Manage & Collect
How To Create A Customer Review Strategy That Works For Your Business
July 19, 2019
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3 min read
Manage & Collect
Why Should You Use a Centralised Platform When Collecting Reviews
June 28, 2022
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5 min read
Your experience matters. And as much as we like to push the boundaries of what our product can do (which we like A LOT), we also aim to keep things simple for the end user.
With so many new tools and features rolled out in recent years, we get that it’s not always easy to figure out which of these you should be using, and how best to use them.
So this is your simplified ‘how to’ guide.
For added simplicity, we’ve split our key features into two categories: Review Collection and Publishing, and Data Collection and UGC.
This is the core of what we do - we help you collect and display customer reviews for transparency and trust. Our tools for this are more advanced than the average, so here’s some guidance on how to make the most of them.
Invites are essential for collecting positive reviews, but you need more than a bog standard template if you want high conversion rates.
Our advice here is to keep things short, to the point, and on brand using our Simple Templates and code free customization tools. You can use these to change content, layout and colors, add logos and headers, and more (there’s also an HTML Template if you’re a dab hand at coding and want something bespoke).
Remember you can send product, company or combined invites. Our stats show higher conversion rates for combined invitations. You can also track conversion rates for the last 3 months on all your email templates, so try A/B testing to find the perfect formula.
The same advice applies as above when you’re setting up email templates specific to product reviews (keep it simple, customize, A/B test), but there’s an additional step you need to take to collect and publish these - importing your product catalog.
If you use an eCommerce platform like Shopify or Magento, just make sure you’ve set up our integration and your product catalog will automatically sync for you. If you run on a custom eCommerce platform you’ll need to manually import. You’ll find all the instructions you need for this in your dashboard.
Another key tip here is watch your timing. Customers need a chance to experience a product in full before they review it, so consider the timeframe you want to allow before a review invite is triggered.
This will automatically be set to 7 days from when the order is due to be fulfilled, shipped or completed, depending on your eCommerce platform. Check the trigger details linked to your integration to find out which, and change it up to get your timing spot on.
Say you’ve been in business for a couple of years but you’ve only just introduced review collection. To get off to the strongest possible start, we highly recommend running a Review Booster campaign.
This is a quick and easy way to reach out to past customers for their opinion - either on your company or the products they purchased (or both). Essentially, it’s a quick and easy way to boost your review count.
Simply upload historical customer data via a CSV file, or add emails and order IDs one by one. Then fire off your Review Booster campaign, either with one of your customized email templates or by SMS.
If you haven’t checked out our widget library in a while it’s well worth another visit. We’ve introduced a host of new ways to display reviews and ratings across your store so you can drive trust and engagement throughout the entire on-site journey.
Review nuggets, shoppable UGC galleries, product rating snippets - there’s a widget for every use case. Try out our widgets for free today with our 14-day trial.
As with your email templates, be sure to use our easy customization tools here. You want reviews to look native to your site, so make sure widgets fit with your store layout and brand identity.
Once you're done customizing, simply generate copy and paste installation codes. And don’t worry about any impact on site loading speed. All our widgets are lightweight and super fast.
A Google Seller Rating adds stars to your Google Ad campaigns which, according to the search engine’s own data, can increase Click Through Rates (CTR) by as much as 17%. As a bonus, this improves your Quality Score, which lowers your PPC costs.
That’s why if you’re collecting reviews you want to be doing it through a Google Licensed Partner - so they actually contribute to your Seller Rating.
If you’re a REVIEWS.io customer you already are.
What we strongly advise here is to have a strategy in place for company reviews so you meet the necessary requirements to achieve a Seller Rating, like a certain number of reviews in a given timeframe (read the full list of requirements in our Google Seller Rating support article).
If you’re running low on company reviews, use a Review Booster campaign to get you to the required threshold.
Trust isn’t just established on your website. There are multiple sites customers refer to to check your reputation, including third party platforms like Facebook and Trustpilot. If you have a low score on these platforms, it could be enough to stop a potential customer in their tracks.
What we recommend here is a tool unique to REVIEWS.io - Reputation Manager. Use this to direct a percentage of customers to these sites when you ask for reviews, and build a consistent reputation across the web. Allowing your brand to manage & monitor your reputation, everywhere.
You don’t need an account with any of these platforms, just a single account with us.
Use our simple slider to set your percentage distribution, or leave it to our platform to automatically send customers to sites where you have a low score.
There’s been a lot of changes in eCommerce since we started out, but two stand out in particular. Consumers want to see visual content that’s authentic and relatable, and they want control back over their personal data. We’ve responded by developing tools for User Generated Content, and for collecting first and zero party data to help merchants create engaging and personalized customer experiences.
The UGC Gallery feature offers an easy way to collate, manage and publish visually engaging content across your site and other marketing channels.
Photo and video reviews will automatically be pulled into your UGC library, as will any Instagram content you’re tagged in, provided you connect your Instagram business account. Note that if you want to use Instagram content you’ll need to obtain permission. Just use our one click request tool to get it, then use the UGC widget to publish.
Toggle on the content you want to use, customize the widget to stay on brand and - to really drive engagement and discovery - add product SKUs to UGC to make it shoppable.
KLAVIYO USERS!!! You can also embed UGC galleries into your email campaigns with our advanced integration.
Data voluntarily given by the consumer is what’s known as zero-party data. It’s incredibly valuable to your business and our Attributes feature makes it easy to collect.
It’s simply a matter of adding custom questions to review invites. These could relate to the customer, the product or your company, and there’s a range of question types you can choose from (center select, multiple choice, yes/no etc.).
There are so many benefits to collecting this kind of data. It can help shoppers make better purchase decisions, aid your personalization efforts, and help you improve your products and services.
It’s a feature we highly advise all our customers to explore. And since we don’t have the scope here to discuss Attributes at length, here’s a couple of posts you should check out:
Surveys are another source of zero-party data, and another tool we encourage you to experiment with.
In a nutshell, you can create custom surveys for any purpose - it could be an onboarding survey, post purchase survey, or a simple NPS survey. Whatever you need it to be.
You can add multiple question types, and publish using a widget code or auto install for Shopify Checkout. You can also generate a shareable link, great for requesting feedback via email or social media.
You can see key metrics from surveys via the insights tab, as well as individual responses. It's a simple and effective way to understand your strengths and weaknesses from the customer perspective, so you can improve any given aspect of your business.
When you install the Session Replay and Analytics widget, you can record and watch back user sessions to understand how customers navigate your store. This is what we call first-party data.
When you watch these sessions, pay close attention to which page elements a user interacts with, and the outcome of their visit. This will essentially tell you what influenced their purchase decision.
For example, if they interacted with review content prior to making a purchase, you know those reviews add value. If they abandoned their visit, you can get a good idea on the points of friction they encountered. You can then make the necessary changes to the on-site experience.
We also recommend you check Session Analytics to see key metrics on individual page performance and recommendations for improvement.
AI Assistant is our latest feature and its purpose is twofold. It’s there to make your life easier, and to help draw more value from your review data.
Under the AI Assistant tab you’ll find a search bar. Input a question and the AI will mine your review content to find the answer in seconds. As an example, you might ask “What is the most common pain point customers encounter with us?” or “What is the main problem our products solve?”
It’s sentiment analysis at super speed.
Our advice with AI Assistant is to play around with it. Ask it some questions and see what insights it uncovers. Once you start to see what it’s capable of you can add structure to the questions you ask. There’s also the AI Insights tool which you can use to generate detailed reports on specific areas of your business.
This is such a new feature that we’re still experimenting with it ourselves. But as an example of its potential check out how to optimize your BFCM strategy with AI sentiment analysis.
Still feeling a bit overwhelmed? That’s OK. Provided you know where you want to go we can help you get there. Just use our Objectives and Guides tool.
When you log into your REVIEWS.io dash, you can select the primary goals you want to achieve using our product. Based on these, we’ll show you a curated list of video guides on the best features to use, with tips on how to use them.
It’s our way of adding value by making REVIEWS.io as user friendly as possible. Experience REVIEWS.io for 14 days with our free trial.
Whether it's reviews to build trust and transparency, data collection for informed decision making, or UGC for authentic brand storytelling, you’ll find a range of tools to improve the customer experience and the support you need to leverage their capabilities.
