Reviews are powerful. They can boost sales, increase revenue, and ultimately help online sellers reach success. Have a look at the effect of reviews with these stats below:
- 97 percent of shoppers read reviews before buying
- As few as five can boost a sale probability by a whopping 200 percent
- A customer is likely to buy a product with more reviews
If you’re an Amazon seller, you need as many positive reviews as you can get, and we’ll tell you why in just a second.
First things first. Let’s go over why Amazon reviews are so important to your business and why they play such a pivotal part to success.
Importance Of Amazon Reviews to Your Business
Reviews play a big role when it comes to the customers’ behavior or purchase decisions. They also impact your success as a seller on Amazon.
Here are some reasons why Amazon reviews are important for your business.
Amazon Takes Reviews Seriously
Amazon cares about what customers have to say about your product.
Keep in mind that Amazon is out to protect its brand as the leading online store for retailers and shoppers.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the retailer is keen on ensuring that only high-quality products are listed on its website.
This means that the more positive feedback your product gets, the higher the likelihood of attaining the coveted “Best Seller” tag.
Reviews Offer Market Crucial Insights
The importance of reviews does not stop at its positive effect on sales and rankings. As a seller, before adding a product to your Amazon line-up, you need some insights that will help you study the market.
How do you analyze the market? Amazon reviews are the best tool that you can use to study customers’ behavior and understand their needs.
Understanding your customers’ pain points means that you will be able to make informed decisions and add a product that will solve their problems.
A product’s reviews are the greatest source of marketing intelligence which shows you the kind of products customers are more likely to purchase, why they purchase them, and what impacts their satisfaction.
Reviews also help customers understand the product better. Through reviews submitted by other customers, potential buyers can gather important information that can tip the scale towards a purchase. These include things like pros and cons, and even how the seller interacts with buyers.
Reviews Can Help Improve Your Product’s Ranking on Amazon
For you to get to the Best Seller Rank, your business or products must have increasing reviews. Reviews help your products appear on the first page of Amazon search results.
The more your products appear at the top of the search results, the higher the chance that customers click on them.
These reviews and clicks are important because they increase the chances of your customers converting to a sale.
Reviews Facilitate “Amazon Buy Box” Wins
As a seller, your biggest dream is obviously making more sales. One of the ways to do this is by winning the Amazon Buy Box. The Amazon Buy Box is the section on the right side of a product detail page that features items that customers can easily and instantly add to their cart.
Your feedback as a seller is influenced by the satisfaction of your buyers. For you to win the Amazon Buy Box, you need to ensure that you’re offering the best products to your customers.
Positive or negative reviews impact the product’s ranking, conversion, and return on investment.
How Positive Reviews Impact Your Listing
Positive reviews are the sellers’ real assets. Here are several reasons why they are so essential when it comes to product listings.
They Boost Your Click-Through Rate
Amazon is a marketplace with thousands of competitors. One important thing that will help you stand out from the rest is having positive reviews.
In fact, you need to maintain this status to be able to beat your competitors.
Positive reviews will help your listing go up in the SERP and reduce the click-through bounce rate.
They Complement Your SEO Efforts
Apart from keywords and other SEO strategies, positive reviews help boost the ranking of your listings on Amazon.
You can manage to put everything in place as far as SEO is concerned but you need more positive reviews. With positive reviews, you increase your conversion rate, sales volume, and relevance.
The cycle goes on over and over again, and that is why you must strive to offer stellar products that earn positive reviews.
They Provide Social Proof
Take this example: a buyer comes to your listing and the only thing they can see is the description given with no reviews on the products.
The same customer goes to a different seller and they get to see several positive reviews on the products from the other seller.
Which seller is more likely to make a sale? Of course, it’s the seller with the positive reviews.
Positive reviews are social proof that help convince buyers that you can deliver exactly what they are looking for.
Your prospective buyers want to get first-hand experience from your former buyers and that is why positive reviews are so important.
Buyers Trust Online Reviews
Most customers rush straight to the reviews section when they want to purchase a product online. You are selling products online. Your prospective customers have not met you before. What makes you think they’ll trust you that easily?
No matter how hard you convince a customer with a catchy description, you won’t win their trust that easily. Positive reviews from other customers help convince buyers that the product works.
They Help Improve Overall Business Outlook
Positive reviews increase the credibility of your business to your customers. With positive reviews, your customer’s buying decision is influenced and engagement is increased.
As stated earlier, positive reviews increase trust. Through this increase in trust, interactions between the business and customers is formed. These interactions foster high sales and, in return, high profits.
How Negative Reviews Impact Your Listings
Negative reviews, on the other hand, are dangerous and can drive away your best customers to your competitors.
A single negative review can drive away a number of customers. That is why they are not good for your business. Reviews act as pre-purchase research, and because most people buy things online, they check out reviews before they buy.
Check out how negative reviews can affect your business.
They Lead to Loss of Revenue
Customers run away from companies with bad reviews. A business with a rating of 1 to 2 stars will probably have a low revenue compared to a business with 4 to 5-star rating.
The bad rating drives buyers to competitors and as a result, your business’ revenue gets lost or reduced.
They Can Hurt Your Business Reputation
For a business to thrive, its reputation must be good.
Reputation takes years to build and negative reviews can seriously damage what you have worked for in mere moments.
Negative reviews affect the trust that customers once had in you. It’s hard for the customers to buy products from you without a foundation of trust. A bad reputation makes customers question the quality of your products.
They Put Off Customers
A negative review is a disadvantage to you and an advantage to your competitor. With negative reviews, customers lose trust in your business. Customers develop trust in a business with positive reviews which is your competitor.
They Hurt Your Search Engine Ranking
Amazon is trying its best to provide the best customer experience to all the buyers that come to the website for any purchase. For that reason, the search engines will always favor the sellers with positive reviews.
If your company has a negative rating, then chances are you might not be able to appear on the SERP.
Gain More Amazon Reviews With These Strategies
Now that you understand the importance of Amazon reviews, you definitely want to know how you can get those reviews.
The ultimate goal of any business is to increase its revenue and that is why reviews are important.
Below are several proven strategies you can use to get Amazon reviews.
1. Simply Ask
Oftentimes, the simplest solution is one of the most effective ones. When trying to get reviews for your product, one effective and straightforward way to go about it is to just ask the customer. It may not seem like an effective way to garner reviews. However, that can’t be farther from the truth. A recent study showed that over 75% of customers will gladly leave a review if a business asks them to.
Reviews are automatically requested when a customer purchases an item. If they do not leave one, sellers can request for one with the “Request a Review” feature. With this, the same email will be sent to the customer again. The problem here though is that it is generic and lacks any personalization.
The better way to ask them is by crafting a personalized email asking for a review. Make sure that the message reflects the voice of the brand and is sincere.
While asking for reviews this way is a good way to get them, there are still some things to consider in order to ensure that customers submit a review. For instance, consider when you ask for a review. Think about the timezone of the customer, what time you send the email, and occasions where people would either be too busy or unavailable.
Sellers should also be selective of the customers they ask reviews from. Customers who get their product on time and have had a positive and seamless customer service experience are prime candidates to ask reviews from.
While asking for reviews is allowed, it is always important to follow the rules and guidelines that Amazon has set out. One guideline in particular is to ask for reviews in a very neutral manner. One cannot ask a customer to leave a positive or 5-star review. Instead, just ask the customers for a review and leave them to write their honest experience.
2. Utilize Amazon’s Early Reviewer Program
This tip is for brand new products. The Early Reviewer Program is for products that have less than five reviews and cost $15 and above. When sellers use this program, Amazon will then ask for reviews from a group of customers. The incentive here is that customers who leave reviews will get an Amazon gift card.
While this sounds like a good bet, it does come with its own set of challenges. For starters, Amazon is the one that selects the group of customers. In essence, it means that you have no control over who submits the review. Thus, sellers are not sure whether the review will be positive or negative. Despite that, if it does work out, it can act as a good springboard towards more positive reviews.
Another important thing to keep in mind though is that this service is not free. Once a seller receives their first review from this program, sellers will be charged $60. This charge will only take place once for the duration of the whole program.
3. Use Amazon’s Vine Program
Amazon offers many avenues for requesting reviews from customers. Apart from the Early Reviewer Program, there is also the Vine Program.
For sellers that have products with less than 30 reviews, sellers can use Amazon’s Vine Program. This is done via the advertising menu in seller central.
After enrolling, the seller will then need to provide 30 products. These products are then shipped out to customers that have a reputation for being trustworthy reviewers. Thus, sellers must be aware that the reviews submitted are most likely more critical and honest.
Once again, this strategy does not guarantee positive results. This leads us to our next strategy.
4. Focus on Quality
Most of the strategies we have discussed do not guarantee a positive review. Considering how valuable having multiple positive reviews is, then it is in every seller’s best interest to try and tip the scales towards garnering the best reviews possible. This can be done by focusing on quality.
The first thing that this can be carried out is by ensuring that the product is of quality. This entails having the product do what it is supposed to do (addressing the customer’s needs). At the same time, the materials used and the way that the product was made should hold strong and not break.
Apart from that, sellers should also focus on providing quality customer service. When a customer sends messages, reply to them in a timely, professional, and respectful manner.
Focusing on offering quality products and customer service provides customers with a glowing perception and can tip the scales towards gaining positive reviews.
Reap the Reviews and the Rewards
Amazon reviews are useful for your business. And, the more reviews you have, the better. Gathering numerous positive reviews has many positive benefits to your company.
At Signalytics, we understand the importance of reviews for your Amazon business.
With our Amazon Product Listing Services, we can help improve your product’s visibility, and by extension, increase the chances of attracting reviews that can help grow revenue.