Pro Online Sellers And How They Use Reviews To Boost Sales

Online sellers have a good indication of what works. Especially the ones who have been online selling items for a long time. In his widely known but vastly underrated book,12 months to 1 million, Ryan Moran astutely states “Once you’ve got sales for your product, your job becomes treating customers like gold, knowing that some of them will leave reviews”.

But the obvious question that most people ask is how many reviews. And if you think about it, you don’t need any. Items got sold before reviews. But now online is different- because of the trust factor. The next question. How many do you want? Ryan states: “Simple: as many as you can get”

But what does he mean by this?

Well, what we will find is that there is a limit on the number of reviews that you need. It is not set in stone how many, like 100 or 50. But after a certain amount, reviews are mainly an enforcing tool. 4000 reviews just shows that people have left a review and have (hopefully) liked the product. The number of reviews is a subconscious check mark to say, go for it. But you don’t need that many to sell there and then. You just need the right amount of reviews to clear away the amount of questions that a potential buyer has. That’s all. However, research has found that the amount of online reviews served as a useful indicator of the purchasing population’s ability to engage in post-purchase offline word of mouth communications.

Ryan states the following of good practise to get reviews:

Make sure that your community is well looked after, especially if you are in a pre-launch phase. This, as we have seen with Sales Theory, promotes the group, the groups promotes you which leads to affirming the review is genuine and leading to more reviews

Any review is celebrated. Taking a picture and showing it off (helping/ promoting the brand in Sales Theory)

If someone has left a review, or ordered multiple times, contact them and say thanks. Even send a gift that thanks them for putting a review down in the first place (not a solicited review). many large companies will follow up with people to ask for reviews or thank them for their reviews. The right reviews are vastly important.

Discuss with your group to actually leave a review. State how the process is going, can they leave a review and help out your brand and lead other people to the brand. Sometimes just the invite of asking is all what people want. But why? Well, some people will buy and leave, never to be seen again. Which is fine, but in that time could they leave a review? Also there is a “why” 2. No-one wants to be first and no-one wants to be first to leave a review. Promoting the process, how easy it is, how it can be helpful to your company and other people, that you really like reviews and celebrate them promotes the notion of “its OK to leave a review”. Once you start to get reviews, more will follow. It is also worthy to note that if the reviews are anonymous 2 things happen. More reviews are created which show positives and negatives of the product. And two, more reviews are required for the person to buy.

Then we have Ecommerce Evolved by Tanner Larsson. He suggests rightly that everything that we do is to place the customer in the right buying decision and to make an informed choice. We are not saying buy now! We are saying- here is the issue, this is going to solve it, look at all the other people that it helped.

Tanner has also noticed something else. Reviews also help with SEO. And as search engines evolve quickly in the advent of AI, you will notice that more trust aspects are going to be applied to their results. So good reviews, higher rating are going to be posted as well as the product. This is called “rich snippets” and allows search engines to display your reviews right in the search results. According to Tanner: ”Our previous system of reviews didn’t include rich snippets, but the new system does and now product pages that never showed up on the search results before pop up on the first and second pages”. Does Tanner have some suggestions?

If not using Amazon use Amazon style of reviews- black text, white background and gold stars. When they changed one website over to this “industry standard” sales went up 7%