If you’ve ever gone online to buy a product, you may have checked its ratings and reviews first.
If it’s badly rated, you may re-evaluate your choice and if it’s highly rated, then you may want to buy it immediately.
Reviews matter very much in the modern online retail market because they do hold a lot of influence over shoppers.
People see themselves in the reviews that they read. They see themselves having the same problems and seeing the same positives in the product that a reviewer sees.
You may have scrolled past dozens of good reviews and spotted a bad one and based your decision on it.
And you may have scrolled past may mixed reviews and based your decision on one stellar review. Such is human nature.
Amazon sellers need to understand this so that they can climb the search results and gain more loyal customers.
How Important Are Amazon Reviews?
Amazon has always put a high emphasis on customer satisfaction. The customer reviews of any product have a huge part in whether it trends and is popular.
According to Matt Moog, the CEO of Power Reviews, a company that makes ratings and review software, 20% of online sales are driven by reviews and a third of shoppers say that they won’t buy a product that hasn’t been positively reviewed.
Research conducted by Dimensional Research also claims that over 90% of consumers online believe that their purchasing choices are influenced by ratings and reviews.
Hence, the question of whether reviews matter is pretty much resolved at this point.
How Does a Good Review Help New Sellers?
Reviews provide a lot of insight in to the market. They can tell a seller if their product or service is flawed and exactly what that flaw is.
It can also point out things that customers consistently enjoy about a product or service.
These things can really help a company in the long run because they outline what their priorities should be and what they should focus their resources on. This can be a game changer for companies that may be struggling.
Related : How To Remove Bad Reviews on Amazon
The Best Ways To Get Reviews On Amazon
There are many tips and tricks online that you can find to get good reviews on Amazon. They range from frowned upon practices like manipulating the reviewers to paying people to write fake reviews for you.
However, these shortcuts will not result in organic growth and can even irritate Amazon. Review manipulation isn’t something they look upon favorably and they’ve been cracking down on fake reviews more regularly as of late.
Here are some tips on how to get more Amazon reviews on your products.
Related : Amazon Feedback Tools & Review Management Softwares
1. Create a Community Feeling around your Products
There’s really nothing like building a community around your products. You may not understand the importance of that on the surface, but it has helped some of the biggest brands in the world achieve their success.
Take for example the people that buy OnePlus smartphones. They have built a loyal community that only waits patiently for OnePlus products and continues to trust that brand because they feel listened to and involved. They don’t sell the most phones, but they keep growing every year.
To build a community you can provide information to your customers about the company. You can offer advice on how to use a product best, and how to make it last longer.
You can also send special notes and cards with the products if you want to make every customer feel special. And you can also personalize the emails and messages that your customers receive in order to make them feel valued.
This kind of connection obliges people to answer back and to communicate the great experience that they’ve had. This not only creates brand trust, but loyalty, which ultimately translates in to more sales.
When the customer sees that you’ve gone the extra mile for them, they won’t hesitate to give something back as well.
This is a great way to get more Amazon feedback.
2. Professionally Design your Insert
The first thing that you need to do is make sure to give your customer a very good reason to leave the review. If you simply ask for a review, they probably won’t give you the time of day.
You need to ask yourself, if it were you in that situation, what would make you leave a review? Hence, you should frame the review in the context of the improvement that the product has made to the customer’s life.
You should also have the insert of the product professionally designed. It’s important that the insert should have a very appealing look so that customers can’t help but want to read it.
The message should be clear and not so wordy, so that the customer doesn’t believe that their reading is a chore. Add the insert to your packaging and if so, leave personalized messages for people there too.
This is an effective ploy to get more Amazon reviews.
However, don’t offer any discounts or perks for reviews on Amazon. This is frowned upon by Amazon and is explicitly against its terms of service.
Related : Guide To Content Personalization
3. Create Landing Pages (Amz Ignition)
If you seek advice from seasoned sellers on Amazon, they’ll tell you that it’s a bad idea to drive traffic to the Amazon product listings.
It’s better to link customers to a landing page instead. This way you can funnel potential buyers to your entire catalogue.
Landing pages are also a great way to harvest emails that you can use for marketing campaigns in the future. It will also optimize the lifetime value of the customers you gain every day.
You can use that email to notify them of special sales and promotions in the future.
4. Timing is everything
There are a lot of things that this idiom can apply to. Comedians say timing is everything and the quote, “There’s nothing quite like an idea whose time has come”, will ring out time immemorial. Hence, timing is important with product reviews too.
Unlike feedback ratings, getting a product review takes time. It requires someone to sit down at their keyboard or virtual keyboard and write down what they feel about a product. However, it’s premature to ask them to do that as soon as they’ve gotten the package.
Instead, it’s a much better idea to get a review from customers after they’ve had a chance to use your product for a month or a few weeks at the least.
You can send follow up emails to people that have bought your product a month after delivery to ask them for reviews.
However, don’t take too long to reach out, since the luster and the endorphins from receiving a new product wear off quickly. It’s smart to get that great rush up on the internet while the euphoria is fresh.
5. Use an online Feedback Tool
Feedback tools offer a great way to increase feedback on Amazon.
They are designed to get you great Amazon Reviews and better feedback from your customers.
They have options for automated emails, pre-designed email templates, customized campaigns and various other options to get reviews.
These feedback tools can vary widely when it comes to value for money, but they usually offer similar options.
Some of them do offer ways to crack down on bad reviews by giving customers discounts or better deals on products but that’s a grey area when it comes to Amazon’s rules.
It would be in your best interest to instead, use these online feedback tools to get more and more people to review your products.
6. Bundle Products
Here’s another smart way to get more Amazon product reviews.
If you market products through bundles you’ll have a higher chance of people purchasing them and leaving reviews.
This is because bundled products have a higher perceived value than single offerings. They provide greater value for the customer’s money.
This ultimately results in greater customer satisfaction. This can result in some really great reviews for your products. Getting a great deal is rarer than you’d think in the retail industry, and if you can provide your customer with such a deal, you’ll have their genuine gratitude.
Related : How To Optimize Your Product Pages To Boost Conversions
7. Use Social Media to your Advantage
Social media is a much more powerful tool than people ever imagined in the early days of Facebook.
It can influence popular opinion, give you information that changes your mind, and can even market products to you that you would never have bought otherwise.
Facebook has literally opened its doors to corporations and brands that wish to sell their products on its platform. This is a great example of what new sellers on Amazon should use to get reviews.
There are entire Facebook groups that are composed of people talking about what to buy on Amazon. Here, you can post your product and ask people to leave reviews after they’ve bought it.
This can hugely influence people because a single comment left on a group is more valuable than all the advertising that money could buy.
People trust individuals without ties to the company because they’ve got nothing to gain from endorsing a product.
Social Media can also widen your reach and expose your products to an audience that is geographically in a different part of the world than your target audience. Who knows what potential you can unlock with social media at your side?
However, you should be aware that social media can do as much damage as good. A single bad customer experience can blow up in your face if they post their negative experiences on a Facebook Group.
Related : How To Develop Content Strategy For Different Social Media Platforms
8. Sponsor Social Media Influencers to Promote your Products
Sponsorships using influencers has gained significant headway in the past half decade. Almost every brand and product sponsors an influencer so they can get a share of their audience to try out their products.
Influencers have begun to replace the standard advertising campaigns that were run on televisions and through emails and their opinion matters to their audiences very much.
The audiences see them not as corporations, but as individuals who have built their way up from nothing because of their support.
Since the audiences for these influencers are loyal, if they do click on the links to your sponsored deals, you can ask them to give reviews as well.
They may not feel obliged to do it, but will do it for the sake of the influencer they follow.
9. Use Amazon’s Customer Services
Amazon’s customer services offer a lot of perks to those that care to use them. The Amazon API can allow you to access certain third party tools to send automatic emails.
These emails will not only allow the customer to keep track of when the purchase has been shipped and delivered, but for you to send emails when the time is right.
Most people who come across this option may think that the process is daunting, but it’s not actually so. The first email is a shipment reminder, the second is a delivery reminder and the third is the offer of regards after the product is received.
This way the customer feels involved with the process and you can even in turn ask them for feedback and reviews. Customers are more likely to give you reviews if and when you ask them to after the delivery process.
This can get your more reviews, better reviews, and lower the chances of customers giving you bad reviews.
10. Memorize Amazon’s Official Rules (Feedback Express)
Not only getting reviews on Amazon is important, getting good reviews is vital as well. For this, you must go through the official list of Amazon’s review rules.
Knowing what is permitted and what is not can help you a great deal in growing an organic audience and staying in Amazon’s good books.
Just log in to your seller central account and go through the rules. Here are some of the most important ones:
- Don’t offer free products in exchange for reviews. Amazon has outlawed this practice because it falls under buyer manipulation. A review written in return for a free product counts as a paid review and is considered fake. The only way this is legal is through the Amazon Vine program, and that is run completely by Amazon.
- Don’t have reviews written by freelancers or people that you have paid. Those reviews will also be counted as fake and that only downgrades your ranking with Amazon.
- Don’t offer any money or a discount in exchange for a review. If you offer a discount or a promotion for a review, Amazon will consider that a fake review. To be clear, handing out coupons and discounts is fine otherwise, just not in exchange for leaving reviews.
- Don’t get biased people like friends or family members to write reviews. This rule is particularly pertinent because it categorizes those reviews in to influenced reviews. There’s very little difference between these and paid reviews.
- Don’t accept unverified reviews. This is obviously to manipulate the sentiment for the product before the release.
If you follow these rules, you will be able to grow your customer base more organically and get reviews which are genuine.
Related : Best Amazon Selling Training Courses
11. Sell a Great Product (Sage Mailer)
The most important of all tips on how to increase Amazon product reviews is to sell first-class products.
There is literally no other substitute for simply making and selling great products. If you have something that people can’t wait to get their hands on and will find useful, you will find that they’ll leave reviews out of gratitude.
There’s just no substitute for that and it only comes when you establish trust over years as a brand.
This is a method that only works when you put in the time, but it also results in exponential returns for you.
Final Words
Getting reviews on Amazon may seem like a daunting task since people instinctively just want to get a product and only come to you when there’s a problem. However, establishing trust and showing them that you care goes a long way.
If you go the extra mile for your customers, they’ll leave you good reviews.