Marketing & reviews 101: Leveraging your reviews across channels

In fact, it's growing so fast that it has now become essential for companies to implement social proof into their omni-channel marketing strategies. Indeed, online customers feel much more comfortable purchasing from a store when presented with evidence that others recommend it.

That’s why in this insightful webinar, two Trustpilot experts share some key concepts that you can start implementing immediately in order to power your business forward.

Watch the recording today, and learn how you can share your customer’s voice across all channels, including social media, to boost confidence and reduce scepticism.

We were founded in Denmark in 2007. The reason it all started was because our CEO's mum was basically shopping online. She was looking for a washing machine. And back in 2007, buying a washing machine online was something that doesn't happen every day. So she was lookhttps://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1s6omllUbvl6Bngo9len-W6dxRqJuz2x0vCqDG7wBL5E/edit#gid=0ing at various different websites, they both sold the same product, but she couldn't decide whom to buy from, because there was no way of knowing which website was most trusted. That's where it stemmed from, the lack of trust for consumers online. And since then, we've had over $173 million worth of investment. That's basically gone into growth to make sure that our product stays at the forefront of reviews. We now span 150 countries, 35 different languages, seven offices with over 800 employees around the globe. We've collected over 100 million reviews for 400,000 businesses around the globe.

Reviews do really have an impact. 92% of consumers read reviews before making a buying decision, 44% think the number of reviews is important and 63% of consumers are likely to make a purchase from a site which has user reviews. So you can see, reviews are really important when consumers are looking to buy from you. We find that a lot of consumers will actually do a search on the company. So like company name plus reviews before they make that buying decision and that's where actually the majority of our traffic comes from.

So authentic content. Obviously back in the day, it used to be the brand would tell everyone what the brand should appear as, but this has basically changed now. Consumers are looking more and more for user-generated content. And this basically leads on nicely into the next part.

So, we've just heard that reviews have an impact on those buying decisions. So now I'm going to talk through the different types of reviews and how you can use these in your business. There are two different types of reviews, there's a service or your brand focused reviews, and then there's product focused reviews. And together, these provide a twofold view of social proof down the entire sales funnel.

There are also two types of reviews within that, that consumers can leave. There's an organic review or there's a verified review. Verified reviews are the ones that give consumer confidence on the authenticity of the review, that is, that it's come from a genuine experience. And another thing about the verified reviews is that they are easier for the consumer to leave. And on top of that, it helps qualify your brand for Google seller ratings, the gold stars that show up against your paid ads.

Now, the way in which we're asking for reviews, is very important and there's many different flexible methods out there. So I'm going to run through a couple of what Trustpilot can offer. So to start with, we need to, of course, understand and follow the consumer through their journey of identifying their need, making a decision, making a purchase and therefore having an experience. And that's when we're going to send that invitation.

So we don't have to wait for people to come to your review profile or to your Facebook page to leave an organic review anymore, we can go to them. And so, there's multiple ways that we can do this, but some of the most popular ways, and for good reason, is how we can do it through our automation method called Automatic Feedback. Sorry about that siren, let's wait a minute. Yeah, is our Automatic Feedback Service. So this is triggered from your CRM or your emailing platform, or you might want to look into using one of our eCommerce plugins like Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, but we can also help collect verified reviews on your site or even through your own SMSs or emails.

So now, understanding how we can collect review, we need to think about when is best to do so. If we go in too early, we risk a lower conversion rate or misconstrued feedback as it can all be a bit too vague, as the experience isn't yet complete. That being said, asking too late is also not the best thing to do. This can also give us a lower response rate or even worse, they don't remember their experience well enough to give us that qualitive review that we're after. But when we get them in the right spot, we get meaningful and relevant sentiment. Our customer facing teams get a chance to get in early, to turn anyone around and overall the customer is still riding high on the experience.

There's more than one way to help improve review conversions, but here are some of the most effective that we have found.

Inviting absolutely everybody to leave a review. We don't have to wait for them to come to us, we go to them. This is more than likely to help us get more reviews.

There's also the option to send them a reminder. People do get busy and we forget that we've got an invitation sitting in our inbox. So no one minds getting a small little once-off nudge to leave that review. And then, if none of this works, which it shouldn't, but we can always A/B test, to see what is going to work for your unique set of customers.

We're going to look at a couple of examples of social proof throughout the journey. We'll look at some stats to validate social proof, that is something that we should be considering. So 92% of consumers read online reviews, 84% of consumers say that they trust peer recommendations, but only 22% of brands are actually trusted. So this could be a great gap you're currently missing with your marketing strategy, and a really easy and effective way to be implemented.

So you've got the header. So as soon as people hit the site, they're met with reviews that fills them with the confidence and it shows them that they can trust in your brand, straight from the get-go. And then they're able to just easily scroll through the reviews on site, make an informed decision and decide whether they want to proceed to the next step. You've got the footer, so as you can see, Safe Financial use social proof, it's huge to them. They have all their social platforms in one place, and then dedicated to building their brand reputation. Another great way for consumers to keep them engaged throughout the website.

So Bridgestone, they do more location based reviews, which is something a little bit new to us. We just brought that out, it's pretty cool. So you can obviously understand where potentially, which one's performing best in terms of location. And there could be a particular location that's not performing too well. But more specifically, it gives you again, that social proof on each of your locations. So if someone is looking to potentially come in store, they're then given that extra nudge with all these fantastic reviews, showing that they're going to get great service. And the location based reviews are also pretty good for localized searches, so we can mark up key landing pages and drive click through rate with review snippet stars.

So that was sort of the more service brand focus, but we can jump down into the product reviews. So at that point where the consumer has made a product choice and a selection, displaying product reviews from their peers basically, of what they also thought of the product, is a really good option. It helps generate that FOMO and drives them to make that decision that we want them to, which is to put it into checkout and purchase the chair.

We all have FOMO. But a lot of this has been focused on acquisition and it doesn't just have to be. Reviews can be used, and they should be used, to help turn your customers into returning customers. And we can see here in these retargeting emails, that's exactly what they're doing. Electricity Wizard, being a comparison site, is calling out how many reviews and trusted customers have had an experience with them. The same for rental of Omega Car Rentals.

We also see ads every day that we're on social media. So using trust marks, such as the Trustpilot stars alongside your customer's own words, is also another great way to re target. We know that social proof does help boost that click through rate when it's used across all of the marketing channels.

So having reviews on-site can help build your brand reputation and create consumer confidence, but we've done a lot of testament to the companies that we actually work with and so actually displaying reviews throughout the journey. And we've proven that you can convert up to 130% more, but as well, you can actually increase sales up to 315%.

Obviously, that would depend on the amount of traffic that you've got coming to your website. But either way, if you have two identical websites next to each other, one's got loads of fantastic reviews from a third party like Trustpilot, the other one's got no reviews, you're obviously going to choose the one that's got reviews. Pretty simple.

So top of the funnel stuff, so you can integrate the reviews on some of your key landing pages. So you could pick where you appear really well in organic search and basically mark them up with what we call review snippet stars, so they're basically just the stars that appear in organic search. You can also have product reviews, so again, product reviews allow you to integrate the review snippet stars onto each of your product landing pages, but as well, product reviews are actually hosted on your site, so it helps build your SEO for each of your product searches. And obviously, those stars are going to increase click through rate.

And then, last but not least, obviously the PPC, which I would imagine majority of you spend on. We can basically help you achieve the stars within your paid ads as well, because we basically have a license agreement with Google, and on average that will increase your click through rate for your ads by 10%.

If you'd like to find out more about the importance of social proof to convert browsers into buyers, speak to one of our review experts for free! It's quick and easy, just click the link below.