Consumers can be very complex; hence, they are always on the lookout to satisfy themselves on a number of considerations before making a purchase decision. These considerations could range from whether products meet the highest standards to whether products are from the right source.
Reviews are therefore very important in guiding your would-be customers in making such purchase decisions. Nearly 70 percent say they look at product reviews before making a purchase.
A study by Dimensional Research also pointed out that an overwhelming 90 percent of respondents revealed that positive online reviews influence buying decisions, while 86 percent said buying decisions were influenced by negative online reviews.
Therefore, as a Shopify Store merchant, you need to constantly learn new skills to advance your store experience. This will not only make your store stand out as an industry top player, it will also boost the credibility of your shop which will help attract new customers and ultimately increase your revenue as well as help you get feedback on your product.
But how do you boost your store reviews? You may probably be thinking about getting a shopify reviews app. Well, that sounds great but before you even consider that, I want us to look at five (5) quick ways that can help increase reviews for your shopify store.
- Reward and celebrate people who leave a review on your store.
Everyone wants to be celebrated or rewarded when they do something good. This will not only leave them with a sweet positive feeling but it will also strengthen brand loyalty.
When it comes to your store, one great way to boost your reviews is to reward loyal customers. This does not only help in customer retention but it also motivates your customers to write positive reviews about your products.
To achieve this, reserve a percentage of your yearly budget to rewarding your customers. Since you want to give a good mileage to your store, the best option is to select some loyal customers who constantly leave reviews on your store and reward them. It could a be product from your store, a discount ticket, a coupon for a weekend treat or even a cake on their birthdays. This will leave them with unforgettable memories and they will certainly want to share their experience with their friends and loved ones. They will, in a subtle way, become ambassadors of your brand; helping you to reach hundreds of new customers. These new customers would want to be rewarded too and therefore would be prepared to review products for free any day and time.
When this happens, you will surely be on your way to become that global business giant you have always worked towards achieving. That sounds awesome, right? Go on and start today to reward a loyal customer and reap the benefits in a super amazing way.
- Contest marketing
Apart from rewarding your customers, contest marketing is also a brilliant way to attract people to your store which would also boost your store reviews. A lot of people like to engage in brain teasers and other competitions. Aside serving as an opportunity to stimulate the mind, people generally love to win cool prizes for themselves. So let’s get going.
Remember that such contests will leave a positive shopping experience to your customers, create an affinity for your products or brand, attract new customers as well as help you collect information about customers that may help with future sales-oriented marketing campaigns.
Ads may be expensive to run; the good news is that contest marketing can be a cheap and more effective approach to acquiring loyal customers. It can also be an opportunity for you to offer new products as samples for your customers to test.
How to go about it?
Well, there are a variety of ways you can adopt to make your contest marketing a success. Explore measures such as website-based giveaways, Social Media campaigns as well as SMS contests.
Try Website-Based Giveaway
To start of with, the most basic way to start contest marketing involves placing a form on your store and supporting that form with an email address. Invite your site’s visitors to answer questions to enable them win some cool goodies. The prizes could range from discount sales on future purchases, coupons or even nice branded T-shirts. That sounds cool, right?
The key to succeeding in such a campaign is communicating about the prizes clearly. Deliver on your promise by actually rewarding winners or rewarding those who entered — even if they don’t win; this will build trust. Repeating this type of campaign on a regular basis will establish your brand on the minds of your customers. They will constantly look forward to these offers and would spread this campaign with their friends and neighbours. This will bring you new customers who will be willing to review products for free.
When you are creating such campaigns, add social shares buttons to enable your customers to share it with their friends and following. Also, send a quick email notification to all the subscribers of your blog to participate in the contest.
How about using Social Media-Based Contest?
Social media has become a suitable platform for engaging, building customer relationships and putting customers ahead of the brand — customer centric marketing.
For instance, if you are into selling T-shirts, you can launch a contest and request your social media followers to take a photo of themselves spotted in your T-shirt or designs and post them on these pages: ask customers to add a hashtag on Instagram, or post a quick note about the contest on their facebook page to help you drive traffic to your site and to enable you track the campaign.
This will give enormous exposure to your brand; helping you to reach millions of people. Some of these people will eventually become your customers and will be ready to leave reviews for your store.
SMS contest also got your back
A third potentially successful contest marketing campaign idea for ecommerce businesses is to use short messaging service (SMS) lists. This could be accumulated from your customers over a period of time to build what is commonly referred to as text messaging lists.
Although text messaging is relatively new for ecommerce merchants, there are some indications that customers respond more readily to text messages than email. According to a survey, the average open rate of email sits around 28 — 33 percent whilst the average opening rate of text messages is 99 percent. This means SMS could be a perfect way for promoting flash sales, where certain items are offered on discounts. After such flash sales, some of these customers may readily give you product reviews for free, which will help increase reviews for store.
- Send free samples to your social media influencers
The world’s digital population is growing astronomically which is a big plus to shopify merchants. For instance, according to Global Digital Report 2018, the number of internet users worldwide in 2018 were 4.021 billion, up 7 percent year-on-year.
The growth of the internet population has also boosted the consumption of social media products such as facebook, instagram, twitter and the like. These social media platforms have worked themselves to become important marketing tools for online businesses. The general rule of thumb is that ecommerce merchants cannot afford to lose out of the full benefits that this explosion offers to the world.
As you already know, your store experience is becoming widely embraced because of the conveniences it offers to customers such as cutting down time to its barest minimum as well as removing all geographical barriers: simplifying buying and selling.
This means if you strategically position yourself, you can reach billions of people with your products. This is because the more people become tech-savvy, the more likely they will find your store online.
So now how do you find your social media influencers?
Even though, the most popular social media sites vary a lot by level of usage in different countries and demographics, understanding these differences in popularity of different social networks is really important when targeting specific audiences; this can help you to recruit the right influencers. What is the point to recruit someone who uses pinterest as your social influencer when your target population is not on pinterest?
So the general rule is to do a social media audit which will then help you understand which social media channels you need to target.
After identifying these networks, get started by looking through them for the popular ones that have huge following and wield authority. These can be celebrities or just ordinary people who have established themselves as industry thought leaders in their fields and command enormous respect from their followers. It is even better if their activities on those networks relate in a way to your products. This should help give the needed mileage to your product in case they accept your offer.
You can find them by searching through the search column. With instagram, you can find them by searching through WEBSTA, a site that catalogues the most popular Instagram hashtags and users. For instance, if you deal in shirts, you can type “shirts” in the search bar, and get to see both the most popular related hashtags as well as users who have “shirts” in their usernames or bios.
After identifying them, you can send them an introductory message to give them a snippet of what you do. You can start by liking their posts or even sharing them on your social media pages. That being done, you can follow up by requesting for their email or sending them a direct message to express your desire to involve them in your campaign.
If they accept your request, bingo! Send them a sample of your product for testing. Hey, you can ask them to share their experiences with their followers and tag you or your store name in their post. Re-share the post on your social media pages and get everyone buzzing!
Aside sharing their experiences with their followers on social media, ask your influencers to give you a feedback on your products. The feedback could be used as reviews to attract new customers.
Obviously, not everyone will follow you, but you will definitely be wowed by the number of people who will check your site. This will be a great way of driving traffic and awareness for your store. Some visitors who will check your site out will become your new customers.
One of the main reasons why some sites do not get reviews is because they don’t have many customers. For example, a shopify store that gets only one customer in a month is most likely to get one review or no review in the month. That could be a heart-wrecking experience, right? Well, the following last two points of this article are dedicated to help you grow your customer base which ultimately will increase your store’s reviews on shopify.
- Reach out to bloggers and press
The mainstream media served as the only means people accessed information until the advent of social media. But despite the seemingly popularity of social media, a recent survey showed that just one in four people in Britain trust news on social media. In fact, the survey further found that only 24 percent of the UK population trust the likes of Twitter, Facebook and instagram when looking for news and information.
Therefore, as an online merchant, you cannot overlook the overwhelming importance of the mainstream media to the success of your online store. You must continually build partnership and a healthy relationship with the press in order to fully leverage on the opportunities that the press can offer to boost your reviews.
Closely linked to mainstream media, is blogging. Blogging has become a powerful medium of telling compelling stories. It operates in similar fashion as the mainstream media and therefore it has earned credibility over the years with lots of people turning to blogs for valid information about celebs, products etc.
How to achieve this?
Organise a breakfast meeting or soiree with a selected number of bloggers and press men and women. This will naturally help you to communicate your brand to a vast number of mainstream media consumers; which will ultimately attract new customers.
You can equally pitch to be featured as a success story in a newspaper, television broadcast, a radio interview or even a blogging page. Journalists commit a lot of creativity in crafting feature stories which normally comes with elaborate pictures. How about having your story and picture splashed in the front or middle page of a newspaper? That will be a perfect opportunity for you to reach a mass of your prospects.
The only caution is that you should be able to tell your story in a unique beautiful way so that editors would see it as an aspirational story worthy to share with their audience. Tell them about your corporate social responsibilities and how your operations are having a positive influence on society.
The media is a very powerful way to create awareness of your business to a great number of people. Take a shot today and be on your way to earning people to review products for free for your store.
- Boost your SEO
Religiously implementing the points that have been enumerated above is a sure way to drive people to begin to search for your product. But would your shopify store show up when someone searches for it on search engine results pages? According to a study the top listing in Google’s organic search results receives 33 percent of the traffic, compared to 18 percent for the second position, and the traffic only degrades from there.
Well, the fact is that it is not by chance that some content rank high on search results pages. Even though getting some social review apps is cool, constantly improving your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) will also make it easier for people to find your store when they search the name of it on these places. Being listed at the top of the results not only provides the greatest amount of traffic, but also instills trust in your customers about the worthiness of your products or brand.
How do you achieve that?
First of all, try and improve meta titles and descriptions of your website. Enriching your meta title and meta description is very essential for customers to find you when they search your store’s name on a search engines. You must provide a clear vivid description of your products with appropriate keywords in both the title and description. The more informative and descriptive your metadata is, the higher your chances of being clicked on.
You should also complement the above with compelling but relevant content. Always remember that creating quality content is good but it should also be of relevance to your target market. Your content should concentrate more on educating your prospects to make informed purchase decisions.
While doing these, upgrade visual content on your site. The arrangement of your images should always make your site look more appealing and interesting. This will help your images to generate organic traffic. Whether you are writing a blog or uploading images to your website, always ensure the images are of good quality. You can also incorporate GIFs, videos and subheadings to make your content very rich and exciting to your site visitors.
On the other hand, having a rich content and appealing images alone do not hold the key to boost your SEO, you need to also ensure your site has the right social media shares while improving the browsing experience on your site as well. When it comes to customers spending more time on your website, user experience is critical. Therefore, ensure that your site is very neat and easy to navigate. When you get all these in place, you are surely on your way to attract new customers.
Conclusion
Your store’s reviews experience can be boosted in these unique ways. Apart from these, there are other tools or shopify apps that can help you to in the area of reviews. A mention can be made of the social review app; which can help you curate reviews for your store. The SEO Doctor app can improve your SEO which will help your would-be customers to find you on search engine result pages. Incorporate these ideas with available tools to your store experience today and be on your way to seeing huge growth for your business.
