It’s fairly common knowledge that product reviews increase conversions. The problem is getting the reviews. I’d had this problem on a client’s site. We enabled product reviews about 6 months ago, and although there was a steady trickle of reviews, less than 5% of products had reviews. How to get this number up? I conceived an idea where I created a simple script triggered by cron where users were emailed 3 weeks after their purchase with a friendly “care to leave a review email?”. The kicker is the email included direct links to the review for all the products they purchased. Lots of people enjoy leaving reviews, they just never get around to it. This takes all the effort out – they have the email, it’s literally one click to leaving a review.
So far it’s an outstanding success, and the drastic increase in incoming reviews can be directly linked to purchases 3 weeks ago! It’ll be a while before we see if it increases conversions (likely), but worst case, we get enthusiastic customers (the reviewers) back on the site, and give them a greater sense of engagement and connection with the site, increasing the chances of repeat purchases.
Justin Palmer
February 19th, 2009