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Real People, Real Results: Why authenticity trumps AI on TikTok, Instagram, and beyond
Whether you operate a retail store, sell direct to consumer, or have a side-gig as a graphic designer, product reviews can make or break your online sales. They’re important for a number of reasons, from validating the quality of your products and services, to showing potential buyers that you have a solid online presence and care about your customers.
Let’s take a look at how you can improve your conversion rates by leveraging product reviews -- here we go!
Product reviews are important because they reinforce a brand’s credibility, while indicating quality. In today’s consumer landscape where so much of the buying process is done online, an authentic review goes almost as far as a personal recommendation, in terms of how much a potential customer trusts them.
According to BIA and Kelsey's User View Wave VII (an ongoing consumer tracking study conducted with research partner ConStat), nearly all consumers (97%) now use online media to shop locally. As such, it’s important that a company spends time cultivating and managing review profiles across the web.
Think about your own buying process. You likely search for something online and see whether it has solid reviews before committing to a purchase, whether it be a new coffee maker or a hotel you’re eyeing for a weekend getaway. This is the same for the average consumer.
Read about asking for reviews here!
When it comes to selling products online, there are a few best practices you should stick to in order to attract, retain and push customers through the purchase funnel:
Consumers trust product reviews, even if the rating isn’t perfect. A review section will help improve trust, while validating the quality, benefits, specs, follow-up service and other aspects of your offer. In addition, a majority of people read a company’s response to reviews, so always respond, to both negative and positive feedback -- this shows you care about customer satisfaction and you’re responsive to issues. Trust elements like awards, testimonials, certifications, patents all help build a customer’s - or potential customer’s - perception of your brand.
In order to give consumers a way to learn more about the product directly from you, consider installing an “ask a question” function within product pages. Supply a form that customers can use to ask questions about specific products. This allows you to track consumer sentiment about those products, and can provide a glimpse into what your potential buyers really care about during their research process. Another option is to add a chat feature where users can directly communicate with representatives, rather than calling or emailing. A great benefit of this is that instead of immediately leaving a negative public review, this funnels people into a private conversation where issues can be resolved one-on-one.
It’s always important to have big, attractive, clear visuals of the product, either through pictures or videos. However, videos are generally more conversion friendly than static images, and provide a more immersive experience with the product itself – especially because online shoppers can’t pick up a product and inspect it as they might in a brick-and-mortar store. Not only that, consumers respond well to videos: in a recent retail report, over half (57 percent) of the respondents reported an average order value increases of at least 50 percent if they watch a video on a product page, while the remaining 43 percent reported no negative impact. Cohley recognizes the importance of UGC content and content testing. With the ability to send assets from your Creative Suite and Content Library to Facebook Business Manager, you can use them in ad campaigns, as well as A/B test ad creative with unique demographics and provide potential consumers with contextually relevant content to improve ad performance.
One of the hardest things about building a product page is choosing the right images to showcase the product in a way that’s going to promote conversion, so why not use proven influencer photographs? If you’re working with an influencer and content engineering platform, like Cohley, all your influencer assets are yours! That means even new products can have social proof baked into a product page. The best way to use influencer marketing on your website is to run A/B testing. This allows you to create content at scale and find what works best for your audience and website.
Unique value propositions, or UVPs, are what set your product apart from others. Boil it down -- what are the 2-3 most beneficial aspects of your product? For example, a customer of a software retailer could find benefit in having a 24/7 customer support line, whereas someone buying a car may care most about performance and price.
In order to improve your search engine rankings, it’s crucial to boost your pages’ content with keyword-rich headlines and copy. By their nature, product pages are generally not the type of content-heavy pages Google likes to see. To fix this, you can add related information, FAQs or company information directly on the page, toward the bottom. You can place it in an expandable drop down box so that it doesn’t interfere with the overall web design, but is still read by search engines.
Extra functionality doesn’t just give the consumer more practical information about the product in question, it keeps people interacting with your website content longer. For example, give shoppers an easy way to put certain products side-by-side by implementing a compare function to help improve engagement and foster sales. Another idea is to add a “related” carousel on the page, that feeds other similar content to the product. Consumers like to have options.
Your call to action (CTA) is one of the most important aspects of your product page. Make sure the action you want them to take stands out. Normally, a “buy now” or “add to cart” button will do the trick. Keep it fresh and help it to stand out so the user doesn’t have to search around to find it; One way to do that is to make it a distinct color from the rest of your interface.
Here are a few stand-out examples of product pages that do a good job leveraging the above tactics to push a consumer to purchase.
The Sephora website is a one-stop shop for all beauty products. The product page prominently highlights reviews and is designed to make you scroll. Content is clear and concise with the use of visual aids as well as text to get the point across. The Ratings and Reviews section allows customers to enter information about themselves, and allows users to filter to similar characteristics to find how these products work for them. This advanced review system is key in most beauty and wellness products, giving a holistic view of products when physical interaction with them is not possible.
Away Suitcases are the up and coming brand in air travel ease. This is one of our favorite product pages for a few reasons. The large image and colorful styles available make it attention grabbing, the title of the product is clear, the description is short and highlights all the wonderful features, but most importantly, the number and quality of reviews is evident and showcased at the top of the listing.
This short and sweet product page from Rent the Runway isn’t just functional, it’s well optimized from user reviews and customer experience. This simple design lays out reviews and customer photos in a way that’s organized and succinct. The simple product photos and informative review section allows users to segment and filter by their information to find a product that works.
Overall, product reviews help increase conversion rate by supplying your brand with a sense of credibility. However, there’s much more you can do in order to improve the way customers interact with your product pages, and ultimately, whether or not they make a purchase.
If you’re struggling to energize your conversion rates, look to Cohley. We’re a content platform that gives you the actionable insights and effective tools to help your website stand out. From review generation to imagery to KPI reporting and beyond, our tool can help take your marketing efforts to the next level – find out more.
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