HOW USER GENERATED CONTENT
Encouraging your Web site visitors to post their own comments, product
reviews and ratings, and other material on your Web sites has three great
benefi ts:
1. It engages your customers emotionally and stimulates a stronger, deeper
relationship with you and your brand. Even negative postings can serve
a positive purpose by opening up a customer-service conversation that
solves the initial problem and leaves the customers happier than they ’ d
have been if no problem had occurred in the fi rst place.
2. On e-commerce Web sites, customer-supplied reviews and ratings are
given more credibility than any claims your company can make.
3. Customer-generated content is a triple boon from a search-engine per-
spective. You ’ ll have customers creating new and often highly ranked
“spider food” while you sleep. Their postings will rank well for the
misspellings, slang, and informality that you would never use—as well
as the superlatives you might never give yourself permission to use.
And fi nally, customer-supplied content can attract valuable links from
blogs and other external sites.
If your company is conducting e-commerce, that is, selling products
online, introducing customer-supplied ratings and reviews is a no-brainer.
Many e-commerce platforms now come with reviews modules built in,
and third-party tools like PowerReviews and Bazaarvoice can be readily
integrated with most sites.
Customer-supplied reviews are also a staple for restaurants, movies, in
the travel and tourism business, and elsewhere.
In a survey of 1,000 online shoppers, 16 the E-tailing Group found that 63
percent of shoppers consistently read product or service reviews before
making a buying decision. Asked to name their top sources of online
reviews, here is how they responded.
Gardener ’ s Supply Company, a leader in equipment, supplies, and spe-
cialized tools for gardeners, partnered with PowerReviews to support cus-
tomer ratings and reviews on its site, More
than 70,000 reviews have been submitted to date, a testimony both to the
size and fervor of Gardener ’ s audience and the company ’ s diligence about
asking for reviews; a couple weeks after any order, Gardener ’ s pushes
product-specifi c e-mails, requesting feedback and linking directly back to
the product page where a review can be submitted. Amazon does much the
same—it is now best practice to solicit post-purchase ratings and reviews;
without asking directly for reviews via e-mail, the growth of on-site reviews
is painfully slow to nonexistent. And nothing kills an incipient customer-
ratings program faster than page after page after page exhorting visitors
“Be the fi rst to write a review!”
Gardener ’ s uses review stars all over the Web site—product pages, cat-
egory views, search results, and in the e-mail program. Customer testimo-
nials also show up prominently, paired to the specifi c product they
describe—or, in the case of testimonials referring, say, to a beloved Moth-
er ’ s Day gift, to any timely holiday or occasion.
“These reviews are completely authentic,” says Harris, “and they are
completely perfect for the product or the occasion.” 17
Case studies on the positive impact of reviews and ratings are compelling:
• 77 percent of online shoppers use reviews and ratings when purchasing
(JupiterResearch, August 2006).
• The conversion rate nearly doubled, from 0.44 percent to 1.04 percent,
after the same product displayed its fi ve-star rating ( Marketing Experi-
ments Journal ).
• Shoppers who browsed the Bass Pro Shops “Top Rated Products” page
had a 59 percent higher conversion rate than the site average and spent
16 percent more per order.
• Shoppers who browsed the “Top Rated Products” page at PETCO had a
49 percent higher conversion rate and 63 percent larger AOV.
Bazaarvoice ’ s “Social Commerce Report 2007” found that user-submit-
ted product reviews and ratings boosted site traffi c, sales conversion rates,
and average order values. Among e-commerce retailers in the United States
and Europe who deployed reviews and ratings tools, 77 percent reported
upticks in traffi c, 56 percent reported improved conversion, and 42 percent
reported higher AOV. Only 5 percent to 9 percent reported that ratings and
reviews tools impacted their performance negatively—presumably because
of the presence of negative feedback.
For online stores, ratings and reviews are the ideal user-generated con-
tent (UGC). Reviews can be a boon for your search-engine optimization
efforts. Every time a customer rates one of your products, they create a
new Web page linking to your product—enhancing your search-engine
visibility even while you sleep. By the nature of user-created content, user
reviews are conversational, informal, rich in the keywords searchers actu-
ally use, and often full of the kind of misspellings, slang, and colloquial-
isms that you as a brand-conscious marketer would never use—but which
search-engine spiders gobble right up.
You can choose to syndicate your new product reviews out to RSS feeds
and comparative shopping platforms like PowerReviews ’ Buzzillions, giv-
ing you additional exposure to Web shoppers. Expect to see a lot of addi-
tional convergence between user-submitted reviews and comparative
shopping. Both are growing fast and will drive an increasing share of your
traffi c.
Another emerging syndication platform for your product reviews is the
new “rich snippets” functionality now being supported by Google. Rich
snippets are a way to mark up the source code of your Web site to tell the
search engines more about your products, reviews, and other fi elded data.
Starred ratings and reviews already are beginning to appear on the Google
search-engine results pages.
Currently, rich snippets Web standards exist for products, recipes, reviews,
videos, people, and events. Clearly, many of these are perfect fodder for
user-generated content. Already, Yelp, LinkedIn, TripAdvisor, UrbanSpoon,
Rotten Tomatoes, and many other top UGC Web sites are using rich
snippets.
“We ’ re convinced that structured data makes the Web better, and we ’ ve
worked hard to expand Rich Snippets to more search results,” says Google.
Google ’ s Matt Cutts, the head of the search-quality and anti-spam team,
is a big fan of the concept: “This one is destined to be a favorite for Web-
masters. Essentially, you use open standards (RDFs and microformats in
the initial launch) to add additional markup to your Web pages . . . Then
when Google thinks it will help users, we show a ‘rich snippet’ that has
more information than a typical search snippet.” 18 Examples include star
ratings, prices for products, serving sizes, and nutritional info for reci-
pes—all called out right on the search results pages and potentially har-
vested and syndicated elsewhere on the Web.
quickly solve the customer ’ s problem. If you do, the customer will likely
volunteer to retract or edit the nasty review.
And as the old chestnut of the customer-service industry goes, the cus-
tomer who has a bad experience that you resolve wonderfully becomes a
more loyal customer than the one who doesn ’ t have a problem in the fi rst
place!
Conversion rates are higher on products with less-than-perfect reviews
(fewer than fi ve stars) than those without reviews at all, indicating that the
customer feels that the product has been properly reviewed by other
customers.
This isn ’ t just about the product pages of your Web site. You should also
leverage the value of customer-created ratings and reviews by:
• Using them in your e-mail campaigns.
• Syndicating them as RSS feeds.
• Syndicating them to shopping portals (the third-party ratings-and-review
tools are already cutting deals with comparative shopping sites, and you
can expect more to come).
When using star-ratings and reviews in its e-mails, pet-supply retailer
PETCO realized a fi ve times increase in click-through rates.
In A/B tests by Golfsmith, promotional e-mails that featured the star rat-
ings and reviews of top products drove revenues 46 percent higher per
campaign.
The takeaway is that customers trust and respond well to the voices of
their fellow consumers. By transforming your marketing into a Web 2.0
customer-to-customer communication, you can tap into that trust, and your
results will benefi t.
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