If you’re new to Shopify and eCommerce, getting your head around your first steps as a business owner might be quite confusing.
To help the merchants like you in this uneasy journey, we’ve decided to run a continuous series of articles on building a Shopify store.
In today’s piece, we’re covering customer reviews: what’s their importance, how to set them up on Shopify, and what tools will help you in converting better.
Let’s get started!
What are Reviews
Customer reviews refer to the feedback that the customers leave for your products or brand overall.
They can be quite helpful for future potential customers, as they give them an honest reflection of the product quality, shipment conditions, your brand’s credibility, and so on. So it’s probably needless to say how crucial the reviews are for your brand trust.
Why are They Important
Apart from credibility, though, reviews have several additional benefits:
- Constructive criticism. Sometimes, as a merchant, you might miss your product’s flaws, which surface only after continuous use. In these cases, reviews can become a great source of feedback for your future product development.
- Customer engagement. With reviews, you allow your customers to engage with your brand, making their overall experience more interactive and memorable.
- Brand loyalty. Moreover, reviews increase their loyalty to your brand, since instead of only getting products, customers also form a connection with your brand community.
What Types of Reviews are There
- Product reviews – the reviews left for specific products.
- Site reviews – the ones are referring to your overall brand.
- Q&A – questions left by customers about your products. They can then be answered either by you or other customers (if you allow them to).
- Replies – like answers, responses allow you to respond to your customers’ feedback, improving the relationship as a result.
How to Add Reviews to Your Shopify Store
- Download and integrate a Reviews app for Shopify. For that, go to the Shopify App Store page, look up a “Reviews App” and then choose the one that suits you the most.
- Once you’ve downloaded it, follow closely the app’s onboarding process, which will give you a greater understanding of how to set up and use it properly. Some apps, such as Shopify’s Product Reviews, might need manual code changes in your store’s admin panel. However, most of the apps offer automatic integration even with their free plans, so don’t worry if you don’t know how to do the code change.
How to Maximize Reviews Potential
Once you’ve set the reviews on your store and got more or less accustomed, you can try leveraging the feature in several ways:
1. Set up an email reminder for your customers
No matter how good your product is, the truth is, most of the customers will forget to go back to your shop and leave a review. However, if you simply remind or ask them to do that, they’ll be more likely to give you the review.
How-to: you can send the emails either manually or through an app, which will send the requests automatically for you. The additional benefit is that the app can allow customers to leave the review within the email itself, making them more likely to respond.
As another way to nudge the customers to answer, you can offer them discount coupons in exchange for a review. It can be done either manually or through an app, which will enable an automatic discount.
2. Optimize for Google Rich Snippets
Rich snippets refer to the additional data about the page, which becomes reflected in google search results. In the products’ case, this can mean their price or aggregated rating, which shows up right under the development.
Snippets can help potential buyers to understand better if your product will suit them, which in effect works to increase their click-trough-rate (or the ratio between how often people see your product and how often they click on it).
How-to: to optimize for Rich Snippets, you need to implement the Aggregate Rating markup. To put it more simply, you need to show Google the structure of your website’s data.
You can achieve that by selecting and marketing your rating and inserting it into each page on your site in the HTML. Alternatively, you can try using existing plugins and apps that will do that for you.
3. Reply to reviews, including the negative ones
Whether your product gets praise or bashing, it is always helpful to respond to your customers. That way, you can strengthen the relationship between them and your brand. In the case of negative reviews, it further allows you to improve your brand’s opinion potentially.
Moreover, the negative reactions have been shown to positively affect the brand’s perception, as they make it look more authentic in the eyes of other customers. Otherwise, it can also help you address your customers’ common problems in using your product. So consider the criticism as an opportunity for your brand rather than an obstacle.
After all, some brands have even gathered praise by finding creative ways to market their negative reviews, such as John Oliver’s famous Last Week Tonight trailer, which wisely made fun of its criticism.
4. Integrate your reviews into Google Shopping
As with Rich Snippets, Google Shopping allows you to display your product ratings and photos in the page preview. The only difference is that instead of search results, the ratings show up in the Product Listing Ads, as shown below:
And as with Rich Snippets, optimizing for Google Shopping can similarly increase the click-through-rate from your potential customers, improving your conversions as a result.
How-to: to show your product in Google Shopping search results, you need to upload your product reviews into Google Shopping using an XML Schema. You can do it on your own, such as by following this guide or with an app’s help, which will automate the whole process.
Wrapping Up
While there is yet a lot to uncover on this topic, we hope that this introduction guide has helped get a much clearer picture of Shopify reviews and their potential for your business growth.
The key points to recap:
- engage with your customers’ reviews more to increase their loyalty;
- don’t shy away from asking your customers for reviews directly but do offer value in return (such as through coupons);
- learn from the negative criticism you get or try to turn it into a marketing opportunity;
- optimize your products for Rich Snippets and Google Shopping;
Are there any other key things we should have mentioned? And what’s the best strategy for getting reviews that worked for you?
Make sure to share with us in the comments, and until next time, stay tuned!
