Monitoring Ratings & Reviews on the digital shelf helps you identify issues with your products and product content and gives you keyword ideas- in the customer's language, which improves the findability of your products.
In part 1 of my triptych blog series about optimizing the digital shelf, I touched on minimizing online stockouts, and in part 2 on optimizing product content on the digital shelf. In todays' last part, I'll talk about how you can monitor and generate product reviews and utilize this valuable feedback.
Product reviews can make your products stand out, give shoppers confidence in your brand, and eventually influence shoppers' purchasing decisions. 81% of all online purchases occur on product pages with ratings and reviews content.
According to PowerReviews Centennial Shopper Study are, after price, reviews the second-most important factor to customers making a purchase decision. Positive and realistic reviews can significantly impact someone's decision to buy a product or not, but for certain products, customer feedback is more important than for others.
We can distinguish between high-involvement decisions and low-involvement decisions. Product reviews are extra powerful for high-involvement buying decisions since these decisions involve research, and shoppers are more personally involved. Having more information via reviews helps decrease risk - whether it is a financial risk, social risk, or psychological risk. Also, in the early stage of a product, consumers pay more attention to online reviews.
It's never fun to hear negative feedback about your products, but negative reviews are inevitable. Turn them into something positive:
Research of PowerReviews and Northwestern University has shown that purchase probability peaks when a product's average star rating is between 4.2 and 4.5. Once you've monitored and analyzed your products' reviews with the help of a review monitoring tool, you know which underperforming products you need to take action on.
There can be many reasons why customers leave negative reviews, but the buyer's expectation likely does not match reality. Dive into the review texts to find out if something went wrong and if you can utilize valuable feedback to improve.Winning on the digital shelf is a challenging and time-consuming process. Your products first need to be visible and findable. Then you need to attract and convince shoppers with complete, correct, and attractive product copy on detail pages, including reviews. Keeping your products visible and brand-compliant on each channel is a time-consuming and ongoing process. However, using Digital Shelf Monitoring Tools can make the job easier for you and your team.