.
Ryan chose REVIEWS.io as his solution, primarily based on our competitive price point and friendly customer service. He also found it a seamless process transferring his existing reviews over to our platform, with our team working hard to get things up and running in quick time.
Since making the switch, Ryan has leveraged our product to collect more review content, and uses our advanced integrations with Shopify, Klaviyo and Influence.io to elevate the overall customer experience - all with the support of a dedicated Account Manager.
“We started with Judge.me, then we moved to Stamped.io. The reason we then moved on again was twofold. One, the price was getting a bit out of hand, and two, their customer support team was terrible. It took days to get a response from anyone. At REVIEWS.io I have an account manager that I can actually phone and talk to.”
Ask Ryan what the single biggest benefit of review collection is for Popov Leather and he’ll tell you there’s two - the trust they generate, and the learning opportunities they provide.
In the first instance, it’s all about using the voice of the consumer to attract potential customers to the brand. Essentially, its word of mouth marketing for the digital age. Existing customers share their experience online which allows the brand to establish credibility with a wider audience.
“Reviews are the bedrock of eCommerce. You want to build trust and be authentic, and you can't really do that without your customers speaking about you. We built our brand on word of mouth, and by extension, having those reviews on our website Is a way to demonstrate trust to people who've never heard of us.”
But there’s benefits to review collection that go beyond the trust factor. For Ryan, it’s also a way to view his business from the user perspective - to understand its strengths and weaknesses and use that insight to make improvements, whether to the products themselves or to service elements like delivery or returns procedures.
It’s also a way to foster loyalty by going above and beyond to resolve any issues. So when a review comes in that’s less than favorable, Ryan and the team do their best to flip the customer experience from negative to positive.
“It's not just about trust and authenticity. It's also driving our business forward. You get the one star reviews where people are not happy for a variety of reasons, and we use those as learning examples. Not just that, but also ways to create lifelong customers - so turning those one stars into five stars.”
With all their associated benefits, it’s no surprise Ryan was eager to ramp up review collection for the brand, and that’s one thing our solution has enabled him to do. Firstly by using Flow - our automation tool for review request sequencing.
What Flow allows you to do is segment your audience and trigger review invites based on specific sending conditions.
For example, you can set different time delays based on a customer’s geographical data, or send different invitations depending on the product purchased. You can also automate follow up requests for those yet to respond to accelerate review collection using Flow sequences.
It’s a tool that’s proved highly beneficial to Ryan, and another way he’s found added value in REVIEWS.io.
“A major difference in price when compared to most competitors is one thing. But having a robust way to build flows for collecting reviews has allowed us to get a 21% increase in response rate when compared to our previous solution.”
Tools like Flow make REVIEWS.io a powerful product on its own, but for maximum ROI we recommend using our advanced integrations. Where Ryan finds value here is in our integrations with Shopify and Klaviyo, as well as with our own loyalty solutions, Influence.io.
Of particular benefit is the power to run a cohesive strategy across reviews, loyalty and email marketing.
For one, it allows Ryan to incentivize product reviews. It’s a simple process to award points for every review submitted, and by rolling out this strategy the brand has seen an increase in response rates, really ramping up its collection of UGC.
“We have a lot of really nice customer photos across all our products, and I think part of that is due to Influence.io integrating so well with REVIEWS.io, and us rewarding customers for performing those types of actions. Whether it's photos, or even just leaving a review, I think it’s been enhanced by having those two platforms integrated so well together.”
Ryan’s also able to leverage customer data from both reviews and loyalty by feeding it into Klaviyo to create a cohesive and personal customer experience. This is particularly important as consumers come to expect higher levels of personalization, but also demand respect for data privacy.
With REVIEWS.io and Influence.io in his tech stack, Ryan has access to the first and zero-party data he needs - and by integrating Klaviyo’s advanced segmentation capabilities, is able to drive personalization at scale.
“What I really like is the fact you can call certain aspects of a customer profile back into the email - like their VIP status and points balance - and have it at the top of every email as a gentle reminder. That’s really cool.”
REVIEWS.io is a Klaviyo Elite Partner, meaning our integration is one of the best you’ll find on the market to enhance email invites by integrating with Klaviyo. It also means we have a relationship with Klaviyo that allows us to support you in making the most of our solutions together.
If you're not an existing REVIEWS.io customer, try our platform with our free trial. If you’re an existing REVIEWS.io customer wanting to leverage our Klaviyo integration, talk to Customer Success today. While you’re there, why not ask about Influence.io and explore the growth driving benefits of this powerful trio.
