Leverage the power of customer reviews throughout the sales cycle — and give your customers something in return.
Reviews play a huge role in the buying cycle. They instill buyer confidence and increase trust throughout the awareness, consideration, and decision stages of the funnel.
Without them, you could be missing out on a large chunk of sales.
Offering rewards for reviews is a great way to increase the AOV of existing customers and generate sales from new customers. It’s a win-win situation.
Here’s why offering store credit in exchange for customer reviews is a great tactic for your online brand.
Why You Should Offer Rewards in Exchange for Customer Reviews
1. Enhance Paid & Organic Search Listings on Google
Google prioritizes reviews as a key ranking factor. The more reviews you have, the more likely you are to appear at the top of search results and capture customers.
There are plenty of factors that go into a good ranking, but a collection of high-star reviews show search engines that a brand is trustworthy. When it comes to shopping-focused search engine results like Google Shopping Ads, reviews and robust Google Seller ratings indicate a good customer experience. As a result, they drive more sales.
By encouraging customers to leave reviews and incorporating them into their Google Shopping listings, women’s shoe brand The Office of Angela Scott saw an 81% increase in conversion rate.
2. Create a Seamless User Experience on Site
When customers have a positive experience, they come back for more. Enjoyable customer journeys turn one-time buyers into loyal fans and help you pinpoint the key hotspots for conversions. Reading reviews can speed up the decision-making process, which creates a slicker journey for customers who want proof before they purchase.
For Freshly Picked, building a devoted customer base was crucial. In the parenting world, word-of-mouth reigns supreme, so the brand relied on populating their site with encouraging reviews to turn skeptical moms and dads into eager buyers.
Make like Freshly Picked and add customer reviews to your homepage, on product pages, on landing pages, throughout blog posts, and at checkout.
3. Improve Email Marketing Effectiveness
Reviews give you a deeper insight into your customers’ wants and needs. You can use key information used in the reviews to segment buyers based on the products they bought, their demographics, or another indicator, and serve them highly relevant content based on that information.
This is exactly what dog food brand WAG does. They encourage reviews and segment their furry customers based on the content of individual reviews. Then, they create targeted email campaigns based on the unique needs of each customer segment. Doing this has increased their Revenue Per Recipient by a huge 423%.
For Freshly Picked, building a devoted customer base was crucial. In the parenting world, word-of-mouth reigns supreme, so the brand relied on populating their site with encouraging reviews to turn skeptical moms and dads into eager buyers.
Make like Freshly Picked and add customer reviews to your homepage, on product pages, on landing pages, throughout blog posts, and at checkout.
4. Nurture Customer Loyalty
Existing customers spend more money than new customers and they have the potential to become ambassadors that recommend your brand to their peers.
Offering rewards for reviews is a great way to nurture customer relationships by showing you care about their thoughts and opinions. It’s also the perfect opportunity to introduce new customers to a loyalty or rewards program.
Think about it: customers that regularly unlock rewards for providing a review of their experience are more likely to stick around and buy from you again in the future. This increases their LTV.
Take Beginning Boutique, for example. When they offered existing customers rewards in exchange for reviews, their coupon code redemption rate shot up by 53%.
Best Practices
Now you know the importance of reviews and what they can do for business and sales, here’s how to ask for reviews and reward customers in the right way:
- Reach customers where they’re already hanging out — make it easy for customers to see your review request and create an organic process.
- Give customers enough time to receive and try your products before asking for a review.
- Offer store credit on a shopper’s next visit — rewarding customers with gift cards can grow revenue, increase customer visits, and boost spending.
- Include a limited time offer on an upsell product — provide customers with an irresistible deal on a product that’s relevant to their previous purchase.
- Create VIP reward tiers to improve the customer experience and reward quality over quantity — you can increase the rewards a customer gets when submitting a higher quality review or when they leave multiple reviews.
- Follow up with and thank customers that leave a review.
Automate the Review Generation Process
Inviting customers to leave a review in exchange for store credit through a Shopify customer rewards program is a great way to increase conversions, nurture engagement, and turn one-time buyers into loyal customers. Get started by integrating Rise.ai with Okendo.
Use the Rise.ai-Okendo integration to automate the review generation process and reward customers for leaving reviews.